LinkBlog: fbi

In Philadelphia, the FBI has instructed tattoo shops to rat out their customers if they demand privacy, insist on paying with cash, engage in “suspicious behavior,” make “anti-US” comments, or request tattoos that are “extremist symbols.”

While some may criticize Rowley (as I have) for not publicly challenging the cover story about al Qaeda, Bin Laden and 19 hijackers, her demand for a new investigation is a necessary first step, and it stands as a strong statement on the record by one of America’s most famous 9/11 whistleblowers. As such it should be applauded.

Ms. Edmonds is prepared to testify this Saturday in an open to the media deposition in Washington DC that during the time she was employed by the FBI she obtained evidence that: 1. The Government of Turkey had illegally infiltrated and influenced various U.S. government institutions and officials, including the Department of State, the Department of Defense and individual members of the United States Congress.

A two-year corruption and international money-laundering investigation stretching from the Jersey Shore to Brooklyn to Israel and Switzerland culminated in charges against 44 people on Thursday, including three New Jersey mayors, two state assemblymen and five rabbis, the authorities said.

In a letter signed by Michael J. Heimbach, Assistant Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) Counterterrorism Division, National Security Branch, it is claimed that a hypothesis regarding exclusive GPS guided autopilot control of the four aircraft destroyed during the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 is under review. The FBI notice is in response to receipt of a twenty page thesis describing the aircraft attacks of September 11, 2001 being potentially within the capability solely of autopilot and navigation systems of American Airlines and United Airlines Boeing 757 and 767 aircraft and upgraded Global Positioning System (GPS) technology circa 2001.

In the absence of my being there in New York City to stand with the 9/11 families, first responders and survivors, I offer the following statement in support of your goal of a new investigation into the attacks of September 11th and the NYC CAN campaign to place it on the ballot for November.

The evidence was crucial because it undermined the official explanation that Hani Hanjour crashed American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon at high speed after executing an extremely difficult top gun maneuver. But to understand how all of this played out, let us review the case in bite-size pieces...

The evidence relies primarily on governement documents and public records. The center piece of the evidence is a memo entitled "Assassination of President John F. Kennedy", signed by J Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, 5 days after the assassination, which names Bush as a supervisor of CIA-trained assassins.

By the now, it's maddeningly familiar. A scary terrorist plot is announced. Then it's revealed that the suspects are a hapless bunch of ne'er-do-wells or run-of-the-mill thugs without the slightest connection to any terrorists at all, never mind to Al Qaeda. Finally, the last piece of the puzzle: the entire plot is revealed to have been cooked up by a scummy government agent-provocateur. I've seen this movie before. In this case, the alleged perps -- Onta Williams, James Cromitie, David Williams, and Laguerre Payen -- were losers, ex-cons, drug addicts. Al Qaeda they're not. Without the assistance of the agent who entrapped them, they would never have dreamed of committing political violence, nor would they have had the slightest idea about where to acquire plastic explosives or a Stinger missile. That didn't stop prosecutors from acting as if they'd captured Osama bin Laden himself.

He published a magazine for a number of years called Lies Of Our Times which specifically was a magazine about propaganda and disinformation. Also he has been the managing director of the Institute for Media Analysis for a number of years. For about 20 years he was one of the principals in a publishing company called Sheraton Square Press that published books and pamphlets relating to intelligence and the media.

New details were released Tuesday in the bizarre case of a Miami woman who is accused of staging her own kidnapping, abducting her teenage son and standing by as an accomplice held a blow torch to the boy's leg to convince his father their ransom demand was serious.

Most Americans have never heard of Sibel Edmonds, and if the U.S. government has its way, they never will. The former FBI translator turned whistleblower tells a chilling story of corruption at Washington’s highest levels—sale of nuclear secrets, shielding of terrorist suspects, illegal arms transfers, narcotics trafficking, money laundering, espionage. She may be a first-rate fabulist, but Edmonds’s account is full of dates, places, and names. And if she is to be believed, a treasonous plot to embed moles in American military and nuclear installations and pass sensitive intelligence to Israeli, Pakistani, and Turkish sources was facilitated by figures in the upper echelons of the State and Defense Departments. Her charges could be easily confirmed or dismissed if classified government documents were made available to investigators. But Congress has refused to act, and the Justice Department has shrouded Edmonds’s case in the state-secrets privilege, a rarely used measure so sweeping that it precludes even a closed hearing attended only by officials with top-secret security clearances. According to the Department of Justice, such an investigation “could reasonably be expected to cause serious damage to the foreign policy and national security of the United States.”

According to investigators, the last minute of flight, as described so far, unfolded this way: As the plane flew about 1,600 feet above the ground, southwest toward a runway at the Buffalo airport, the crew lowered the landing gear. Twenty seconds later, one of the two pilots set a lever to extend the flaps, movable metal panels on the back of each wing, to 15 degrees, a standard step before landing. Immediately, the airplane’s nose began to pitch radically up and down, and soon after, the airplane rolled left and right. A stick shaker, a device that warns that the plane is flying so slowly that its wings are about to stall, losing lift, gave its warning by shaking the yoke in the pilots’ hands. Then the stick pusher came on, a system that literally takes matters out of the pilots’ hands by pushing the yoke forward, to push the nose down and increase airspeed to avoid stall. The crew increased engine power, but never regained control: the plane hit the house, having spun around to face northeast, although it had been flying southwest. It happened so fast that the flaps never made it to 15 degrees.

The government had a problem! Lee Harvey Oswald would have to be tried for the crime of murdering the President. For quite some time in our history, those charged with crimes were given trials. The government had not yet figured out that if you just call them a bad name (terrorist) you can dispense with all those niceties. Someone, somewhere was alarmed! What if Lee Harvey Oswald should get a good lawyer and mount a strong defense! What if Lee Harvey Oswald proved his charge that he was just a patsy!

Richard Gage, AIA founder of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth discusses a welcome letter of response from Michael J. Heimbach, Asst. Director in the FBI division of Counterterrorism. On Nov. 7th the FBI received a registered letter from Harold Saive - founder of Gators911Truth.org. Saive referenced evidence presented in Richard Gage's 2008 video release of "9/11: BLUEPRINT FOR TRUTH". On Dec 22, 2008, Saive received a letter of response from Michael J. Heimbach thanking Saive for "offering to provide information to the United States Government". Richard Gage comments during a conference call with Gators911Truth members to offer his vast resources to Heimbach's team in order to help the FBI with their job of investigating the crimes of mass murder on 9/11/2001.

A combination of dedicated FBI detective work and the brilliant skills of forensic scientists eventually put names to the fragments by matching them with DNA traces discovered at the terrorists’ hideouts.

Five men whom attorneys said paid FBI informants prodded into exploring their deepest fantasies about waging jihad on America were convicted in federal court Monday of conspiring to kill US soldiers but acquitted on attempted murder charges.

This FBI-document of 1947 recommends that "one Jack Rubenstein of Chicago" should not be called to testify for the Committee on Unamerican Activities, for he is working for Congressman Richard M. Nixon. According to the Warren Commission, Ruby had no connections with Oswald, Organized Crime or the Government. No wonder the header reads "This is sensitive".

The FBI denied Rossini and Miller permission to participate in the book or the PBS “NOVA” documentary, which is also being written and produced by Bamford, on grounds that the FBI “doesn’t want to stir up old conflicts with the CIA,” according to multiple reliable sources. Bamford, contacted by phone, said he could not comment because his publisher has embargoed his new book for release around Oct. 10.

The Congressional anthrax hearings of September 16-17 revealed that public pressure is keeping the doors open in the anthrax case. FBI Director Robert Mueller promised that the FBI will provide their evidence to a panel of experts for scientific evaluation. The battle will now turn to the independence of this panel, and whether "all evidence" or merely "scientific evidence" will be under review.

Attorney Jesse Trentadue says the two prisoners have information about the 1995 death of his brother, who he believes was murdered in a federal prison after guards mistook him for an accomplice in the bombing. Kenneth Trentadue was found hanged in his cell in August 1995 at a federal prison in Oklahoma City, where he was being held on an alleged parole violation. Although the death was ruled a suicide, Trentadue family members think Kenneth died during an interrogation that got out of hand. To support that theory, Jesse Trentadue has filed three Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits seeking information on the bombing and the FBI's alleged withholding of relevant documents he has requested. In September 2007, U.S. District Judge Dale Kimball gave him the go-ahead to depose Nichols and David Paul Hammer, who is on death row at the federal penitentiary at Terre Haute, Ind. The judge said information from the two men might help Trentadue better identify the existence of other records pertaining to his FOIA requests.

Neither the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which holds the remains of the nine hijackers whose planes hit the Pentagon and crashed in a field in Somerset County, Pa., nor the New York City medical examiner’s office, which holds the remains of 4 of the 10 hijackers who flew planes into the World Trade Center buildings, has policies to deal with such a request. “If and when it comes up, we’ll address it then,” an F.B.I. spokesman, Richard Kolko, said. The bureau could turn down such requests, Mr. Kolko said, because the Sept. 11 investigation is an open case... But, since the DNA profiles were unnamed by the bureau, the office could not say which hijackers have been identified, just that 4 of the 10 have been so far.

What does this all mean? 1/4 of an inch equals 6,350 microns. So the FBI is trying to say that a mail-sorting machine which is designed to process letters 6,350 microns thick crushed something down to 3 microns . . . 2,116 to 4,232 times smaller than the type of envelope sorting machines are designed to handle (the smaller number is compared to 3 micron thick anthrax powder and the larger is compared to 1.5 micron powder). I don't know about you, but my mail isn't crushed into oblivion when I get it.

Remember how the FBI was instructed to blame the Anthrax attacks on Al Qaeda by White House officials in 2001? Well, according to Washington Post reporter and Assistant Managing Editor for Investigations at The Washington Post Marilyn Thompson, the US government ordered Fort Detrick's USAMRIID bioweapons facility to "tone down" its description of the Daschle anthrax as "weaponized."

Ivins passed two polygraph tests and no link was made between his handwriting and that on the anthrax letters. Investigators were so frustrated at Ivins passing the polygraph tests that they searched his house for books or articles on how to fool a polygraph, but found none.

Moreover, the protesters who were targeted in Minnesota were mainly those who were peacefully filming the protests. Indeed, a 2003 FBI memo describes protesters' use of videotaping as an "intimidation" technique, even though - as the ACLU points out - "Most mainstream demonstrators often use videotape during protests to document law enforcement activity and, more importantly, deter police from acting outside the law."

The Professor explained that the motive behind the attacks was clear: "I believe the first anthrax attack was designed to ram through the PATRIOT ACT because Senators Daschle and Leahy were holding it up and once the anthrax occurred it rammed right through, indeed, on the renewal of the USA PATRIOT ACT, Senator Feingold was holding it up and all of sudden out of nowhere some white powdered substance appeared at one of the Senate office buildings, and all of a sudden the renewal of the PATRIOT ACT went through." The evidence becomes more compelling when you take into consideration the fact that the White House was on anthrax fighting antibiotics weeks prior to the attacks.

The FBI could have said "we will prove to Congress, the scientific community and the public that only Ivins could have done it". But they didn't. Instead, the FBI is trying to discredit the many top anthrax scientists who question the government's case against Ivins by using the "grassy knoll" conspiracy-theory smear.

Bruce Ivins, 62, one of America’s top biodefense researchers, had been told that he was going to be prosecuted for the attacks that killed five people and sent the country into panic in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers. He died in hospital on Thursday after taking a huge dose of prescription Tylenol, a painkiller, mixed with codeine. The scientist had worked at the the United States Army Medical Research Institute,(USAMRIID), the government’s elite biodefense research laboratories in Maryland for 18 years. He had played a pivotal role in research to improve anthrax vaccines, and during the attacks had helped the FBI analyse powdery material recovered from an envelope tainted with anthrax which had been sent to the Washington DC office of Tom Daschle, a US senator.

Anthrax-laced letters that killed five people and severely rattled the post-9/11 nation may have been part of an Army scientist's warped plan to test his cure for the deadly toxin, officials said Friday. The brilliant but troubled scientist committed suicide this week, knowing prosecutors were closing in. The sudden naming of scientist Bruce E. Ivins as the top -- and perhaps only -- suspect in the anthrax attacks marks the latest bizarre twist in a case that has confounded the FBI for nearly seven years. Last month, the Justice Department cleared Ivins' colleague, Steven Hatfill, who had been wrongly suspected in the case, and paid him $5.8 million. Ivins worked at the Army's biological warfare defense labs at Fort Detrick, Md., for 35 years until his death on Tuesday. He was one of the government's leading scientists researching vaccines and cures for anthrax exposure. But he also had a long history of homicidal threats, according to papers filed last week in local court by a social worker. The letters containing anthrax powder were sent on the heels of the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and turned up at congressional offices, newsrooms and elsewhere, leaving a deadly trail through post offices on the way. The powder killed five, sent numerous victims to hospitals and caused near panic in many locations.

"The identity of the three hijacked aircraft has never been in question by the FBI, NTSB or FAA"

The FBI had actually TRACED THE MONEY. Only they traced it a little too well, back to US ally Pakistan and to their intelligence service, the ISI.

The sense of pressing urgency conjured up by Bush administration folks to justify torture does not square with Coleen Rowley’s direct personal experience in the FBI. As some will remember, the FBI's joint terrorism task force in Minneapolis had detained Zacarias Moussaoui on Aug. 16, 2001. Flight school pilots acting as whistleblowers had notified the FBI, against the wishes of their airline employer, of detailed information making Moussaoui the most suspicious student they had ever encountered. French intelligence soon supplied further background confirming Moussaoui's fighting for a “foreign power” — Chechnyan rebels, whose leader was connected to al-Qaeda. By Aug. 23, the case was deemed so suspicious, it went all the way to the top of the intelligence community, to Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet, in a PowerPoint presentation entitled: "Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly.” As Rowley revealed in her letter of May 21, 2002, to FBI Director Robert Mueller, there was considerable frustration in her FBI unit in Minneapolis over the inability of FBI headquarters to get its act together and present these facts pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to obtain the secret FISA Court’s permission to search Moussaoui’s personal effects and laptop computer in the days before 9-11.

Students of the assassination are familiar with the chain of events. First, Oswald reportedly takes his three shots from the sixth floor. He is then seen in the second floor lunchroom calmly drinking a Coke. Next, he’s off to the rooming house via bus and taxi to retrieve a .38 revolver. In a typically odd Oswald scheme, he heads off to the movie theater where he is apprehended in a scuffle with Dallas police officers. Along the way he runs into officer J. D. Tippet who is allegedly murdered by Oswald. I say allegedly, because eyewitness testimony on the murder of Tippet is a controversy all of its own. I’ll leave that for a future post. Meanwhile, after Oswald is arrested at the movie theater he refused to identify himself. After searching him, his wallet is retrieved, containing an ID for Lee H. Oswald and a second ID for the Alek Hidell alias. Here comes the rub. Back at the Tippet murder scene the wallet is now in the hands of Dallas police captain W. R. Westbrook. FBI agent Robert M. Barrett appears and is asked by Westbrook if he knows whom Lee Oswald or Alek Hidell is. Apparently Capt. Westbrook examined the contents. Barrett says no. You would think this would be a damning piece of evidence to put Oswald away for the Tippet murder, but that is not the case. The wallet seems to fade in out of the story.

"In an e-mail obtained by FOX News, scientists at Fort Detrick openly discussed how the anthrax powder they were asked to analyze after the attacks was nearly identical to that made by one of their colleagues. "Then he said he had to look at a lot of samples that the FBI had prepared ... to duplicate the letter material," the e-mail reads. "Then the bombshell. He said that the best duplication of the material was the stuff made by [name redacted]. He said that it was almost exactly the same … his knees got shaky and he sputtered, 'But I told the General we didn't make spore powder!'"

Forced to drop its charges of weapons manufacture, the government instead accused Kurtz and Ferrell of mail and wire fraud. The government claimed that when Dr. Ferrell gave the cultures to Dr. Kurtz, this violated a contract between the University of Pittsburgh and the supplier, American Type Culture Collection (ATCC). Neither the university nor ATCC had brought any complaint, and observers pointed out that scientists routinely share non-hazardous cultures. The Department of Justice further claimed that this alleged contract discrepancy constituted federal mail and wire fraud. Because the charges against the two academics were brought under the PATRIOT Act, the maximum penalty was increased from five years to 20. Earlier, Dr. Ferrell pled guilty to a lesser misdemeanor charge rather than facing a prolonged trial for the mail and wire fraud felonies. During the legal wrangling, he had two minor strokes and a major stroke that required months of rehabilitation. He was indicted as he was preparing to undergo a stem cell transplant, his second in seven years. But Kurtz rejected any plea deal, instead demanding a public trial. Most of the art world has rallied behind him. His colleagues in the Critical Art Ensemble set up a website and a legal defense fund, and Kurtz continued to teach at the University of Buffalo. When the case finally arrived in a courtroom this month, Federal Judge Richard J. Arcara ruled to dismiss the indictment. It is unclear whether the government will appeal the dismissal.

Could we be doomed to repeat our mistakes if we don’t learn from our past? History says yes. Libertarians for Justice say investigate 9/11 until we are sure beyond a reasonable doubt that the terrorists have been brought to justice.

Austin police said Thursday that they are leaning toward a ruling of suicide in the death of a middle school teacher and activist whose body was found Wednesday in Lady Bird Lake with his hands and legs bound and tape over his eyes.

"The entire situation was concocted by the government. The warehouse was paid for by the FBI, and the defendants moved their operations there at the suggestion of an undercover informant who was also paid by the FBI. The swearing-in ceremony was led by the informant — who at another point also suggested a plan to bomb FBI offices in Miami. "The case was written, produced and directed by the FBI," defense attorney Albert Levin said in his closing arguments."

This rejection of Ted Olson’s story by American Airlines, the Pentagon, and especially the FBI is a development of utmost importance. Without the alleged calls from Barbara Olson, there is no evidence that Flight 77 returned to Washington. Also, if Ted Olson’s claim was false, then there are only two possibilities: Either he lied or he was duped by someone using voice-morphing technology to pretend to be his wife.17 In either case, the official story about the calls from Barbara Olson was based on deception. And if that part of the official account of 9/11 was based on deception, should we not suspect that other parts were as well? The fact that Ted Olson’s report has been contradicted by other defenders of the official story about 9/11 provides grounds for demanding a new investigation of 9/11. This internal contradiction is, moreover, only one of 25 such contradictions discussed in my most recent book, 9/11 Contradictions: An Open Letter to Congress and the Press.

After this extensive research, RIDS has been unable to locate any FBI records responsive to your request. RIDS' search efforts included verification by the responsible FBIHQ operational division that because the identity of the three hijacked aircraft has never been in question by the FBI, NTSB or FAA (since other evidence collected after 9/11 has all corroborated the fact that American Airlines Flight 11, United Airlines Flight 175, American Airlines Flight 77 and United Airlines Flight 93 were the aircraft that were hijacked), no records would have been generated responsive to your request for documents "revealing the process by which wreckage recovered by defendant, from the aircraft used during the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, was positively identified by defendant (with the aid of the National Transportation Safety Board), as belonging to the said aircraft, presumably though the use of unique serial number identifying information contained by the said aircraft wreckage."

Although Pasdar has refused to name the carrier, and those working for the carrier who have knowledge of the Quantico Circuit's user aren't saying what they know, Wired's Threat Level blog connected the pieces and points us to the 2006 wiretapping lawsuit against the telcos, which alleges that Verizon "has engaged and maintained and still does maintain a high speed data transmission line from its wireless call center to a remote location in Quantico, Virginia, the site of a U.S. government intelligence and military base." The lawsuit also asserts that "the transmission line provided the Quantico recipient direct access to all content and all information concerning the origin and termination of telephone calls placed on the Verizon Wireless network as well as the actual content of calls." Providing any third party with unfettered network access to such a broad spectrum of sensitive consumer data would seem to constitute a very clear violation of the Communications Act, which broadly forbids disclosure of such information.

The FBI now keeps a list of over 900,000 names belonging to known or suspected terrorists, the American Civil Liberties Union said today. If that number is accurate, it would be an all-time high, exponentially more than the 100,000 names on the list several years ago. But the number needs to be taken with a grain of salt: after all, the ACLU doesn't keep the list, the FBI does, and the bureau doesn't generally like to talk about it. (Indeed, the FBI has not yet responded to a request for comment for this post.) But if the ACLU's figure isn't accurate, it's also unlikely to be off by that much. Last September, the ACLU notes, the Department of Justice's Inspector General reported the FBI watch list was at 700,000 names, and growing at 20,000 names per month. The ACLU says they "extrapolated" from those figures to determine the list's current size. ACLU's Barry Steinhardt added that the group had spoken privately with people familiar with the watch list, who told them the 900,000 figure was not outlandish.

It’s interesting to compare the results of the 9/11 Commission with the 9/11 Congressional Inquiry that proceeded it. For instance, while the 9/11 Commission downplayed any possible ties between the hijackers and the Saudi government, the 9/11 Congressional Inquiry wrote an entire chapter on the topic. Unfortunately, all 28 pages of that chapter were censored. But Sen. Bob Graham, co-chair of the inquiry, later claimed that evidence relating to the two hijackers who lived in San Diego “presented a compelling case that there was Saudi assistance” to the 9/11 plot. He alleged that Omar al-Bayoumi in fact was a Saudi intelligence agent. He also concluded that President Bush directed the FBI “to restrain and obfuscate” investigations into these ties.

Beginning in late 1975, Operation Condor -- named after Chile's national bird -- was a joint operation of right-wing South American military dictatorships, working closely with U.S.-based Cuban and other anticommunist extremists on cross-border assassinations of political dissidents as far away as Europe. This meant that during George H.W. Bush’s year at the CIA’s helm, the United States both harbored domestic terrorist cells and served as a base for international terrorism. Yet no U.S. official was ever held accountable -- and in many cases, just the opposite.

From the American Protective League to InfraGard, it has been a long, tortuous road, one which ceaselessly destroyed liberty and individual rights. The ultimate destination has never changed: the installation of an unassailable, enormously privileged ruling elite -- which, no matter the cost in liberty or blood, will get what it wants. You need not despair, and you need not be paralyzed by depression. To change our direction, we must understand fully and completely how we arrived here, and we must appreciate just how dire our predicament is. And to change it, we need a great deal of courage.

There are signs, however, that judges and jurors are getting fed up with such concocted "threats." In December, the prosecution of the "Liberty City Seven" ended in one acquittal and a hung jury for the rest of the accused. The supposed cell was accused of preparing a "full ground war" against America by bringing down the Sears Tower and other buildings. At trial, however, it emerged that the men had no operational abilities, that the plots were dreamed up at the exhortation of two paid FBI informants while smoking dope and that the group had been provided its camera, military boots and warehouse by the JTTF. Despite 15,000 surveillance recordings of the men, including one in which they swore allegiance to Osama bin Laden, the jury refused to convict. "This was all written, produced, directed, choreographed and stage-designed by the United States government," Albert Levin, an attorney for one of the accused, said in his closing argument.

Kill The Messenger, the long-awaited film about Sibel Edmonds is still not apparently available for purchase. 911truth.org has sent repeated requests to the producers, ove rthe course of several months, but have received no reply. Now, the film has been uploaded to Youtube. We will update the site as soon as we learn how readers can purchase this film.

The FBI has determined that the release of SSFDR data for AA 77 and UA 93 would not interfere with enforcement proceedings, yet the release of data for flights carried out by N644AA (AA 77) and N591UA (UA 93) that occurred prior to September 11, 2001, apparently contained by the same SSFDRs (that would presumably confirm flight history data provided by the BTS), is "expected to interfere with enforcement proceedings".

Curiously, the states-secrets gag order binding Edmonds, while put in place by DOJ in 2002, was not requested by the FBI but by the State Department and Pentagon—which employed individuals she identified as being involved in criminal activities. If her allegations are frivolous, that order would scarcely seem necessary. It would have been much simpler for the government to marginalize her by demonstrating that she was poorly informed or speculating about matters outside her competency. Under the Bush administration, the security gag order has been invoked to cover up incompetence or illegality, not to protect national security. It has recently been used to conceal the illegal wiretaps of the warrantless surveillance program, the allegations of torture and the CIA’s rendition program, and to shield the telecom industry for its collaboration in illegal eavesdropping. Both Senators Grassley and Leahy, a Republican and a Democrat, who interviewed her at length in 2002, attest to Edmonds’s believability. The Department of Justice inspector general investigation into her claims about the translations unit and an internal FBI review confirmed most of her allegations. Former FBI senior counterintelligence officer John Cole has independently confirmed her report of the presence of Pakistani intelligence service penetrations within the FBI translators’ pool. Edmonds wasn’t angling to become a media darling. She would have preferred to testify under oath before a congressional committee that could offer legal protection and subpoena documents and witnesses to support her case. She claims that a number of FBI agents would be willing to testify, though she has not named them.

When U.S. authorities got their hands on terrorist Mohammed Mansour Jabarah in May 2002, he agreed to inform on some of the most influential al-Qaeda leaders. So instead of being sent to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, or a high-security CIA detention facility, Jabarah was housed with relatively lax security at Fort Dix, N.J., where he was allowed to watch television and movies, speak to his family in Canada by telephone, go for walks and even make his own meals, all under 24-hour FBI watch.

Either Mr. McConnell is an idiot or an accomplished liar. Suffice it to say idiots are not appointed to oversee the CIA, NSA, DIA, FBI, NRO, etc. ad nauseam, a virtual alphabet soup of “intelligence” agencies.

Recently, I have seen a lot of people asking about Sibel Edmonds' connection to 9/11. I sent an email to Luke Ryland, the individual that knows that most about Sibel, and asked him to please give me a brief summary of Sibel's relationship to 9/11. Here is what he wrote.

As we know, thousands of Americans are on the Federal Aviation Administration’s No-Fly List and the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center has compiled a terrorist watch list of over 700,000 people. Moreover, as Dave Lindorff writes, the government is in the business of passing this information out to private companies. “The Wall Street Journal reported that the FBI made its list of people with even remote links to terrorism — having associated, perhaps inadvertently, with a terror suspect, for example — available to a wide range of private companies, from banks and rental-car companies to casinos.” And who exactly are these primary terrorists, the ones you don’t want to associate with, that is if you ever want to fly again? They are “law-abiding Americans” who were detained and questioned — we used to call this harassment — “based on their political viewpoints,” according to Nancy Chang, a senior litigation attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. “I think what they are doing is harassing people who are opposing the war and publicly speaking out against administration policy,” John Dear, a Jesuit priest and member of the Catholic peace group Pax Christi, told Lindorff. Back in 2003, we learned that the FBI “collected extensive information on the tactics, training and organization of antiwar demonstrators and … advised local law enforcement officials to report any suspicious activity at protests to its counterterrorism squads,” the New York Times reported. Of course, this is simply a continuation of the FBI’s COINTELPRO, initiated in the 1960s to “neutralize” the opposition — i.e., render activists not only politically impotent, but often wreck their lives as well.

Refusal to release this footnote data (that is crucial to confirming the U.S. government's positions regarding the federal registry identifications of the civil aircraft used during the 9/11 attacks) was not per any established FAA information request exemptions, normally cited by federal agencies that deny FOIA requests: http://www.faa.gov/foia/media/exemptions.pdf The FAA along with the FBI, have now declared that 9/11 aircraft component serial number data that would confirm the publically known opinions regarding the 9/11 planes, provided by the FAA, FBI and the National Transportation Safety Board, is exempt from public disclosure.

2 robbers broke in to Luther RIcks home, one of them stabbed his son. He shot and killed one of them defending his home. Even though the robbers didn't get to the $402,767 that he had in a safe, the FBI refuses to give it back until he proves he made it, because they found marijuana in the home. Even though he has been cleared of all charges!

Bottom line: According to the FBI, the information which formed the basis for the 9/11 Commission Report was based on the ramblings of a literally crazy guy after he had been tortured for many, many weeks in a manner that was guaranteed to destroy his trust in his interrogators and which was contrary to effective interrogation techniques.

The hidden assumption that poisons all mainstream (and much "alternative") analysis is the idea that the Bush administration and the CIA didn't want 9/11 to happen. If you just throw away the prism -- drop the hidden assumption and look at the dots on their own -- the picture gets a lot clearer.

If the White House refused to allow an interview of a government informant who was landlord to two of the hijackers -- one of the most valuable leads it could possibly pursue -- what other investigations did it spike? And if the White House killed an investigation to, allegedly, protect its Saudi friends, how much more motivated would the White House have been to kill investigations into areas which implicated elements of the U.S. government itself?

A federal court in New Haven, Connecticut, heard startling testimony from an FBI entrapment specialist late last month in the case of an alleged terrorist supporter from Phoenix. William Chrisman [photo] testified on November 28 and 29 in a hearing in the case against former US Navy signalman Hassan Abujihaad, taking the stand just hours after Derrick Shareef, whom Chrisman entrapped, pleaded guilty in Chicago.

In 2004, however, the nation's most prestigious scientific body concluded that variations in the manufacturing process rendered the FBI's testimony about the science "unreliable and potentially misleading." Specifically, the National Academy of Sciences said that decades of FBI statements to jurors linking a particular bullet to those found in a suspect's gun or cartridge box were so overstated that such testimony should be considered "misleading under federal rules of evidence." A year later, the bureau abandoned the analysis. But the FBI lab has never gone back to determine how many times its scientists misled jurors. Internal memos show that the bureau's managers were aware by 2004 that testimony had been overstated in a large number of trials. In a smaller number of cases, the experts had made false matches based on a faulty statistical analysis of the elements contained in different lead samples, documents show.

Despite the implications of this incredible information, only one newspaper covered it. In a report published that same day, USA Today briefly described: "The attack was so unexpected that a joint FBI/CIA anti-terrorist task force that specifically prepared for this type of disaster was on a training exercise in Monterey, Calif." The politics website Evote.com also mentioned the incident, concluding: "just as the worst terrorist act was being committed on American lives and property, the chief federal agency responsible for preventing such crimes was being AWOL." But, in the six years since, this information has been ignored, and no mention was made of it in the 9/11 Commission Report. If the official theory about 9/11 is correct, and the attacks were indeed perpetrated by Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, then the absence of the FBI's antiterrorist experts at the one time they were most needed must be a freak coincidence. However, if the official theory is wrong, then this could have been part of a deliberate attempt to 'stand down' normal lines of defense, so as to ensure that the attacks succeeded.

Like Hansel and Gretel hoping to follow their bread crumbs out of the forest, the FBI sifted through customer data collected by San Francisco-area grocery stores in 2005 and 2006, hoping that sales records of Middle Eastern food would lead to Iranian terrorists. The idea was that a spike in, say, falafel sales, combined with other data, would lead to Iranian secret agents in the south San Francisco-San Jose area. The brainchild of top FBI counterterrorism officials Phil Mudd and Willie T. Hulon, according to well-informed sources, the project didn’t last long. It was torpedoed by the head of the FBI’s criminal investigations division, Michael A. Mason, who argued that putting somebody on a terrorist list for what they ate was ridiculous — and possibly illegal. A check of federal court records in California did not reveal any prosecutions developed from falafel trails.

The long and the short of it was that an Egpytian national, Abdallah Higazy, was staying in a hotel in New York City on September 11 and the hotel emptied out when the planes hit the towers. The hotel later found in the closet of his room a device that allows you to communicate with airline pilots. Investigators thought this guy had something to do with 9/11 so they questioned him. According to Higazi, the investigators coerced him into confessing to a role in 9/11. Higazi first adamantly denied any involvement with 9/11 and could not believe what was happening to him. Then, he says, the investigator said his family would go through hell in Egypt, where they torture people like Saddam Hussein. Higazy then realized he had a choice: he could continue denying the radio was his and his family suffers ungodly torture in Egypt or he confesses and his family is spared. Of course, by confessing, Higazy's life is worth garbage at that point, but ... well, that's why coerced confessions are outlawed in the United States. So Higazy "confesses" and he's processed by the criminal justice system. His future is quite bleak. Meanwhile, an airline pilot later shows up at the hotel and asks for his radio back. This is like something out of the movies. The radio belonged to the pilot, not Higazy, and Higazy was free to go, the victim of horrible timing. Higazi was innocent! He next sued the hotel and the FBI agent for coercing his confession. The bottom line in the Court of Appeals: Higazy has a case and may recover damages for this injustice. As I read the opinion I realized it was a 44 page epic, too long for me to print out. I blogged about the opinion while I read it online and then posted the blog as I ate lunch. Then something strange happened: a few minutes after I posted the blog, the opinion vanished from the Court of Appeals website! I had never seen this before, and what made all the more strange was that it involved a coerced confession over 9/11. What the hell was going on? I let some other legal bloggers know about this, particulary the How Appealing blog and Appellate Law and Practice. They both ran a commentary on the missing opinion. Then someone sent How Appealing a PDF of the decision (probably very few of them were floating around since the opinion was posted for a brief period of time) and How Appealing posted the decison. Then things got even stranger. The Court of Appeals actually phoned How Appealing to request that he remove the opinion from his website since it contained classified information. The Court said that a revised opinion would come out the next day without the classified information. How Appealing actually refused to remove the opinion. Through it all, hundreds of people came to my legal blog to see my summary of the opinion. It was either my blog or printing out and reading a 44 page epic. The next day, the Court of Appeals reissued the Higazy opinion. With a redaction. The court simply omitted from the revised decision facts about how the FBI agent extracted the false confession from Higazy. For some reason, this information is classified. Just as the opinion gets interesting, when we are about to learn how an FBI agent named Templeton squeezed the "truth" out of Higazy, the opinion reads at page 7: "This opinion has been redacted because portions of the record are under seal. For the purposes of the summary judgment motion, Templeton did not contest that Higazy's statements were coerced."

A week ago, I returned from a fact-finding mission in Shreveport, New Orleans and Houston. Alongside reporter Jordan Green, I met many of Dr. Graham’s surviving friends and coworkers. Every one of them indicated that Dr. Graham’s death deserves a deeper investigation. No one believes that Dr. Graham was unstable, or suicidal. The only party to allege that Dr. Graham could have taken his own life is the Shreveport FBI. I personally did a face-to-face interview with FBI Special Agent Stephen Hayes, when I stumbled into him at his office in Shreveport. The tone and content of his comments were indicative. He was hostile, and belittling. The interview ended when he “called security” on me and Mr. Green, (who was there reporting for Yes! Weekly, Greensboro, N.C.) Dr. Graham met two 9/11 terrorists, ten months before 9/11, in his native Shreveport. He was a medical associate of Dr. Mohammed Habeeb Ahmed (now a resident of San Jose, CA, we believe) and an associate of current federal fugitive Mohammed Jamal Khan (now residing in his native Pakistan, we believe). Dr. Graham was meticulous about these meetings. He wrote a book he tried to publish (“The 9/11 Graham Report”) and even created a set of four video tapes in which he clandestinely recorded Khan and Ahmed in his office in 2002 and 2003, discussing the year 2000 meetings with 9/11 hijackers Nawaf al-Hazmi and Fayez Banihammad. In his book, Graham discusses cardboard boxes in Khan’s apartment that indicated that Khan was supplying documents or supplies to Khalid al-Mihdhar, who with al-Hazmi, was later identified to be one of the “ringleaders” of 9/11. Khan also had boxes bearing the names Nawaf al-Hazmi and Fayez Banihammad.

In May 2004 Steve Kurtz's life was turned upside down. Kurtz, a founding member of the award-winning collective Critical Art Ensemble, was a tenured art professor at SUNY, Buffalo. His work and that of the collective was of a kinetic conceptual sort, much of it aimed at informing audiences about the lack of regulation and potential risks of genetically modified (GM) food. Shortly before his show was to open at MASS MoCA, a museum in North Adams, Massachusetts, Kurtz's wife of twenty years died in her sleep. When police responded to his 911 call, they saw petri dishes in his home -- part of the scheduled installation -- filled with bacteria cultures. They called the FBI. At that point, the nation was still reeling from the 2001 anthrax scares. Kurtz was detained (not arrested, not charged but held beyond the range of due process, under the USA Patriot Act) on suspicion of bioterrorism. Within days, FBI tests showed that there were no harmful biological agents in his house and that his wife had died of natural causes. But the case against Kurtz has not gone away. Forced to drop charges of weapons manufacture, a federal prosecutor charged mail fraud against both Kurtz and Robert Ferrell, a professor of genetics at the University of Pittsburgh who sent Kurtz the uncontestedly harmless, legal, unregulated bacterial cultures used in his artwork. The "fraud" alleged is that they did not reveal, in a requisition form, the purpose of the mailing. Neither the University of Pittsburgh nor Buffalo has asserted fraud, and neither Ferrell nor Kurtz believed that there was anything fraudulent in their dealings. The allegation of fraud is made exclusively by the federal prosecutor -- a first as far as anyone knows.

A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for documentation confirming the recovery and positive identification of debris from the commercial aircraft allegedly used in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 (N334AA, N612UA, N644AA, N591UA), has been denied. An appeal is pending. According to the FBI, "the material requested is located in an investigative file which is exempt from disclosure pursuant to Title 5, United States Code, Section 552, subsection (b) (7) (A)." This subsection reads: "could be reasonably be expected to interfere with enforcement proceedings."

Among the most serious charges against the prominent security firm is that Blackwater contractors sought to cover up a June 2005 shooting of an Iraqi man and the company paid, with State Department approval, the families of others inadvertently killed by its guards. Blackwater has had to fire dozens of guards over the past three years for problems ranging from misuse of weapons, alcohol and drug violations, inappropriate conduct and violent behavior, says the 15-page report from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Just after the report was released, The Associated Press learned the Federal Bureau of Investigation is sending a team to Iraq to investigate an incident that has angered the Iraqi government.

he FBI has quietly built a sophisticated, point-and-click surveillance system that performs instant wiretaps on almost any communications device, according to nearly a thousand pages of restricted documents newly released under the Freedom of Information Act. The surveillance system, called DCSNet, for Digital Collection System Network, connects FBI wiretapping rooms to switches controlled by traditional land-line operators, internet-telephony providers and cellular companies. It is far more intricately woven into the nation's telecom infrastructure than observers suspected.

On 9/18/01, the anthrax attacks started. The lethal anthrax spores -- which were sent along with notes purportedly written by Islamic terrorists -- used a weaponized anthrax strain from the top U.S. bioweapons facility, the Fort Detrick military base. Indeed, top bioweapons experts have stated that the anthrax attack may have been a CIA test "gone wrong"; and see this article by a former NSA and naval intelligence officer. "Coincidentally", White House staff began taking the anti-anthrax medicine before the Anthrax attacks occurred.

At Huffington Post, FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley has written a piece titled, Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed neocons can destroy the world (if we let them). While I recommend the entire editorial, here I will extract only this part: "On page 362 of the Epilogue of his insightful book Chain of Command, Seymour Hersh asked the question back in 2004 that I predict will become the major question all historians will have to answer: "How did they do it? How did eight or nine neoconservatives who believed that a war in Iraq was the answer to international terrorism get their way? How did they redirect the government and rearrange long-standing American priorities and policies with so much ease? How did they overcome the bureaucracy, intimidate the press, mislead the Congress, and dominate the military? Is our democracy that fragile?""

Curiously, however, there is no mention of the organized crime connections of air charter owner Zammiello in either the 9/11 Commission Report, which covered the Saudi flights, or in recently-released FBI documents rebutting allegations that bin Laden family members were allowed to leave the U.S. without being interviewed by authorities. The omission is surprising, especially considering Frank Zammiello's relevance to the story of President George W. Bush's amazing claim of executive privilege in early 2002 for all records of the Boston FBI.

Newly released documents reveal the FBI suspected that a plane hired to transport members of the bin Laden family from the United States back to Saudi Arabia might have been chartered by Osama bin Laden himself. The documents raise new questions about the FBI investigation into the 9/11 attacks. Truthout reviewed the 224 pages of newly released documents over the past two days. A heavily redacted FBI report on the incident begins by describing a private jet that was hired to pick up members of the bin Laden family that were in the US eight days after the 9/11 attacks. "The plane was chartered either by the Saudi Arabian Royal Family or Osama bin Laden," according to the declassified pages of the FBI investigation titled PENTTBOMB (page 3).

Gregg Junnier and another narcotics officer went inside the apartments around 2 p.m. while Jason Smith checked the woods. Smith found dozens of bags of marijuana -- in baggies that were clear, blue or various other colors and packaged to sell. With no one connected to the pot, Smith stashed the bags in the trunk of the patrol car. A use was found for Smith's stash 90 minutes later: A phone tip led the three officers to a man in a "gold-colored jacket" who might be dealing. The man, identified as X in the documents but known as Fabian Sheats, spotted the cops and put something in his mouth. They found no drugs on Sheats, but came up with a use for the pot they found earlier. They wanted information or they would arrest Sheats for dealing. While Junnier called for a drug-sniffing dog, Smith planted some bags under a rock, which the K-9 unit found. But if Sheats gave them something, he could walk. Sheats pointed out 933 Neal St., the home of 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston. That, he claimed, is where he spotted a kilogram of cocaine when he was there to buy crack from a man named "Sam."

Attorney Jesse Trentadue said in his investigation into his brother's August 1995 death in a federal holding facility in Oklahoma City, he ran across what he claims was a concerted effort by the FBI and U.S. Department of Justice to cover up the circumstances surrounding the death of Kenneth Trentadue. Jesse Trentadue claims his brother was killed during interrogation by the FBI who thought, in a case of mistaken identity, he was a suspect in the April 19, 1995, bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building that took the lives of 168 adults and children.

An FBI agent who posed as an al-Qaida recruiter in a terrorism investigation testified Thursday at a doctor's trial, recalling that a key conspirator in the case showed him how he could strangle somebody with his prayer beads. The agent, Ali Soufan, is a key witness in the terrorism trail against the doctor, Rafiq Abdus Sabir, 52, who was charged two years ago with pledging to provide material support to al-Qaida by offering to treat the group's injured fighters. Most of Soufan's testimony in nearly a day on the witness stand revolved around conversations he had with Tarik Shah, a martial arts expert and jazz musician who said he wanted to introduce him to Sabir. Several taped conversations from a meeting between the agent and Shah in Plattsburgh, N.Y. were played for the jury.

The FBI contacted a number of colleges in Worcester and one in Providence after it received nonspecific threats of violence against the schools, an agency spokeswoman said today. Officials have urged school officials to be alert today for suspicious activity. Gail Marcinkiewicz, an FBI spokeswoman, said the threats had not been corroborated. They did not include a date or time and were not directed at specific schools, she said, and "they had no nexus to terrorism."

The talk concluded with Rowley accepting some questions from audience members. The first, from a man who inquired about whether Rowley believed the United States government purposely allowed 9/11 to happen seemed to make her uncomfortable. Rowley responded by saying she felt the lack of communication between levels of bureaucracy had allowed it to happen, not any internal conspiracy. Another audience member, who introduced himself as a former FBI agent, congratulated Rowley for what he saw as the courage that led her to blowing the whistle in the first place. The statement was met with resounding applause from the audience.

But darker allegations are included in the complaint over false imprisonment. Because he worked with the FBI, Vance contends, U.S. government officials in Iraq decided to retaliate against him and Ertel. He believes these officials conspired to jail the two not because they worked for a security company suspected of selling weapons to insurgents, but because they were sharing information with law enforcement agents outside the control of U.S. officials in Baghdad. "In other words," claims the lawsuit, "United States officials in Iraq were concerned and wanted to find out about what intelligence agents in the United States knew about their territory and their operations. The unconstitutional policies that Rumsfeld and other unidentified agents had implemented for 'enemies' provided ample cover to detain plaintiffs and interrogate them toward that end."

Israeli spies cheer as WTC burns – not that there's anything wrong with that, says Barbara Walters

Story of Sibel Edmonds and other FBI heroes who were stymied from investigation and arresting the alleged Arab hi-jackers before 9/11.

I agree we are a nation of "cowards." But I disagree on the timing. We are not spaghetti-spined because we might exit Iraq anytime soon. We became a bunch of yellow bellies on Sept. 12, 2001. That was when, in our fear and anxiety, inspired by the endless images of the still smoldering remnants of the Twin Towers, we Americans checked 200 years of self-reliance and the Constitution at the door, and handed the keys to the store over to a White House run by one guy whose military derring do was performed in the skies over south Texas instead of South Vietnam and by another who ran from an opportunity to fight for his country no less than five times. FBI Director Robert Mueller's recent revelations about the agency's abuse of the Patriot Act, rammed into law two weeks after 9/11, proves Ben Franklin was right: trading security for liberty leaves you with neither.

Senators outraged over the conclusions signaled they would provide tougher oversight of the FBI -- and perhaps limits its power. "I am very concerned that the FBI has so badly misused national security letters," said Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee that oversees the FBI. Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., another member on the judiciary panel, said the report "proves that 'trust us' doesn't cut it."

Former FBI Terrorist Task Force director Danny Coulson has called for a new grand jury investigation into the Oklahoma City bombing and for the first time names Andreas Strassmeir as an "agent," in a documentary set to air Sunday, according to lawyer Jesse Trentadue. Trentadue, attorney for bombing conspirator Terry Nichols, last week obtained an astounding declaration from Nichols in which he fingered FBI agent Larry Potts as having directed McVeigh in carrying out the attack.

If Osama bin Laden or one of the other alleged masterminds behind 9/11 publicly accused Dick Cheney as having helped facilitate 9/11, would the media be interested? Why is press coverage so sparse when this testimony fundamentally contradicts the official version of a major chapter in American history? The question answers itself - the establishment is complicit in burying these revelations while Americans are bombarded with 24/7 drivel about Anna Nicole Smith and Britney Spears shaving her head.

On Tuesday, a federal judge will hear final arguments in a civil suit seeking more than $100 million in damages from the government for the false imprisonment of Salvati and Limone, whose convictions in the slaying of Edward "Teddy" Deegan were overturned six years ago, and Greco and Tameleo, both of whom died in prison before they were exonerated.

Just like 9/11, the official story of the Oklahoma City Bombing, that McVeigh alone carried out the attack using a fertilizer truck bomb, is contradicted by a plethora of eyewitness account as well as physical and circumstantial evidence.

When I spoke to the FBI, they told me that the reason for the confusion was that the names were like John Smith in the West, i.e. very common names. I have never been able to back up this claim until this year, since I did not have equipment to record the phone call. But the BBC article now confirms exactly what I have been telling MPs since 2002. However, here is the crunch. I then asked, well that’s fine. The names were the same. But then I asked, well why are you still showing their photos? Check yourself. The FBI to this very day is showing photographs of people who are very much alive and well. When I asked this question to the FBI press officer, he became extremely angry and slammed the phone down on me.

All of the classic anti-Semitic myths are being reinvented and re-deployed against Muslims. Here is Holocaust scholar Helen Fein's definition of anti-Semitism, with "Jew" changed to "Muslim": "A persisting latent structure of hostile beliefs towards Muslims as a collective manifested in individuals as attitudes, and in culture as myth, ideology, folklore and imagery, and in actions – social or legal discrimination, political mobilisation against the Muslims, and collective or state violence – which results in and/or is designed to distance, displace, or destroy Muslims as Muslims."

A paid FBI informant was the man behind a neo-Nazi march through the streets of Parramore that stirred up anxiety in Orlando's black community and fears of racial unrest that triggered a major police mobilization. That revelation came Wednesday in an unrelated federal court hearing and has prompted outrage from black leaders, some of whom demanded an investigation into whether the February 2006 march was, itself, an event staged by law-enforcement agencies.

Records show that she received superior or exceptional job ratings until after her supervisor, Craig Welken, was interviewed in 1999 about a sex-discrimination complaint she had filed the previous year. Her ratings plummeted, which led to a transfer from Minot, N.D., to a desk job in Minneapolis. Jurors decided that the negative job reviews were retaliation for filing the internal discrimination complaint, but that the transfer was not.

What happened to critical thinking? I thought "the Left" believed that the system's power is based on lies, exploitation and a media controlled by its own culture of overly cautious professionalism. The Left should be leading this 9/11 movement, not taking potshots from outside.

Call it the vacuum-cleaner approach. It's employed when police have obtained a court order and an Internet service provider can't "isolate the particular person or IP address" because of technical constraints, says Paul Ohm, a former trial attorney at the Justice Department's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section. (An Internet Protocol address is a series of digits that can identify an individual computer.) That kind of full-pipe surveillance can record all Internet traffic, including Web browsing--or, optionally, only certain subsets such as all e-mail messages flowing through the network. Interception typically takes place inside an Internet provider's network at the junction point of a router or network switch.

The FBI described the gang presence as a "growing threat," the Chicago Sun-Times reported. "The military enlistment of gang members could ultimately lead to the worldwide expansion of U.S.-based gangs," the report said.

Lance's implied theory of 9/11 — that the 9/11 hijacking plot basically slipped past the greasy fingers of a corrupt and egotistical DOJ/FBI — no doubt irritates many in the movement for truth about 9/11 for whom the "inside job" theory is creed, yet he has unearthed some of the most important gems in the struggle to bring real truth and justice to 9/11. Most importantly, he has shown how the efforts of the Southern New York division of the Justice Department, since the early 90s, have been half-baked, ridiculously negligent, and at times blantantly criminal. His work has been instrumental in fleshing out the continuum between the New York cell of the Blind Sheikh (proto-al Qaeda) in the early 1990s and the crimes of September 11, 2001, tracking the FBI all along in its failures and refusals to expose, arrest, and convict. In Triple Cross, a whole chapter is given to a New Jersey check cashing store which, had the FBI used common sense and monitored the place once they knew, early on, that it was a hub of al Qaeda activity, they probably would have snuffed out the 9/11 plot before Clinton had left office. Lance has also definitively fingered Dietrich Snell as the 9/11 Commission staff member who forged the Commission's official timeline into a deception by claiming that the 9/11 plot was conceived in 1998 — two years after Snell's DOJ office had known of a planes-as-missiles plot from interrogations of Abdul Hakim Murad.

The California congressman spoke further about John Doe #2, citing numerous reported sightings by "credible witnesses" interviewed by the House International Relations Investigative Subcommittee, and slammed the FBI for calling a "premature end" to their investigation. "We did our best with limited resources, and I think we moved the understanding of this issue forward a couple of notches even though important questions remain unanswered," Rohrabacher told the Associated Press after the two-year report's release.

For years, Salt Lake City attorney Jesse Trentadue has maintained his brother was killed in prison months after the Oklahoma City bombing by interrogators who mistakenly believed he was connected to the attack. Now, a new congressional report says federal authorities failed to investigate evidence suggesting Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols had assistance plotting the bombing - and some of the information pointing to co-conspirators came out of Trentadue's lawsuits against the FBI. And it adds fuel to the mystery of Kenneth Trentadue's supposed suicide in 1995 at the Federal Transfer Center in Oklahoma City.

Two of those men, Joseph Salvati and Peter Limone, spent more than 30 years in prison for the murder of Edward "Teddy" Deegan before being exonerated in 2001 when the Justice Department released documents showing the FBI withheld evidence from prosecutors that could have cleared the men so the agency could protect Vincent "Jimmy" Flemmi, an informant who actually committed the crime.

I want to admit, in all fairness, that certain notable victories have been achieved in the narrow pursuit of al Qaeda. At the same time, after five years of the new broadened war on terrorism, we can say with confidence that the net result to date is a far more dangerous world than we had before.

Violent US crime such as robberies and murders rose by 3.7 per cent in the first half of 2006, while property crimes such as larceny and car thefts declined from the year-earlier period, the FBI said Monday. Murders were up by 1.4 per cent, with major cities leading the trend, the US federal anti-crime agency's data showed.

Batiste said he only told an FBI informant posing as an al-Qaida operative he planned to blow up the Sears Towers because that's what he thought the man wanted to hear. Batiste said he was hoping to get money from the informant so he could help his organization, which he said was called the Universal Divine Saviours. "I made it up right then and there," Batiste said. "If you listen to the words I was saying, it's unrealistic, such as I need horses." Batiste also blames a convenience store owner from Yemen, who he says befriended him and later teamed up with the informants, feeding them lies to help his own financial and immigration problems.

Salem, initially believing that this was to be a sting operation, claimed that the FBI's original plan was for Salem to supply the conspirators with a harmless powder instead of actual explosive to build their bomb, but that the FBI chose to use him for other purposes instead. [4] He secretly recorded hundreds of hours of telephone conversations with his FBI handlers; reported by Ralph Blumenthal in the New York Times, Oct. 28, 1993, secton A,Page 1.

Voters in the cities of Covington, Hampton and Colonial Heights and the counties of Accomack, Northampton and Fairfax reported getting deceptive telephone calls in the days before the election informing them that their voting places had changed, when they had not, Jensen said. In Arlington County, resident Timothy Daly said he got a phone message Sunday, said to be from the "Virginia Elections Commission," telling him he was registered to vote in New York so he couldn't vote in Virginia. "If you do show up, you will be charged criminally," said the message, the text of which appeared on Daly's affidavit to the Board of Elections.

During three hours of interrogation, Padilla was asked about his personal history, family details and travel, but the record reflects no question or answer directly dealing with his alleged ties to al Qaeda.

Though he's one of only six FBI agents with advanced Arabic skills, Youssef believes that, since 9/11, the FBI has blocked him from playing a significant role in the war on terror. He claims discrimination, and sued the FBI in 2003. "To be totally set aside, blackballed since 9/11, makes absolutely no sense," he says.

The FBI appears to have begun using a novel form of electronic surveillance in criminal investigations: remotely activating a mobile phone's microphone and using it to eavesdrop on nearby conversations. The technique is called a "roving bug," and was approved by top U.S. Department of Justice officials for use against members of a New York organized crime family who were wary of conventional surveillance techniques such as tailing a suspect or wiretapping him.

The same month the report was released, Edmonds' lawsuit to contest her firing was dismissed. Legal briefs show the government had invoked the so-called state secrets privilege, arguing that the lawsuit would jeopardize national security. The state secrets privilege — a series of U.S. legal precedents — has been cited by the federal government at least 18 times since 9/11 and at least 81 times since the privilege was first recognized in 1953, according to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

"U.S. District Court Judge Richard W. Roberts of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia has ordered the Federal Bureau of Investigation to submit 'proper disclosures' to the Court and Judicial Watch by December 15, 2006 concerning the U.S. government's evacuation of Saudi royals and members of the bin Laden family from the United States immediately following the 9/11 terrorist attacks," the group said in a press release obtained by RAW STORY.

On Oct. 6, the 30th anniversary of the bombing of the Cuban plane (you have to give them credit for timing), I received a new subpoena. This one, issued by a federal grand jury in Newark, was requested by Gonzales. They may be ambivalent about the war on terrorism over at the Justice Department, but you can't question their dedication to their war against the Fourth Estate. For my part, it raised a peculiar pickle: contemplating how far one should go to protect the civil liberties of an accused terrorist.

A Justice Department spokesman noted that terrorist hoax cases that were quickly dismissed may have been included in the data. And some cases are referred to prosecutors to obtain subpoenas in investigations that never result in criminal charges, the spokesman said. He said prosecutors rejected 67 percent of FBI international terrorist cases -- not 87 percent.

So, is there any area where FBI referrals are leading to more prosecutions? Yes, one. Obscenity and pornography prosecutions are up. Your FBI. Keeping you safe from porn.

The informer was to have helped plotters build the bomb and supply the fake powder, but the plan was called off by an F.B.I. supervisor who had other ideas about how the informer, Emad A. Salem, should be use, the informer said.

FBI Special Agent Thorne called KSLA News 12 right before news time, telling us that our question is not one the FBI should answer. Thorne told us the decision whether to indict Usama Bin Laden for the 9/11 attacks is made by the U.S. Justice Department. We'll keep you posted.

The privacy-rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a lawsuit against the Department of Justice on Tuesday, demanding the government disclose information on the handling of personal data in the FBI’s "Investigative Data Warehouse." The lawsuit seeks details on the nature of the information collected and what privacy protections the agency has applied.

In instructing the jurors to take on faith one side's position over another's, Judge McAvoy, whether intentionally or not, used his office to urge a particular result in a trial over which he presided. Even now, this is not what it means to be a "judge."

Counting agents who know only a handful of Arabic words -- including those who scored zero on a standard proficiency test -- just 1 percent of the FBI's 12,000 agents have any familiarity with the language, the statistics show.

If Ashcroft had been flying commercial before 9/11 as he claims then they FBI could have simply stated this - why would they lie and tell CBS News that Ashcroft was "acting under guidelines," that came strictly from his FBI security detail?

In the August issue of Applied and Environmental Microbiology, FBI scientist Douglas Beecher sought to set the record straight. Anthrax spores mailed to politicians and journalists in September and October of 2001, Beecher wrote, were not prepared using advanced techniques and additives to make them more lethal, contrary to "a widely circulated misconception." The notion the anthrax spores were "weaponized" had fueled conjecture that only a government insider could have carried out the operation. Beecher's article suggested a much wider universe of potential suspects -- who showed they could kill without highly refined spores.

Law enforcement officials confirmed that the anthrax bacteria, initially described as a near-military-grade biological weapon, showed no signs of processing that would make it more deadly, the Post reported. The officials also said scientific analysis found the strain of anthrax used in the attack to be more common than was initially believed, the newspaper reported.

In the article, the Washington Post attempts to explain to its readers why the FBI’s Osama bin Laden Ten Most Wanted poster makes no direct mention to Osama bin Laden being wanted for the events of September 11, 2001. Eggen and Horwitz make no mention whatsoever as to what prompted them to write this article at this time.

My permanent exodus from the US was actually ordained thirty years –- to the month –- before I left for good on July 18th, 2006. It was thirty years ago that my then-fiancée, a career contract agent for the CIA, disclosed to me that “her people” were interested in giving a major boost to my career with LAPD if I would become involved with her “anti-terror” operations that involved “overlooking” (i.e. protecting) large drug shipments coming in while facilitating the movement of large quantities of firearms going out. I refused to compromise my ethics as a police officer and –- as I wrote on page 6 of Crossing the Rubicon – “that has determined the course of my life ever since.”

Either way, Val McClatchey's Flight 93 photo is a smoking gun whether it's a legitimate photo, or whether it's a fake.

A banker found dead and believed linked to a US fraud probe involving NatWest was allegedly "hounded by the FBI".

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has been detaining Muslim immigrants, holding their green cards hostage, and threatening deportation unless the detainee agrees to become a government informant, today's WALL STREET JOURNAL is reporting.

An FBI informant urged seven terror suspects to target FBI offices throughout the country - including one in New York - and even helped the men scout the buildings, law enforcement sources told the Daily News yesterday.

There are simply too many dots! I’m not kidding around here.

Rameau notes that while the government has taken action against "men with little to no demonstrable capacity to advance their plans beyond the discussion stage,” it has refused to extradite – or prosecute – Luis Posada, suspected mastermind of the bombing of a Cuban airliner “full of human beings” in 1976.