Killtown's

9/11 coincidences and oddities page!

(and other note worthy tidbits.)

Pre 2001 • 2001 • 9/11 • 2002 • 2003 • 2004 • 2005 • 2006

Last updated:  02/15/2007

(Use the WayBack Machine for expired links.)

• January 5, 2005 - Ex-FBI agent admits giving online stock traders 9/11 data.

"A former FBI agent admitted that he gave online stock traders confidential details of federal investigations, including a probe of the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
One of the recipients was San Diego stock speculator Anthony Elgindy. A Justice Department task force had begun the investigation of Elgindy to determine whether anyone might have known of the terrorists' plans and profited by selling vulnerable stocks just before the attacks, Jeffrey Royer said.
Elgindy was not charged in connection with that probe, but an investigation into the ties between Elgindy and Royer led to charges against the two men of racketeering, securities fraud and other crimes. The two are on trial together in federal court in Brooklyn.
Taking the stand Monday in his defense, Royer acknowledged he had revealed the existence of FBI and SEC investigations, executives' criminal records and other sensitive information to Elgindy and associate Derrick Cleveland.
When pressed by Assistant U.S. Attorney Seth Levine about apparent violations of FBI rules, Royer grew testy, asserting he was an independent-minded agent who had the right to decide what information to reveal.
"It's real easy for you to armchair quarterback when you don't have anything to do with the case," Royer told Levine. "Pursuant to a law-enforcement purpose, I can do anything I want with the files."
Cleveland has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit securities fraud and testified against Elgindy and Royer." -  San Diego Union Tribune (01/05/05)

• January 5, 2005 - Conspiracy theorists see dark forces behind tsunami disaster

"Just 11 days after Asia's tsunami catastrophe, conspiracy theorists are out in force, accusing governments of a cover-up, blaming the military for testing top-secret eco-weapons or aliens trying to correct the Earth's "wobbly" rotation.
In bars and Internet chatrooms around the world questions are being asked, with knowing nods and winks, about who caused the submarine earthquake off Sumatra on December 26, and why governments were so slow to act in the minutes and hours before tsunamis slammed into their shores, killing almost 150,000.
"There's a lot more to this. Why is the US sending a warship? Why is a senior commander who was in Iraq going there?" whispered designer Mark Tyler, drinking a pint of beer at a bar in Hong Kong's Wan Chai district.
"This happened exactly a year after Bam," said Tyler, referring to the earthquake in Iran which killed 30,000 on December 26 last year. "Is that a coincidence? And there was no previous seismic activity recorded in Sumatra before the quake, which is very strange," he said, nodding somberly.
After every globally shocking event -- from the bombing of Pearl Harbour to the assassination of John F Kennedy, the death of Princess Diana and the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States -- conspiracy theorists emerge with their own sinister take on events.
This time the Indian and US military are in the frame, while the governments of countries from Australia to Thailand stand accused of deliberately failing to act on warnings of the impending earthquake or the tsunamis it unleashed around Asia.
Among the more common suggestions is that eco-weapons which can trigger earthquakes and volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves were being tested.
The Free Internet Press, which claims to offer "uncensored news for real people", has an article saying the US military and the State Department received advanced warning of the tsunami, but did little to warn Asian countries.
America's Navy base on the Indian Ocean jungle atoll of Diego Garcia was notified and escaped unscathed, it said, asking "why were fishermen in India, Sri Lanka and Thailand not provided with the same warnings?.
"Why did the US State Department remain mum on the existence of an impending catastrophe?," author Michel Chossudovsky pondered.
The India Daily's website joined the conspiracy theorists noting, "it seems the whole world decided to fail to do anything together at the same time. Are we missing something?" - Channel News Asia/AFP (01/05/05)

• January 7, 2005 - CIA report faults top officials for pre-9/11 lapses

"A report from the CIA's independent investigator is expected to conclude officials at the highest level of the agency are to blame for pre-September 11 intelligence lapses.
The report by the CIA's inspector general, John Helgerson, which is nearly complete, concludes that senior leaders should be held accountable for failing to provide adequate resources for combating terrorism, the New York Times reports in its Friday editions.
Among those who receive the most pointed criticism in a draft version are former CIA Director George Tenet and former Deputy Director of Operations Jim Pavitt, both of whom resigned last summer, the newspaper said. The report quoted current and former intelligence officials." - CNN (01/07/05)

• January 8, 2005 - Mysterious jet tied to torture flights, Is shadowy firm front for CIA?

"The first question is: Where is Leonard T. Bayard? The next question is: Who is Leonard T. Bayard? But the most important question may be: Does Leonard T. Bayard even exist?
The questions arise because the signature of a Leonard Thomas Bayard appears on the annual report of a Portland-based company, Bayard Foreign Marketing LLC, that was filed in August with the Oregon secretary of state.
According to federal records, Bayard Foreign Marketing is the newest owner of a U.S.-registered Gulfstream V executive jet reportedly used since Sept. 11, 2001, to transport suspected Al Qaeda operatives to countries such as Egypt and Syria, where some of them claim to have later been tortured.
The Central Intelligence Agency has declined to discuss the plane. But one retired CIA officer said that he understood the Gulfstream had been operated by the Joint Special Operations Command, an interagency unit that organizes counterterrorist operations in conjunction with the CIA and military special forces.
A search of commercial databases turned up no information on Leonard Thomas Bayard: no residence address, no telephone number, no Social Security number, no credit history, no automobile or property ownership records--in short, none of the information commonly associated with real people.
And yet, someone signed the name Leonard T. Bayard to Bayard Foreign Marketing's annual report.
The first public mention of the Gulfstream appeared six weeks after Sept. 11, 2001, when a Pakistani newspaper reported that Jamil Qasim Saeed Mohammed, a 27-year-old microbiology student at Karachi University, had been spirited aboard the plane at Karachi's airport by Pakistani security officers in the early hours of Oct. 23, 2001.
There is no information about where Mohammed was taken. But Pakistani officials said later that Mohammed, a Yemeni national, was believed by the U.S. to belong to Al Qaeda and to have information about the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole.
Since Sept. 11, unnamed U.S. officials have been quoted in several publications discussing the U.S. practice of "rendition," which involves sending suspected terrorists or Al Qaeda supporters captured abroad for interrogation to countries where human rights are not traditionally respected.
The Sunday Times of London, which claimed to have obtained the plane's flight logs, reported in November that the plane was based at Dulles International Airport outside Washington. The newspaper said it had flown to at least 49 destinations outside the U.S., including Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, other U.S. military bases, as well as airports in Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Morocco, Afghanistan, Libya and Uzbekistan.
Two days after the Sunday Times report, Premier Executive Transport sold the Gulfstream to Bayard Foreign Marketing. On Dec. 1, records show, the FAA assigned the plane yet another tail number, N44982." - Chicago Tribune (01/08/05)

• January 8, 2005 - ‘The Salvador Option’, The Pentagon may put Special-Forces-led assassination or kidnapping teams in Iraq - Newsweek/MSNBC

• January 9, 2005 - Let bin Laden stay free, says ex-No. 3 CIA man A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard.

"Three years after the attack on New York's World Trade Center, the manhunt for Osama bin Laden has failed to produce the world's most wanted terrorist, and, according to the former No. 3 man at the CIA, that's just fine.
Former Central Intelligence Agency executive, A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard, has told the London Times that letting the al-Qaida leader run free may actually make the world a safer place.
"You can make the argument that we're better off with him (at large)," Krongard said. "Because if something happens to bin Laden, you might find a lot of people vying for his position and demonstrating how macho they are by unleashing a stream of terror."
Krongard, former head of Alex. Brown & Co., a Baltimore-based investment bank, came to the CIA in 1998 as then Director George Tenet's counsel. He was appointed executive director of the CIA in March 2001 by President Bush. Krongard, 68, stepped down six weeks ago as the agency's third most senior executive following the appointment of Porter Goss as director.
Krongard is the most senior official to date to publicly question the wisdom of capturing Osama. If his views are widely shared – and the London Times reports that other U.S. officials have privately said pinning bin Laden down on the Afghan-Pakistan border is preferable to making him a martyr or trying him – they represent a break with three years of official pronouncements about bringing him to justice.
Only this week the U.S. re-stated its desire to capture the elusive bin Laden and more than a dozen other al-Qaida figures by placing a half page ad in the Urdu daily "Jang" promising millions of dollars in rewards. "All the information would be kept secret," the U.S. Justice Department advertisement promised." - WorldNetDaily (01/09/05)

(See also:  September 6, 2001 - Put options placed on United Airlines were purchased through Bank formally ran by the No. 3 CIA man, "Buzzy" Krongard; December 2001 - Osama bin Laden reportedly dies)

• January 11, 2005 - Bush nominates Whitewater scandal/Vincent Foster suicide investigator and Patriot Act co-architect Michael Chertoff  for Homeland Security Post.

President Bush nominated federal judge as the new Homeland Security chief Tuesday, completing the second-term Cabinet with a former prosecutor who recently called for a new look at the tough terrorist detainee laws that he helped craft after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Chertoff would replace Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, who helped build the new department after the terror attacks by combining 22 existing and often competing federal agencies. Ridge, often identified with the color-coded terror alerts, plans to step down from his post Feb. 1.
Chertoff's resume includes stint as a Supreme Court clerk and as the Senate Republicans' chief counsel for the Clinton-era Whitewater investigation. He helped develop the U.S. Patriot Act, which greatly expanded the government's surveillance and detention powers.
His role in crafting that law, a measure that has become a flashpoint for critics who say it has eroded civil liberties, is expected to bring sharp questioning in Senate confirmation hearings.
The American Civil Liberties Union said Tuesday that as an architect of the act, Chertoff seemed to view the Bill of Rights "as an obstacle to national security rather than a guidebook for how to do security properly."
Chertoff's tenure at the Justice Department included high-profile cases that his criminal division either lost or that have yet to be resolved:
The collapse in Detroit of the first post-Sept. 11 prosecution of an alleged terrorist sleeper cell. The charges were thrown out because of misconduct by prosecutors.
The case of a Saudi college student in Boise, Idaho, who was acquitted for lack of evidence on charges he created an Internet network that prosecutors claimed fostered Islamic extremism and helped recruit potential terrorists.
The still-incomplete prosecution of Zacarias Moussaoui, the only U.S. defendant charged in an al-Qaida conspiracy that includes the Sept. 11 attacks.
As chief Republican counsel to the Senate Whitewater Committee, Chertoff played a major role in the investigation of various allegations against then-President Clinton, including his Arkansas business dealings and the suicide of Clinton aide Vincent Foster.
Chertoff and his wife each donated $1,000 to Bush's first presidential campaign." - ABC (01/11/05)

• January 11, 2005 - Supreme Court is asked to rule on Moussaoui case

"Lawyers for Zacarias Moussaoui petitioned the Supreme Court yesterday, challenging the government's right to put the terrorism suspect on trial while the defense has no access to potentially favorable Al Qaeda witnesses.
The written brief questioned whether Moussaoui's constitutional rights would be violated if the defense is forced to rely on government-prepared summaries of interrogation statements from three Al Qaeda captives.
A federal appeals court has approved the use of the summaries after the government argued that more direct access to Al Qaeda leaders, or even to their classified interrogation statements, would jeopardize national security.
The lawyers said it was unconstitutional to force Moussaoui to rely on ''summaries of classified documents containing information from unnamed, unsworn government agents purporting to report unsworn, incomplete, nonverbatim accounts" of witness statements.
Moussaoui, a French citizen arrested on immigration charges shortly before the Sept. 11 attacks, was indicted in December 2001 and remains the only US defendant charged in an Al Qaeda conspiracy that includes those attacks. The defendant has acknowledged his loyalty to Osama bin Laden but denies he was to have any role in the hijackings.
The lawyers said Moussaoui was denied rights guaranteed under the Sixth Amendment, the right of the accused to confront his accusers; the Fifth Amendment, the right not be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; and the Eighth Amendment, the ban on cruel and unusual punishment." - Boston Globe/ (01/11/05)

(See also: July 19, 2002 - Judge rejects Moussaoui's 'I am guilty' plea; April 19, 2005 - Report: Moussaoui Plans to Plead Guilty)

• January 11, 2005 - Robert Scheer: Is Al Qaeda Just a Bush Boogeyman?

"Is it conceivable that Al Qaeda, as defined by President Bush as the center of a vast and well-organized international terrorist conspiracy, does not exist?
To even raise the question amid all the officially inspired hysteria is heretical, especially in the context of the U.S. media's supine acceptance of administration claims relating to national security. Yet a brilliant new BBC film produced by one of Britain's leading documentary filmmakers systematically challenges this and many other accepted articles of faith in the so-called war on terror.
"The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear," a three-hour historical film by Adam Curtis recently aired by the British Broadcasting Corp., argues coherently that much of what we have been told about the threat of international terrorism "is a fantasy that has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians. It is a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned through governments around the world, the security services and the international media."
Stern stuff, indeed. But consider just a few of the many questions the program poses along the way:
• If Osama bin Laden does, in fact, head a vast international terrorist organization with trained operatives in more than 40 countries, as claimed by Bush, why, despite torture of prisoners, has this administration failed to produce hard evidence of it?
• How can it be that in Britain since 9/11, 664 people have been detained on suspicion of terrorism but only 17 have been found guilty, most of them with no connection to Islamist groups and none who were proven members of Al Qaeda?
• Why have we heard so much frightening talk about "dirty bombs" when experts say it is panic rather than radioactivity that would kill people?
• Why did Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claim on "Meet the Press" in 2001 that Al Qaeda controlled massive high-tech cave complexes in Afghanistan, when British and U.S. military forces later found no such thing?
Consider, for example, that neither the 9/11 commission nor any court of law has been able to directly take evidence from the key post-9/11 terror detainees held by the United States. Everything we know comes from two sides that both have a great stake in exaggerating the threat posed by Al Qaeda: the terrorists themselves and the military and intelligence agencies that have a vested interest in maintaining the facade of an overwhelmingly dangerous enemy." - LA Times (01/11/05)

• January 12, 2005 - The White House says the U.S. is no longer searching for the WMD's that President Bush often pointed to as he made his case for an Iraq war.

"The White House says the United States is no longer actively searching for the weapons of mass destruction that President Bush often pointed to as he made his case for war, reports CBS News White House Correspondent Peter Maer.
Chief weapon hunter Charles Duelfer is expected to make only small additions to his October report that found Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction programs had deteriorated into only hopes and dreams by the time of the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, says White House spokesman Scott McClennan." - CBS (01/12/05)

(See also:  October 7, 2004 - CIA report concludes no WMD's in Iraq)

• January 12, 2005 - Secretary Tom Ridge close to lobbying firm's chairman, Company's clients won lucrative Homeland Security contracts

"As the Homeland Security Department was starting up, Secretary Tom Ridge twice stayed overnight at the Arizona home of a wealthy friend who ran a lobbying firm that was aggressively expanding its homeland security business.
The Blank Rome firm, whose chairman is former Ridge fund-raiser David Girard-diCarlo, hired two of Ridge's aides to lobby the new department, and some of the firm's clients eventually landed lucrative contracts, according to documents and interviews.
Blank Rome has lobbied Ridge's department on behalf of 29 companies, three nonprofit groups and a trade association for the software industry, according to reports the firm filed with Congress.
In a statement, the lobbying firm called Ridge and Girard-diCarlo "close personal friends for more than a decade."
Ridge and Girard-diCarlo worked together in Pennsylvania to raise more than $400,000 for the Bush-Cheney campaign in 1999 and 2000. Before that, Girard-diCarlo helped Ridge raise money as Pennsylvania governor.
The day after the department's creation on November 25, 2002, Ridge flew to Arizona with his wife and stayed overnight for two or three days in Girard-diCarlo's gated-community home in Scottsdale, officials say. Six days before Ridge's visit, Girard-diCarlo had taken out a $3 million loan on the newly built home.
The month after the trip, the first of two Ridge's White House aides left the government and went to work for Girard-diCarlo's firm focusing on homeland security issues.
That aide, Mark Holman, has been "the closest governmental and political adviser to Secretary Tom Ridge for over 18 years," a federal contractor proclaimed in promotional material for a seminar series for which Holman was a featured speaker.
Holman, Ridge's chief of staff during his years as Pennsylvania governor, worked briefly for Girard-diCarlo's firm before Ridge brought him to the White House.
When they got to Blank Rome, Holman and the other former Ridge White House aide, Ashley Davis, started signing up new homeland security clients and lobbying Ridge's department.
Ridge made a second trip to Girard-diCarlo's Arizona home in mid-April 2003, helping to celebrate the lobbyist's wedding anniversary with 50 other couples.
In addition to the two Arizona trips, Ridge has been to Girard-diCarlo's Washington condominium on social occasions, and the two have run into each other at social events around town, Ridge's office says.
At the time of Ridge's trips to Arizona, Girard-diCarlo's firm represented Raytheon, which is on a team of companies recently awarded border protection work by Ridge's department worth up to $10 billion over the next decade.
Since early 2003, Blank Rome has lobbied Ridge's department on behalf of the technology services company BearingPoint. The department awarded a $229 million contract to the company in September.
Boeing, another Blank Rome client, says it received help from Girard-diCarlo's firm in setting up a meeting early this year with the No. 2 official at Ridge's department, Adm. James Loy.
Boeing is performing more than $1 billion worth of work for Ridge's department under a competitively bid contract awarded by the Transportation Department the year before Homeland Security was created." - CNN (01/12/05)

• January 12, 2005 - The ACLU files a brief to the D.C. Court of Appeals to reinstate the case of former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds, saying that the government is abusing the "state secrets privilege" to silence employees who expose national security blunders.

"The American Civil Liberties Union today urged the D.C. Court of Appeals to reinstate the case of former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds, saying that the government is abusing the "state secrets privilege" to silence employees who expose national security blunders.
"The government should be applauding, not punishing, employees who risk their jobs to expose threats to our nation’s security," said ACLU Associate Legal Director Ann Beeson. "If the lower court ruling stands, many thousands of government employees will be unprotected from retaliatory dismissal, with no recourse in the courts, and others will be even less willing to risk exposing misconduct or corruption."
Edmonds, a former Middle Eastern language specialist hired by the FBI shortly after 9/11, was fired in 2002 after repeatedly reporting serious security breaches and misconduct in the agency’s translation program. She challenged her retaliatory dismissal by filing suit in federal court. Last July, the district court dismissed her case when Attorney General John Ashcroft invoked the so-called state secrets privilege. The ACLU is representing Edmonds in the appeal.
In the brief filed today, the ACLU sharply criticizes the government’s "radical theory" that every aspect of the Edmonds’ case involves state secrets and therefore it cannot go forward. In accepting the government’s theory, the ACLU said, the district court relied on the government’s secret evidence but denied Edmonds the opportunity to prove her case based on non-sensitive evidence. That approach, the ACLU said, "made a mockery of the adversarial process and denied Ms. Edmonds her constitutional right to a day in court."
The state secrets privilege, when properly invoked, permits the government to block disclosure of particular documents that would cause harm to national security. In the Edmonds case, the government used the privilege not just to protect particular documents but to urge dismissal of the entire case.
The government is engaged in a similar cover-up in the Edmonds case, the ACLU said. In 2002, at the request of Senate Judiciary Committee members Charles Grassley (R-IA) and Patrick Leahy (D-VT), the FBI provided several unclassified briefings to Members of Congress in which it confirmed many of Edmonds' allegations.
Only two weeks after the district court dismissed Edmonds’ case, FBI director Robert Mueller wrote a letter to Senator Grassley reporting that the Department of Justice Inspector General had completed a classified investigation and concluded that Edmonds’ allegations "were at least a contributing factor in why the FBI terminated her services." - ACLU (01/12/05)

Sibel Edmonds, Plaintiff–Appellant, v. United States Department of Justice, et al.,

(See also:  April 26, 2004 - Bush Administration gags former Sibel Edmonds)

• January 12, 2005 - The FBI is keeping 257.5 million records on people who flew on commercial airlines from June through September 2001.

 "If you're among the millions of Americans who took airline flights in the months before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the FBI probably knows about it - and possibly where you stayed, whom you traveled with, what credit card you used and even whether you ordered a kosher meal.
The bureau is keeping 257.5 million records on people who flew on commercial airlines from June through September 2001 in its permanent investigative database, according to information obtained by a privacy group and made available to The Associated Press.
Privacy advocates say they're troubled by the possibility that the FBI could be analyzing personal information about people without their knowledge or permission.
Hofmann, though, said the FBI still had a legal responsibility to tell people that it had obtained information about them and to let them have access to it.
As part of its investigation into the terrorist attacks, the FBI asked for, and got, the records from a number of airlines shortly after Sept. 11. The FBI also got one set of data through a federal grand jury subpoena.
The privacy center in May requested records of the FBI's acquisition of the data. The bureau last week turned over 12 pages of information, much of it blanked out for security reasons.
The 12 pages do show that the bureau obtained 82.1 million passenger manifests, or lists of people who flew on planes, between January and September 2001, in addition to the 257.5 million passenger name records.
Citing privacy concerns, the FBI didn't reveal which airlines turned over the information, which airline employees turned it over and which FBI special agents got it.
The data are called passenger name records, or PNR, and can include a variety of information such as credit card numbers, travel itineraries, addresses, telephone numbers and meal requests.
David Hardy, the FBI's chief of the record/information dissemination section of the records management division, said in a legal document dated Jan. 5 that the data were being stored and combined with other information from the Sept. 11 investigation, dubbed PENTTBOMB." - Kansas City Star (01/14/05)

• January 18, 2005 - U.S. Companies Eye Trans-Afghan Pipeline - Forbes/AP (01/18/05)

• January 25, 2005 - 9/11 victim’s son asks FBI to describe his Mother's ordeal before her plane struck the WTC at Mounir el-Motassadeq's retrial.

"In harrowing exchanges before a German court, the son of a Sept. 11 victim asked an FBI agent on Tuesday to detail his mother’s ordeal in the “hellish” minutes before her plane hit New York’s World Trade Center.
“Are you able to conclude it would be akin to torture, what happened to my mother?” American Dominic Puopolo Jr. asked U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation special agent Matthew Walsh.
The exchanges came as Walsh gave a first day of testimony at the retrial of Mounir El Motassadeq, a Moroccan man accused of aiding and abetting the attacks that killed nearly 2,800 people on Sept. 11, 2001.
Puopolo, a co-plaintiff with the German state prosecution, was seeking to reinforce the case against Motassadeq.
He repeatedly asked Walsh to try to describe what his mother Sonia Morales Puopolo and her fellow passengers must have experienced after hijackers led by Mohamed Atta took control of American Airlines Flight 11 from Boston to Los Angeles.
Walsh said the effects of pepper spray released by the hijackers were most severe at the front of the plane where Puopolo’s mother, a severe asthmatic, was sitting in first-class seat 3J, one row behind two of the hijackers and five rows in front of Atta.
“It was certainly what I would describe as hellish on board the plane,” Walsh said, adding two flight attendants had been stabbed and one passenger had his throat slashed.
“The plane was being flown very erratically and blood was being shed on board.” - MSNBC/Reuters (01/25/05)

(See also:  August 10, 2004 - U.S.: No testimony at Motassadeq's retrial; January 31, 2005 - Key al Qaeda suspect in U.S. custody said Motassadeq had no knowledge of the 9/11 plot)

• January 31, 2005 - A key al Qaeda suspect in U.S. custody has said Mounir el-Motassadeq had no knowledge of the 9/11 attack plot.

"A key al Qaeda suspect in U.S. custody has said a Moroccan man on trial in Germany had no knowledge of the September 11 attack plot, according to an interrogation summary.
The summary was read out Wednesday in the Hamburg courtroom where Mounir el-Motassadeq is being retried on charges in connection with the 2001 attack.
He was convicted in 2003 but the verdict was thrown out by an appeals court in March and he was freed in April.
The appeals court said the conviction was unfair because U.S.-held suspects didn't testify. As El-Motassadeq's retrial opened Tuesday, Washington pledged to provide evidence but not live testimony from the suspects.
The U.S. Justice Department faxed the German court summaries of the interrogation of two key detainees: Ramzi Binalshibh and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.
Binalshibh, believed to be the Hamburg cell's contact with al Qaeda, said "the only members of the Hamburg cell were himself, Atta, al-Shehhi and Jarrah," according to the summary, The Associated Press reported.
Binalshibh said "the activities of the Hamburg group were not known to el Motassadeq," the summary added.
The group was "well known by a number of Arab students," but "Binalshibh said that the people in question had no knowledge and were not participants in any facet of the operative plans of September 11."
According to the summary, the Justice Department had "doubts" about some of the testimony, but the summary did not elaborate.
Binalshibh also said that while el-Motassadeq had transferred money on behalf of one of the plotters, he did not know for what purpose, Reuters reported.
Mohammed, who is believed to have masterminded the September 11 plot, told interrogators that Binalshibh had not told Motassadeq of the details for security reasons.
Binalshibh gave interrogators a list of more than a dozen names of people who he said had no knowledge of and did not take part in any aspect of the 9/11 plan. The list included Zacarias Moussaoui, a suspect being held in the United States, Reuters reported.
According to the summary, the Justice Department had "doubts" about some of the testimony, and that the persons interrogated might have withheld information.
German prosecutors have suggested Binalshibh would not be a credible witness because he might lie to protect el Motassadeq.
El-Motassadeq's lawyers are calling for the Hamburg state court to throw out the case, suggesting that any information gathered by U.S. intelligence services might have been obtained through use of torture.
U.S. authorities have said they cannot provide direct contact with suspects including Binalshibh and Mohammed for national security reasons.
But in el-Motassadeq's first trial, the U.S. government refused to allow even transcripts of interrogations to be admitted as evidence." - CNN (01/25/05)

(See also:  January 25, 2005 - 9/11 victim’s son asks FBI to describe his Mother's ordeal at Motassadeq's retrial; February 8, 2005 - A police witness says Motassadeq carried out money transactions on behalf of suicide pilot)

• January 31, 2005 - Citigroup dropped from lawsuit that charged that the diesel fuel it kept at WTC 7 was a main culprit in the destruction of the building on 9/11.

"Citigroup Inc. cannot be held responsible for the large stocks of diesel fuel it kept at 7 World Trade Center -- fuel that an insurance company claimed was a main culprit in the destruction of the building on Sept. 11, 2001 -- a federal judge ruled Friday.
Southern District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein found that covenants in Citigroup's lease with Larry Silverstein, and an insurance company's agreement with Silverstein, bar the company from proceeding as Silverstein's subrogee against Citigroup Inc. and Citigroup Global Market Holdings Inc.
In Industrial Risk Insurers v. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, 02 Civ. 7170, Industrial Risk, or IRI, claimed that several parties were responsible for the destruction of 7 World Trade Center, which sat adjacent to the twin towers that were destroyed by terrorists.
Fires from the twin towers spread to 7 World Trade Center when chunks of the collapsing buildings fell on it. Citigroup had a long-term lease for portions of its floors one through five and floors 28 through 47 for trading operations for Salomon Smith Barney.
Seeking damages of $75 million, IRI claimed that the system, including the pipes connecting two 6,000 gallon tanks of diesel fuel kept on site by Citigroup in the event of a power outage, were negligently installed and maintained, and that the ignited fuel intensified the fires and ensured the building would fall." - Law.com (01/31/05)

(See also:  Killtown's: Was the WTC 7 pulled?)

• February 2, 2005 - Neighbor says Atta seemed 'disturbed'

"Sept. 11 suicide hijacker Mohamed Atta appeared "psychologically disturbed" and acted "distant" when encountered on the street, a former neighbor testified Wednesday during the retrial of a Moroccan accused of providing logistical support for the attacks.
Indra Andrea Braun, 34, lived next door to Atta in a Hamburg suburb and said she saw defendant Mounir el Motassadeq visiting him. Atta was also visited by suicide pilots Ziad Jarrah and Marwan al-Shehhi and others suspected of involvement in the Sept. 11 plot, she said.
Braun was married to an Iranian Muslim and lived in an adjoining building to Atta for several years, but she said her neighbor never spoke to her.
"For me, he was psychologically disturbed. He had communication problems," she said. "I didn't find him threatening, just strange and distant."
She said she and her husband would try to provoke Atta when they saw him outside his apartment.
"My husband would often kiss me on the street," she said. "Atta was disgusted ... my husband did it just to annoy his type."
Friends and family have said Atta was intensely uncomfortable around women, even once refusing to shake a female professor's hand when she told him he had earned his degree.
Braun did not shed more light on el Motassadeq's role, saying he was only one of a group of people around Atta whom she would see in the neighborhood." - Seattle Post-Intelligencer (02/02/05)

(See also:  August 16, 2002 - Germany issues the first indictment against Motassadeq for conspiracy with 9/11)

• February 2, 2005 - Ashcroft urges renewal of Patriot Act powers

"Attorney General John Ashcroft conceded Tuesday that he could have done a better job explaining the Patriot Act, though he defended the criticism he lobbed at foes of the Bush administration's anti-terrorism policies.
"There has been a lot of discussion about the Patriot Act that really might have been avoided had it been clearly understood," he said, shouldering some blame for confusion surrounding the 2001 law that gave federal law enforcement broad new powers to investigate crime and terrorism.
In his session with reporters and a speech earlier Tuesday, Ashcroft urged Congress to renew the wiretap and other Patriot Act powers that expire at year's end.
Ashcroft, who drew an outcry in 2001 when he claimed that administration critics aided terrorists by evoking "phantoms of lost liberty," stood by those words.
"Everybody ought to raise real questions about lost liberty, but if they are just fabrications of lost liberty . . . I stand by my statement, people who do that divert us," he said.
In an hourlong sit-down with reporters, he defended the decision to bring terror suspect Zacarias Moussaoui before the criminal courts rather than a military tribunal. "It's very important for us to demonstrate that we can do complex terrorism cases in the criminal-justice system," Ashcroft said." - AZCentral/Dallas Morning News (02/02/05)

(See also:  January 26, 2004 - A federal judge has declared a section of the Patriot Act unconstitutional; February 14, 2005 - Bush Urges Congress to Renew Patriot Act)

• February 6, 2005 - Alleged 9/11 hijacker, Nawaf Alhazmi, is reported to be the pilot of Flight 77 in an AP article.

"The terrorist believed to have flown a hijacked airliner into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, obtained a California driver's license without providing the required Social Security number for identification, officials are acknowledging for the first time.
Nawaf M.S. Alhazmi then used that license when he registered for the flight training that enabled him to pilot the doomed airliner." - San Luis Obispo Tribune/AP (02/06/05)

(See also:  Killtown's:  Did Flight 77 really crash into the Pentagon?)

• February 6, 2005 - Alleged Flight 77 hijacker, Nawaf Alhazmi, obtained a California driver's license by using a Social Security number bypass code.

"The terrorist believed to have flown a hijacked airliner into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, obtained a California driver's license without providing the required Social Security number for identification, officials are acknowledging for the first time.
Nawaf M.S. Alhazmi then used that license when he registered for the flight training that enabled him to pilot the doomed airliner.
Alhazmi used a loophole, since closed, in California law that allowed hundreds of thousands of foreign drivers without Social Security numbers to use a generic number in its place. Even some foreign citizens with Social Security numbers skirted the identity check required of U.S. citizens.
California was one of the first states to require that Social Security numbers be verified as part of a routine identification check when driver's licenses were issued. But a 1994 court decision required the state to also give driver's licenses to qualified applicants, such as foreign students, who had no Social Security number. Those forms were processed with the bypass code.
Alhazmi used his own name and presented other identification to get his license. But a Social Security number is the nation's standard identification number; if Alhazmi had used one for his license, he might have been easier for authorities to track.
While it was commonly known after 9/11 that Alhazmi had a California driver's license, it has not previously been reported in any detail that he obtained it using a bypass number also used by thousands of other foreign citizens, said DMV spokesman Bill Branch." - San Luis Obispo Tribune/AP (02/06/05)

• February 7, 2005 - Montreal terrorist suspect Adil Charkaoui, who has been detained in Canada for nearly two years, testifies in court for the first time and suggests that ultra-conservative Americans were behind 9/11 for economic gain and calls the attacks the "world's biggest conspiracy".

"A Moroccan-born Montrealer detained for nearly two years on suspicion of being a terrorist testified for the first time yesterday, suggesting ultra-conservative Americans may have been responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.
"I'm not an expert but from what I read, some guy living in a cave doesn't have the means to plan an attack against the most powerful nation in the world," Adil Charkaoui said when Federal Court Justice Simon Noël asked who was responsible for the attacks.
"It could've been (Osama) bin Laden," Charkaoui said. "But maybe it was done by ultra-conservatives in the United States for economic gain.
"It was the world's biggest conspiracy."
Charkaoui denied at his bail hearing that he was a terrorist and vowed to abide by any conditions imposed by the judge.
Many household names, including filmmaker Denys Arcand, have posted about $50,000 bail for Charkaoui, who is being held under a controversial provision of the Immigration Act known as a security certificate.
Most of the evidence against him is seen only by the government and the judge.
The judge doesn't have to determine whether Charkaoui is indeed a terrorist, just whether the two ministers who signed the certificate had reasonable cause to do so.
If Noël decides they did, Charkaoui faces deportation to Morocco, where the federal government has already said he faces possible torture.
There is no chance for an appeal." - Toronto Star/Canadian Press (02/08/05)

• February 8, 2005 - A police witness says Mounir al-Motassadeq carried out money transactions on behalf of one of the suicide pilots.

"Mounir al-Motassadeq, the Moroccan on trial in Hamburg as an accused accomplice in the 11 September terror attacks, carried out money transactions on behalf of one of the suicide pilots, a police witness said on Tuesday.
Motassadeq had power of attorney for Marwan al-Shehhi who was believed to have been at the controls of the hijacked plane which crashed into the south tower of the World Trade Center in 2001, the court was told.
The Federal Police Department witness said Motassadeq carried out several transactions on behalf of al-Shehhi.
These included one in September 2000 when Motassadeq transferred DEM 5,000 (EUR 2556.50) from al-Shehhi's account at the Dresdner Bank in Hamburg to an account belonging to Ramzi bin al- Shibh, who is thought to have organised the 9/11 attacks.
In several cases there was a "time proximity" between money taken from al-Shehhi's account and money arriving on Motassadeq's account, the investigator said." - Expatica (02/08/05)

(See also:  January 31, 2005 - Key al Qaeda suspect in U.S. custody said Motassadeq had no knowledge of the 9/11 plot; August 16, 2002 - Germany issues the first indictment against Motassadeq for conspiracy with 9/11)

• February 9, 2005 - Court to decide access to NYC's 9/11 emergency tapes.

"The state's highest court heard arguments Wednesday in a two-year struggle over access to a trove of city transcripts and tape recordings from Sept. 11, 2001.
At issue before the Court of Appeals is access to tapes of 911 calls, Fire Department dispatches and transcripts of interviews with hundreds of firefighters who responded on the day of the attack.
The New York Times filed the lawsuit after the city declined to release the items. The paper was later joined by relatives of civilians and firefighters who died at the World Trade Center.
In fighting the suit the city has cited privacy issues, concern over the emotions of the grieving and the ongoing terror prosecution of Zacarias Moussaoui in Virginia.
Judge Albert Rosenblatt pressed the plaintiff to "give us an example of a privacy interest. Otherwise there is no standard."
"The burden of proof is on the city," Norman Siegel, a lawyer representing the families, said, adding that the city did not consult "a single family member" before refusing to release the items.
John Hogrogian, a lawyer for the city, did not deny that.
About two dozen relatives of Sept. 11 victims journeyed to Albany to attend the hearing.
"If the city has someone who was against releasing the tapes we should have heard from them," said Russell Mercer, the stepfather of firefighter Scott Kopytko, 33, who died on Sept. 11." - Newsday (02/09/05)

• February 9, 2005 - A previously undisclosed report completed by the 9/11 Commission last August, more than two months before the '04 Presidential election, reports that FAA chiefs received 52 warnings in the six months before 9/11 about attacks from Bin Laden and al-Qaida including some that mentioned airline hijackings and suicide attacks.

"In the months before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal aviation officials reviewed dozens of intelligence reports that warned about Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, some of which specifically discussed airline hijackings and suicide operations, according to a previously undisclosed report from the 9/11 commission.
But aviation officials were "lulled into a false sense of security," and "intelligence that indicated a real and growing threat leading up to 9/11 did not stimulate significant increases in security procedures," the commission report concluded.
The report discloses that the Federal Aviation Administration, despite being focused on risks of hijackings overseas, warned airports in the spring of 2001 that if "the intent of the hijacker is not to exchange hostages for prisoners, but to commit suicide in a spectacular explosion, a domestic hijacking would probably be preferable."
The report takes the F.A.A. to task for failing to pursue domestic security measures that could conceivably have altered the events of Sept. 11, 2001, like toughening airport screening procedures for weapons or expanding the use of on-flight air marshals. The report, completed last August, said officials appeared more concerned with reducing airline congestion, lessening delays, and easing airlines' financial woes than deterring a terrorist attack.
The Bush administration has blocked the public release of the full, classified version of the report for more than five months, officials said, much to the frustration of former commission members who say it provides a critical understanding of the failures of the civil aviation system. The administration provided both the classified report and a declassified, 120-page version to the National Archives two weeks ago and, even with heavy redactions in some areas, the declassified version provides the firmest evidence to date about the warnings that aviation officials received concerning the threat of an attack on airliners and the failure to take steps to deter it.
Among other things, the report says that leaders of the F.A.A. received 52 intelligence reports from their security branch that mentioned Mr. bin Laden or Al Qaeda from April to Sept. 10, 2001. That represented half of all the intelligence summaries in that time.
Five of the intelligence reports specifically mentioned Al Qaeda's training or capability to conduct hijackings, the report said. Two mentioned suicide operations, although not connected to aviation, the report said.
A spokeswoman for the F.A.A., the agency that bears the brunt of the commission's criticism, said Wednesday that the agency was well aware of the threat posed by terrorists before Sept. 11 and took substantive steps to counter it, including the expanded use of explosives detection units.
"We had a lot of information about threats," said the spokeswoman, Laura J. Brown. "But we didn't have specific information about means or methods that would have enabled us to tailor any countermeasures."
The report, like previous commission documents, finds no evidence that the government had specific warning of a domestic attack and says that the aviation industry considered the hijacking threat to be more worrisome overseas.
"The fact that the civil aviation system seems to have been lulled into a false sense of security is striking not only because of what happened on 9/11 but also in light of the intelligence assessments, including those conducted by the F.A.A.'s own security branch, that raised alarms about the growing terrorist threat to civil aviation throughout the 1990's and into the new century," the report said.
In its previous findings, including a final report last July that became a best-selling book, the 9/11 commission detailed the harrowing events aboard the four hijacked flights that crashed on Sept. 11 and the communications problems between civil aviation and military officials that hampered the response. But the new report goes further in revealing the scope and depth of intelligence collected by federal aviation officials about the threat of a terrorist attack.
The F.A.A. "had indeed considered the possibility that terrorists would hijack a plane and use it as a weapon," and in 2001 it distributed a CD-ROM presentation to airlines and airports that cited the possibility of a suicide hijacking, the report said. Previous commission documents have quoted the CD's reassurance that "fortunately, we have no indication that any group is currently thinking in that direction."
Aviation officials amassed so much information about the growing threat posed by terrorists that they conducted classified briefings in mid-2001 for security officials at 19 of the nation's busiest airports to warn of the threat posed in particular by Mr. bin Laden, the report said.
Still, the 9/11 commission concluded that aviation officials did not direct adequate resources or attention to the problem.
The F.A.A. also made no concerted effort to expand their list of terror suspects, which included a dozen names on Sept. 11, the report said. The former head of the F.A.A.'s civil aviation security branch said he was not aware of the government's main watch list, called Tipoff, which included the names of two hijackers who were living in the San Diego area, the report said.
Nor was there evidence that a senior F.A.A. working group on security had ever met in 2001 to discuss "the high threat period that summer," the report said.
Jane F. Garvey, the F.A.A. administrator at the time, told the commission "that she was aware of the heightened threat during the summer of 2001," the report said. But several other senior agency officials "were basically unaware of the threat," as were senior airline operations officials and veteran pilots, the report said.
The classified version of the commission report quotes extensively from circulars prepared by the F.A.A. about the threat of terrorism, but many of those references have been blacked out in the declassified version, officials said.
Several former commissioners and staff members said they were upset and disappointed by the administration's refusal to release the full report publicly." - New York Times (02/10/05)

"Federal aviation officials received dozens of warnings before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks about Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida, including some that mentioned airline hijackings or suicide attacks, The New York Times reported.
In its Thursday editions, the Times said a previously undisclosed report by the commission that investigated the suicide airliner attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon detailed 52 warnings given to leaders of the Federal Aviation Administration from April to Sept. 10, 2001, about the radical Islamic terrorist group and its leader.
Information in this report was available to members of the 9/11 commission when they issued their public report last summer. That report itself contained criticisms of FAA operations." - ABC (02/10/05)

• February 10, 2005 - Critics Want Full Report of 9/11 Panel

"The Bush administration came under pressure on Thursday to make public the full classified version of a report from the 9/11 commission that is critical of the government's failure to heed aviation threats before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Former members of the commission, victims' families, open-government advocates and a leading Democrat called on the administration to release the entire report on aviation problems surrounding the attacks.
The commission completed the report in August, and commission members said the administration blocked their efforts to release the report.
The administration delivered a declassified version of the report to the National Archives two weeks ago with numerous deletions of material it considered too sensitive for the public to see.
Commissioners from the 9/11 panel said they believed that the entire report should be public.
Administration officials said declassifying the report had been slowed by the fact that the commission no longer existed and that it was unclear who was authorized to work on the declassification.
The commission said several members and staff members who maintained security clearances were in a position to work on the declassification.
In a letter on Thursday, Representative Henry A. Waxman of California, ranking Democrat on the House Government Reform Committee, and Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York, asked that the report be made public and called for a Congressional hearing into whether the administration had "misused the classification process" to withhold it.
The letter, responding to an article on Thursday in The New York Times reporting the existence of the commission report, questioned whether the administration had kept the report secret for political reasons "until after the November elections."
Administration officials denied that." - New York Times (02/11/05)

• February 10, 2005 - Families outraged over FAA 9/11 warnings

"Expressing outrage Thursday, family members of 9/11 victims called on the federal government to probe why it didn't act on intelligence warning of terrorist hijackings in the months before the World Trade Center was destroyed.
"The fact of the matter is these warnings were out there and nobody did anything about it," said Bill Doyle of Staten Island, who lost his son Joseph Doyle at the trade center. "My biggest concern is how high up did this get into the administration.
"There were people who testified at the 9/11 hearings that there were no warnings, but now we know there were. We need another investigation into the failures of 9/11. Obviously, someone at the FAA should be held accountable." Doyle said he received 253 e-mails yesterday from victim's families expressing anger over the declassified report.
Attorney Sanford Rubenstein, who represents families in a 9/11-related federal lawsuit against Saudi Arabia, said the families were hoping something good could come from the declassified information.
"It is clear that what the victims hope is what comes out of this information will prevent another 9/11," Rubinstein said. City Councilman Peter Vallone Jr.(D-Astoria), said, "It was outrageous that no action was taken by the FAA." "How much more specific than the word hijack before the FAA increases security?" said Vallone." - Newsday (02/10/05)

• February 11, 2005 - Donald Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard Myers confirm there were four wargames on 9/11 from a question asked by Rep. Cynthia McKinney at the FY06 defense budget hearing at the Capitol.

"Sec. of Defense Rumsfeld in House Hearing on FY06 Dept. of Defense Budget
Chairman Representative Duncan Hunter (R-CA) and witnesses Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and JCS Chairman General Richard Myers hold a House Hearing on the FY 2006 Budget for the Department of Defense and Military Services.
3/11/2005: WASHINGTON, DC: 2 hr. 5 min.

CMK: Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney (D-GA)
DR: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
RM: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers
DH: Chairman Representative Duncan Hunter (R-CA)

25:20
CMK: Finally Mr. Secretary, after the last Hearing, I thought that my office was promised a written response to my question regarding the four wargames on September 11th. I have not yet received that response, but would like for you to respond to the questions that I've put to you today. And then I do expect the written response to my previous question - hopefully by the end of the week.
----
RM: Okay I don't know about the promise, Congresswoman, but could you repeat the question to make sure I'm answering the right question; this is a 9/11 question.
31:25
CMK: The question was, we had four wargames going on on September 11th, and the question that I tried to pose before the Secretary had to go to lunch was whether or not the activities of the four wargames going on on September 11th actually impaired our ability to respond to the attacks.
RM: The answer to the question is no, it did not impair our response, in fact General Eberhart who was in the command of the North American Aerospace Defense Command as he testified in front of the 9/11 Commission I believe - I believe he told them that it enhanced our ability to respond, given that NORAD didn't have the overall responsibility for responding to the attacks that day. That was an FAA responsibility. But they were two CPXs; there was one Department of Justice exercise that didn't have anything to do with the other three; and there was an actual operation ongoing because there was some Russian bomber activity up near Alaska. So we -
CMK: Let me ask you this, then: who was in charge of managing those wargames?
DH: General, why don't you give the best answer that you can here in a short a period of time and we'll - the gentlelady wants to get a written answer anyway, and then we can move on to other folks.
RM: The important thing to realize is that North American Aerospace Defense Command was responsible. These are command post exercises; what that means is that all the battle positions that are normally not filled are indeed filled; so it was an easy transition from an exercise into a real world situation. It actually enhanced the response; otherwise, it would take somewhere between 30 minutes and a couple of hours to fill those positions, those battle stations, with the right staff officers.
CMK: Mr. Chairman, begging your indulgence, was September Eleventh declared a National Security Special Event day?
RM: I have to look back; I do not know. Do you mean after the fact, or
CMK: No. Because of the activities going on that had been scheduled at the United Nations that day.
RM: I'd have to go back and check. I don't know." - C-Span (03/11/05) [Transcription and video:  fromthewilderness.com; video:  youtube, prisonplanet.com]

(See also:  9/11 (6 am) - Military participants  in NORAD' s "Vigilant Guardian" wargame thought the first reports of the hijackings were "part of the exercise")

• February 11, 2005 - Seattle Post commentary:  Truth held hostage

"It's difficult to decide which is more outrageous -- federal aviation officials' failure to follow through on intelligence reports before Sept. 11, 2001, that warned of al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden using airliner hijackings and suicide operations, or the Bush administration's refusal to let the American public know about it before the November election.
The administration has for five months blocked public release of the full version of the 9/11 commission report, even though former commission members insist that it provides what The New York Times calls a critical understanding of the failures of the civil aviation system that contributed to the atrocities.
This revelation perhaps would not have changed the outcome of the presidential election. But that could not have been clear to the administration in the months between the report's completion and the resolution at the polls of what was widely presumed to be a very tight race with Sen. John Kerry.
In April last year, President Bush said, "Had I any inkling whatsoever that the people were going to fly airplanes into buildings, we would have moved heaven and earth to save the country. ..." The 9/11 commission report apparently found that there were indeed such inklings, which should have "raised alarms about the growing terrorist threat to civil aviation throughout the 1990s and into the new century."
We're left with a pretty good inkling as to why the president moved heaven and earth to keep it quiet before the election." - Seattle Post-Intelligencer (02/11/05)

• February 11, 2005 - A newly released memo written by former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke warned the White House at the start of the Bush administration about al Qaeda, a warning that critics said went unheeded by President Bush until 9/11.

"A newly released memo warned the White House at the start of the Bush administration that al Qaeda represented a threat throughout the Islamic world, a warning that critics said went unheeded by President Bush until the September 11, 2001, attacks.
The memo dated January 25, 2001 -- five days after Bush took office -- was an essential feature of last year's hearings into intelligence failures before the attacks on New York and Washington. A copy of the document was posted on the National Security Archive Web site Thursday.
The memo, from former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke to then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, had been described during the hearings but its full contents had not been disclosed.
Clarke, a holdover from the Clinton administration, had requested an immediate meeting of top national security officials as soon as possible after Bush took office to discuss combating al Qaeda. He described the network as a threat with broad reach.
The memo also warned of overestimating the stability of moderate regional allies threatened by al Qaeda.
It recommended that the new administration urgently discuss the al Qaeda network, including the magnitude of the threat it posed and strategy for dealing with it.
The document was declassified April 7, 2004, one day before Rice's testimony before the September 11 commission. It was released recently by the National Security Council to the National Security Archive -- a private library of declassified U.S. documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.
The meeting on al Qaeda requested by Clarke did not take place until September 4, 2001." - CNN (02/11/05)

January 25, 2001 Richard Clarke Memo - National Security Archive

(See also:  January 25, 2001 - Richard Clarke warns the Bush administration in a memo about the threat al Qaeda poses)

• February 13, 2005 - A 32-story Madrid skyscraper is gutted by a fire, but does not collapse and was housed mostly by Deloitte & Touche, the largest U.S. accounting firm, which also had offices destroyed in the WTC 2 building on 9/11.

"A fire described as the worst in Madrid's history ravaged a 32-story skyscraper in the Spanish capital's financial district on Sunday, causing no injuries, but the tower stayed upright despite fears of collapse.
The building, which houses the offices of U.S. accounting firm Deloitte & Touche, was completed in 1979." - ABC/Reuters (02/13/05)

"Most of it housed offices of international auditing giant Deloitte, which also lost its offices in the World Trade Centre in the 9/11 attacks." - Scotsman (02/14/05)

"A blaze in Madrid destroyed a 32- story downtown office building mostly occupied by Deloitte & Touche LLP, the largest U.S. accounting firm. Fire services haven't ruled out the possibility that the block could collapse.
New York-based Deloitte & Touche occupied 20 floors of the building, where about 1,000 employees worked, Deloitte's Madrid spokesman Gregorio Panadero said. Deloitte audits 19 of Spain's 35 largest-traded companies by market value, including Telefonica SA, Santander Central Hispano SA and Repsol YPF SA, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Financial information is ``safe'' because it's held on computer back-ups and the majority of Deloitte's Madrid employees can continue working tomorrow from other locations, Panadero said in an interview." - Bloomberg (02/13/05)

"WTC TENANTS LIST - 2 World Trade Center (South Tower) - Deloitte & Touche [10 floor] - September11Victims.com

(See also:  9/11 (5:20pm) - WTC 7 collapses supposedly from an internal fire; October 19, 2004 - A 56-story Venezuela skyscraper burns for over 17 hours, but does not collapse)

• February 14, 2005 - Bush Urges Congress to Renew Patriot Act As New Attorney General Is Sworn In

"President Bush on Monday urged Congress to reauthorize the USA Patriot Act, the Justice Department's widely criticized anti-terrorism law.
"We must not allow the passage of time or the illusion of safety to weaken our resolve in this new war" on terrorism, Bush said at a swearing-in ceremony for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales at the Justice Department.
The Patriot Act, passed in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, bolstered FBI surveillance and law-enforcement powers in terror cases, increased use of material witness warrants to hold suspects incommunicado for months, and allowed secret proceedings in immigration cases.
Civil liberties groups and privacy advocates lambasted the law because they said it undermines freedom. But Bush said the act "has been vital to our success in tracking terrorists and disrupting their plans." He noted that many key elements of the law are set to expire at the end of the year and said Congress must act quickly to renew it." - ABC (02/14/05)

(See also:  February 2, 2005 - Ashcroft urges renewal of Patriot Act powers; October 26, 2001 - Only a month and a half after 9/11, the PATRIOT ACT is signed into law)

• February 14, 2005 - National ID cards on the way? - CNET News (02/14/05)

• February 14, 2005 - Spanish prosecutors seeks 222,000 years in prison and nearly $1.17 billion in fines for 9/11 suspects.

"Spanish prosecutors are seeking a total of 222,000 years in prison and nearly $1.17 billion in fines for three suspects accused of aiding the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.
The punishments are among a total of 230,000 years of prison terms sought for 24 suspects held in jail on charges of belonging to an al Qaeda unit in Spain, according to court documents filed Monday.
The prison terms correspond to all the charges, including 2,973 murders for those who died in the Sept. 11 attacks, but Spanish law would limit jail sentences to a maximum of 40 years.
The suspected leader of the cell is Syrian-born Imad Eddin Barakat Yarkas, born in 1963 and also known as Abu Dahdah, who investigators believe financed and organized Islamic militants in Spain.
He and two other suspects — 32-year-old Moroccan Driss Chebli and 41-year-old Syrian Ghasoub al Abrash Ghalyoun — are charged with aiding the Sept. 11 hijackers in their preparations for the attacks on New York and Washington.
Prosecutors seek sentences of some 74,000 years for each of the three and fines of 893 million euros.
Another high-profile suspect from the 24 due to go on trial is Tayseer Alouni, 49, a correspondent from Arabic television channel Al Jazeera who interviewed Osama bin Laden shortly after Sept. 11, 2001.
Prosecutors are seeking an eight-year term for Alouni on charges of collaborating with a terrorist organization. Alouni has repeatedly maintained his innocence." - ABC/Reuters (02/14/05)

• February 15, 2005 - Fahrenheit 9/11 had no effect, says Carlyle chief and reported its "best ever" year.

"The Carlyle Group, the American private equity firm whose former Saudi links were highlighted by film-maker Michael Moore, yesterday reported its "best ever" year and said it returned $5.3bn (£2.8bn) to its investors in 2004.
The performance underlined the sheer size of Carlyle. The group withdrew either partially or completely from 71 investments and made 107 new investments. It raised $7.8bn for investment and the amount of cash it returned was more than twice the level of 2003.
Carlyle's London managing director, Robert Easton, said Moore's film Fahrenheit 9/11 had had no effect on the day-to-day running of the company.
"In defence we have less than 1% of our funds deployed, but it is the defence sector that gets most noise from the likes of Michael Moore," he said. "Defence is now such a small part of our business because we have grown massively in other sectors."
Within a few months of the September 11 terrorist attacks, Carlyle bought out the investment in some of its funds of a half-brother of Osama bin Laden. The group says it now has no investments in Saudi Arabia.
Former US president George Bush senior, who was shown in Moore's film meeting wealthy Saudis, retired as a Carlyle adviser in 2003. Former British prime minister John Major is still an adviser, but no longer chairman of Carlyle Europe.
Carlyle has almost $19bn under management in Asia, North America and Europe. Companies within Carlyle's portfolio are thought to employ more than 150,000 people worldwide. The industries in which it has invested most are property, telecommunications and media, aerospace, information technology, and automobiles and transport." - Guardian (02/15/05)

(See also:  October 21, 2003 - Former President and CIA Director, George H. W. Bush, retires from the Carlyle Group)

• February 16, 2005 - Secret FBI report doubts Al Qaeda can stage another 9/11-type and says it knows of no sleeper cells in the U.S.

Secret FBI Report Questions Al Qaeda Capabilities

A secret FBI report obtained by ABC News concludes that while there is no doubt al Qaeda wants to hit the United States, its capability to do so is unclear.
"...their capability to do so is unclear, particularly in regard to 'spectacular' operations. We believe al-Qa'ida's capability to launch attacks within the United States is dependent on its ability to infiltrate and maintain operatives in the United States."

And for all the worry about Osama bin Laden's sleeper cells or agents in the United States, a secret FBI assessment concludes it knows of none.
The 32-page assessment says flatly, "To date, we have not identified any true 'sleeper' agents in the US," seemingly contradicting the "sleeper cell" description prosecutors assigned to seven men in Lackawanna, N.Y., in 2002.

It also differs from testimony given by FBI Director Robert Mueller, who warned in the past that several sleeper cells were probably in place.
"Our greatest threat is from al Qaeda cells in the United States that we have not yet been able to identify," Mueller said at a Senate Select Intelligence Committee hearing in February 2003. "Finding and rooting out al Qaeda members once they have entered the United States and have had time to establish themselves is our most serious intelligence and law enforcement challenge."
When the secret report was issued last month, on Feb. 16, Mueller testified at a hearing before the same committee that the lack of evidence concerned him. "I am concerned about what we are not seeing," he said.

But the report continues that "US recruits are hard to find and al-Qa'ida detainees have reported that US citizens can be difficult to work with, one senior detainee claimed that US citizens and others who grew up in the West, were too independent and thought they knew more about US operations than senior planners."  - ABC (03/09/05)

Secret FBI report doubts al-Qaida can stage 9/11-type strikes in US

"A secret FBI report has cast doubt on al-Qa'ida's ability to stage another "spectacular" attack in the US, three and a half years after the 9/11 suicide hijackings and a year after the Madrid bombings, the network's only other major strike in the West." - Independent UK (03/13/05) [Reprinted at:  agonist.org]

• February 16, 2005 - What We Don't Know About 9/11 Hurts Us - The Nation (02/16/05)

• February 17, 2005 - War Costs May Exceed $300 Billion - FOX News (02/17/05)

• February 18, 2005 - NY debates post-9/11 demolition - Disaster News Network (02/18/05)

• February 23, 2005 - Company's Work in Iraq Profited Bush's Uncle, William H.T. 'Bucky' Bush earned $450,000 on stock options with defense contractor ESSI.

"The Iraq war helped bring record earnings to St. Louis-based defense contractor Engineered Support Systems Inc., and new financial data show that the firm's war-related profits have trickled down to a familiar family name — Bush.
William H.T. "Bucky" Bush, uncle of the president and youngest brother of former President George H.W. Bush, cashed in ESSI stock options last month with a net value of nearly half a million dollars.
"Uncle Bucky," as he is known to the president, is on the board of the company, which supplies armor and other materials to U.S. troops. The company's stock prices have soared to record heights since before the invasion, benefiting in part from contracts to rapidly refit fleets of military vehicles with extra armor.
William Bush exercised options on 8,438 shares of company stock Jan. 18, according to reports filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. He acknowledged in an interview that the transaction was worth about $450,000.
William Bush, 66, a onetime St. Louis bank executive and head of an investment firm, joined the board in 2000, eight months before his nephew won the White House.
Some of the firm's Defense Department work has included no-bid, sole-source contracts, including a $48.8-million deal to refurbish military trailers.
Other company contracts have raised questions.
Pentagon Acting Undersecretary Michael Wynne said he had referred the contracts "that appear to have anomalies in them." Wynne and his aides would not elaborate on those anomalies. Other contracts referred for review included pacts with Accenture (formerly called Andersen Consulting), Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
Company officials acknowledge the war is an economic boon to the firm.
In the conference call with analysts Tuesday, ESSI's Potthoff expressed optimism that the Bush administration's proposed $82-billion supplemental defense budget submitted last week could mean substantial additional opportunities for the company in Iraq and elsewhere.
"Personally, I could not be more happy about our company's prospects," Potthoff told stock analysts." - LA Times (02/23/05)

• February 23, 2005 - Nearly Half of NY Sept. 11 Dead Cannot Be Identified, Forensics at New York's Ground Zero Ends

"New York authorities have ended efforts to identify victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, leaving the remains of nearly half the 2,749 people killed in the World Trade Center unidentified, the city's medical examiner said on Wednesday.
Some 9,720 unidentified bone and tissue fragments have been sealed and stored in case developments in technology allow for identification in the future, said Ellen Borakove, spokeswoman for the medical examiner's office.
Of those killed, 42 percent remain unidentified due to difficulties in getting DNA samples from the remains.
The medical examiner's office has identified 1,585 victims, but progress has slowed to a halt on 1,161 victims. Only eight remains have been identified since September." - Reuters (02/23/05)

• February 26, 2005 - CIA blind to its shortcomings before 9/11, former spy says - SF Gate (02/26/05)

• February 28, 2005 - Judge Restricts Discovery To Speed 9/11-Related Cases - NY Lawyer (02/28/05)

• February 28, 2005 - Judge: Charge Or Release Padilla - CBS (02/28/05)

• March 1, 2005 - Turkmenistan, Afghanistan Agree on Pipeline - Forbes/AP (03/01/05)

(See also:  December 23, 2004 - Afghan President Karzai chooses ex Unocal engineer for Minister of Mines and Industries; April 13, 2005 - Afghanistan to Request Long-Term U.S. Protection)

• March 1, 2005 - Former senator discusses role on 9/11 Commission - The Daily/Univ of Washington (03/01/05)

• March 3, 2005 - Boeing shares rise back to pre-9/11 levels - Seattle Post-Intelligencer (03/03/05)

• March 3, 2005 - House Passes 9/11-Inspired Doomsday Bill - ABC (03/03/05)

• March 4, 2005 - Bush says stopping bin Laden the 'greatest challenge' - Washington Times (03/04/05)

• March 5, 2005 - Buffett says he "struck out" in 2004 - Salon (03/05/05)

• March 5, 2005 - Afghanistan opium production surges.

Report: Afghan opium production surges

"More than three years after installing a pro-U.S. government, Afghanistan has been unable to contain opium poppy production and is on the verge of becoming a narcotics state, a presidential report said Friday.
The report said the area in Afghanistan devoted to poppy cultivation last year set a record of more than 510,000 acres, more than triple the figure for 2003. Opium poppy is the raw material for heroin.
In Afghanistan, the U.S. military deposed the Taliban government in November 2001. President Hamid Karzai has been in charge since then with strong American backing." - USA Today (03/05/05)

(See also:  July 2000 - Taliban bans the cultivation of opium poppies in Afghanistan)

• March 5, 2005 - Efforts to Hide Sensitive Data Pit 9/11 Concerns Against Safety - NY Times (03/05/05)

• March 6, 2005 - Bush Gave CIA Expansive Interrogation Power days after 9/11 - Reuters (03/06/05)

• March 7, 2005 - Chertoff Cousin Wrote 9/11 Propaganda For Popular Mechanics Magazine - Rense.com/American Free Press (03/07/05)

• March 7, 2005 - Hunter Thompson's Suicide Fuels Conspiracy Buzz - NY Post (03/07/05)

• March 7, 2005 - CIA Report Finds Its Officials Failed In Pre-9/11 Efforts - NY Times (03/07/05)

• March 7, 2005 - Airline ticket agent recalls encounter with 9-11 hijackers - Billings Gazette (03/07/05)

• March 7, 2005 - CIA Jets Fly the War on Terror - ABC (03/07/05)

• March 8, 2005 - Study: Post-9/11 news drove liberals toward a harder line - News@UW-Madison (03/08/05)

• March 8, 2005 - FBI Warns of 'Special Interest' Aliens - ABC (03/08/05)

• March 8, 2005 - Baker to retire next month from Carlyle Group - NY Lawyer (03/08/05)

• March 8, 2005 - City's 9/11 risk drops to $1.3B - NY Daily News (03/08/05)

• March 8, 2005 - Expert: Atta Long Involved With 9/11 Plot - Guardian (03/08/05)

• March 8, 2005 - Defense Wants Bush to Testify at German 9/11 Trial - ABC (03/08/05)

• March 8, 2005 - US expert testifies at 9/11 trial - Seattle Post-Intelligencer (03/08/05)

• March 8, 2005 - Injured soldiers evacuated to the US never arrive during day, Pentagon has yet to offer explanation why - Salon (03/08/05)

• March 8, 2005 - Why can't the US find bin Laden? - Asia Times (03/08/05)

• March 9, 2005 - 9/11 Panel's Findings Strain German Case - Washington Post (03/09/05)

• March 9, 2005 - Bin Laden approved US attack: court - Sydney Morning Herald (03/09/05)

• March 9, 2005 - FBI shielded me from al-Qaeda kidnap plot, says Crowe - Scotsman (03/09/05)

• March 10, 2005 - Journalism Groups Seek Government Openness - ABC (03/10/05)

• March 10-16, 2005 - NORAD touts readiness - Colorado Springs Independent (03/10-16/05)

• March 13, 2005 - Post-9/11 secrecy produces some undesirable results - USA Today (03/13/05)

• March 13, 2005 - Your essential right to know - Journal Gazette/Fort Wayne (03/13/05)

• March 13, 2005 - Qaeda Ally May Target U.S. Theaters, Schools -Report - Reuters (03/13/05)

• March 13, 2005 - Al-Qaida Ability Diminishing, Agents Say - ABC (03/13/05)

• March 13, 2005 - Poll: Secrecy in Government a Problem - FOX (03/13/05)

• March 14, 2005 - 9/11 panel to hit loose ID controls - Washington Times (03/14/05)

• March 14, 2005 - FBI: Aviation Still Vulnerable - CBS (03/14/05)

• March 14, 2005 - Kerik Says He Didn't Keep Money From 9/11 Book - New York 1 (03/14/05)

• March 14, 2005 - Kerik's royalties shocker, Gets $75G for 9/11 book - NY Daily News (03/14/05)

• March 14, 2005 - Signs of Anthrax at Two Pentagon Mailrooms - ABC (03/14/05)

• March 15, 2005 - Pakistan Says Forces Nearly Hunted Down Bin Laden - ABC (03/15/05)

• March 15, 2005 - 9/11 Families Troubled by Va. Man's Flag Auction, Cancer Patient Nets $371,000 on eBay - Washington Post (03/15/05)

• March 16, 2005 - Bush to pick Wolfowitz for World Bank - CNN (03/16/05)

• March 17, 2005 - Bush administration made plans for war to oust Saddam and for Iraq's oil before the 9/11 attacks.

Secret US plans for Iraq's oil

"The Bush administration made plans for war and for Iraq's oil before the 9/11 attacks, sparking a policy battle between neo-cons and Big Oil, BBC's Newsnight has revealed.

Two years ago today - when President George Bush announced US, British and Allied forces would begin to bomb Baghdad - protesters claimed the US had a secret plan for Iraq's oil once Saddam had been conquered.
In fact there were two conflicting plans, setting off a hidden policy war between neo-conservatives at the Pentagon, on one side, versus a combination of "Big Oil" executives and US State Department "pragmatists".
"Big Oil" appears to have won. The latest plan, obtained by Newsnight from the US State Department was, we learned, drafted with the help of American oil industry consultants.
Insiders told Newsnight that planning began "within weeks" of Bush's first taking office in 2001, long before the September 11th attack on the US.
An Iraqi-born oil industry consultant, Falah Aljibury, says he took part in the secret meetings in California, Washington and the Middle East. He described a State Department plan for a forced coup d'etat.
Mr Aljibury himself told Newsnight that he interviewed potential successors to Saddam Hussein on behalf of the Bush administration.
The industry-favoured plan was pushed aside by a secret plan, drafted just before the invasion in 2003, which called for the sell-off of all of Iraq's oil fields. The new plan was crafted by neo-conservatives intent on using Iraq's oil to destroy the Opec cartel through massive increases in production above Opec quotas.
The sell-off was given the green light in a secret meeting in London headed by Fadhil Chalabi shortly after the US entered Baghdad, according to Robert Ebel.
Mr Ebel, a former Energy and CIA oil analyst, now a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, told Newsnight he flew to the London meeting at the request of the State Department.
Mr Aljibury, once Ronald Reagan's "back-channel" to Saddam, claims that plans to sell off Iraq's oil, pushed by the US-installed Governing Council in 2003, helped instigate the insurgency and attacks on US and British occupying forces.
"Insurgents used this, saying, 'Look, you're losing your country, you're losing your resources to a bunch of wealthy billionaires who want to take you over and make your life miserable,'" said Mr Aljibury from his home near San Francisco.
"We saw an increase in the bombing of oil facilities, pipelines, built on the premise that privatisation is coming."
Philip Carroll, the former CEO of Shell Oil USA who took control of Iraq's oil production for the US Government a month after the invasion, stalled the sell-off scheme.
Mr Carroll told us he made it clear to Paul Bremer, the US occupation chief who arrived in Iraq in May 2003, that: "There was to be no privatisation of Iraqi oil resources or facilities while I was involved."
Ariel Cohen, of the neo-conservative Heritage Foundation, told Newsnight that an opportunity had been missed to privatise Iraq's oil fields.
He advocated the plan as a means to help the US defeat Opec, and said America should have gone ahead with what he called a "no-brainer" decision.
Mr Carroll hit back, telling Newsnight, "I would agree with that statement. To privatize would be a no-brainer. It would only be thought about by someone with no brain."
New plans, obtained from the State Department by Newsnight and Harper's Magazine under the US Freedom of Information Act, called for creation of a state-owned oil company favoured by the US oil industry. It was completed in January 2004 under the guidance of Amy Jaffe of the James Baker Institute in Texas.
Formerly US Secretary of State, Baker is now an attorney representing Exxon-Mobil and the Saudi Arabian government.
Questioned by Newsnight, Ms Jaffe said the oil industry prefers state control of Iraq's oil over a sell-off because it fears a repeat of Russia's energy privatisation. In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, US oil companies were barred from bidding for the reserves.
Ms Jaffe says US oil companies are not warm to any plan that would undermine Opec and the current high oil price: "I'm not sure that if I'm the chair of an American company, and you put me on a lie detector test, I would say high oil prices are bad for me or my company."
The former Shell oil boss agrees. In Houston, he told Newsnight: "Many neo conservatives are people who have certain ideological beliefs about markets, about democracy, about this, that and the other. International oil companies, without exception, are very pragmatic commercial organizations. They don't have a theology."
A State Department spokesman told Newsnight they intended "to provide all possibilities to the Oil Ministry of Iraq and advocate none". - BBC (03/17/05)

(See also:  January 31, 2001 - Treasury Department memo contains military plan for a post-Saddam Iraq marked secret)

• March 17, 2005 - Giuliani firm's deal to advise company raises questions.

"Giuliani Partners, the security consulting firm of former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, has signed a multimillion-dollar deal with a struggling Los Angeles business backed by investors with a history of securities-related charges, regulatory records show.

The marketing partnership raises the question of how much Giuliani and his firm know about Applied DNA Sciences (APDN), a fast-rising "penny stock," or a small company that trades for under $5 a share on the OTC Bulletin Board.

Giuliani's firm also stands to receive 21 million Applied shares, which would make it the largest shareholder of Applied. The shares were worth $10 million when the agreement was signed.

Two securities lawyers say it's curious that Giuliani's firm signed a marketing deal with an ailing company backed by investors with regulatory records.
Stephen Meagher, a San Francisco attorney and former federal prosecutor, says Applied's stock price has risen rapidly despite no profits or solid business record.
After Applied first disclosed the Giuliani Partners deal in an SEC filing Nov. 10, Applied's shares leaped 268%, from 65 cents to $2.39 Dec. 7. It closed at 97 cents Thursday.
"It has all the markings of something Giuliani himself would have looked into as U.S. attorney in the old days," Meagher says." - USA Today (03/17/05)

(See also:  January 2002 - Former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani forms Giuliani Partners)

• March 17, 2005 - No convictions among Guantanamo suspects sent home - Reuters AlertNet (03/17/05)

• March 17, 2005 - AP: Terrorists train for seaborne attacks - San Jose Mercury (03/17/05)

• March 17, 2005 - Online auction for disputed 9-11 flag on again - CNN (03/17/05)

• March 18, 2005 - Anthrax attacks still unsolved years later - Kansas City Star (03/18/05)

• March 18, 2005 - Bush Administration Blacks Out Clinton Docs - FOX (03/18/05)

• March 18, 2005 - CIA Chief Defends Interrogation Procedure - ABC (03/18/05)

• March 19, 2005 - The Hidden Hand Of The CIA, 911 And Popular Mechanics - Rense.com/American Free Press (03/19/05)

• March 20, 2005 - Terrorist Plan To Level  WTC Created In 1976 - Rense.com/American Free Press (03/20/05)

• March 21, 2005 -  Frank Spotnitz, co-producer of the now infamous Lone Gunmen 'Pilot' episode, which depicted a U.S. government conspiracy plot to crash an electronically hijacked Boeing 727 into the WTC, says he hopes the attacks at the WTC had nothing to do, or wasn't "somehow inspired" by anything they did.

"On March 4, 2001, during Season 8 of “The X-Files,” the three spun off in a seriocomic series of their own, created by “X” producers Chris Carter, Frank Spotnitz, Vince Gilligan and John Shiban, and co-starring Zuleikha Robinson (“Hidalgo”) and Stephen Snedden (“Coyote Ugly”).
Despite the concern of some fans, the pilot of “The Lone Gunmen” is indeed part of the boxed set. This would seem like a no-brainer — until you realize that the central conspiracy in the episode involved the high-tech electronic hijacking of a commercial airliner with the intent of crashing it into the World Trade Center.
Although the episode was conceived and shot in 2000 and aired six months before the tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001, the eerie coincidence sent shockwaves through cast and producers.
“I'll never forget that,” says Spotnitz, calling in from the set of the pilot for his remake of “Kolchak: The Night Stalker.” “That was such a disturbing thing. It was very upsetting. As I say in the DVD featurette, you write something like that, and you assume that if you can think of it, being a Hollywood writer, then somebody in the government has thought about it already.
“Obviously that wasn't the case. Just the idea that a plane could fly into a building, and the building would be unprotected was just … anyway, it was upsetting.”
Although their scenario involved using sophisticated electronics to remotely control the plane and had nothing to do with suicidal terrorists, Spotnitz had some long moments on the fateful September morning.
“I was directing an episode of ‘The X-Files' when that happened,” he recalls, “so I woke up a little late because we'd been shooting the night before. It was the first thing I saw on TV, one of the trade towers burning. The first thing that went through my head was, ‘I hope this doesn't have anything to do with what we did, that it wasn't somehow inspired by anything we did.'
“Nobody knew who had done it or what had happened, but we knew it was an airplane. It became obvious that it didn't have any connection to what we did.”
Haglund, a frequent guest at sci-fi conventions, had noted a brisk business in “Gunmen” bootlegs over the years. He attributes some of that to the pilot.
“Once the pilot and the 9/11 thing came together,” Haglund says, “all the conspiracy theorists started passing around that pilot at conventions and UFO conventions and started propelling that forward. These guys are all asking questions about, ‘How much did we know?' ‘Who wrote the script?' — that kind of thing.
“Other than small, middling details, what's odd about that ‘Gunmen' pilot is the larger details they got right. I assume somebody will look through the rest of the episodes and see what other details may be right. I can assure you, I don't think there is a legion of super-smart military chimps out there.” - Kansas City Star (03/21/05)

(See also:  March 20, 2000 - Filming begins on the The Lone Gunmen's 'Pilot' episode; March 4, 2001 - The Lone Gunmen 'Pilot' episode airs on FOX TV; Killtown's: The Lone Gunmen's 'Pilot' Episode)

• March 21, 2005 - Ticket agent says Atta, Alomari were dressed in business suits; surveillance photos don’t match - American Free Press (03/21/05)

• March 21, 2005 - High Court Won't Hear Moussaoui Appeal - ABC (03/21/05)

• March 22, 2005 - Document: Bin Laden Evaded U.S. Forces - Guardian (03/22/05)

• March 24, 2005 - Court orders FDNY to release 9/11 attack audiotapes - NY Daily News (03/24/05)

• March 24, 2005 - Court prevents release of most September 11 emergency calls - CNN (03/24/05)

• March 24, 2005 - A lowdown on the facts behind the allegations in 'Fahrenheit 9/11' - Massachusetts Daily Collegian (03/24/05)

• March 27, 2005 - New Details on F.B.I. Aid for Saudis After 9/11 - NY Times (03/27/05) [Reprinted at:  TruthOut.org]

• March 28, 2005 - IN WAKE OF 9-11: Report: Saudis left from LV - Las Vegas Review-Journal  (03/28/05)

• March 29, 2005 - Bush critics blocked from presidential events - Kansas City Star (03/29/05)

• March 29, 2005 - TV spinoff The Lone Gunmen comes to DVD with its prescient 9/11 episode - Canada.com (03/29/05)

• March 31, 2005 - U.S. Intelligence 'Dead Wrong' on Iraq-Report - ABC (03/31/05)

• March 31, 2005 - Commander of 9/11 Air Defenses Retires - Newhouse News Service (03/31/05)

• March 31, 2005 - Activists see deception in night arrivals at Walter Reed - Stars and Stripes (03/31/05)

• March 31, 2005 - Wolfowitz Is Confirmed as President of World Bank - NY Times (03/31/05)

• April 1, 2005 - Trent Reznor Worries About Freedom in Post-9/11 US - Contact Music (04/01/05)

• April 1, 2005 - 9-11 survivor remembers Al-Queda hit on Pentagon - Grayson County News-Gazette (04/01/05)

• April 6, 2005 - Fireproofing Blown Off Twin Towers - Washington Post (04/06/05)

• April 7, 2005 - Report: Motorola repeater worked properly on 9/11 - Mobile Radio Technology Magazine (04/07/05)

• April 8, 2005 - French scholar says 9/11 attacks backfired on Jihads and allowed neo-cons to further their agenda in the Middle East, which was the most complex problem Washington faced before 9/11.

9/11 - a plan gone horribly wrong: French scholar

"Al Qaeda’s plan to galvanise jihad internationally and win the sympathies of the Muslim world through 9/11 attacks went horribly wrong and instead provided Washington an opportunity to attack Iraq and redraw the Middle East peace road map.
This was the crux of a lecture titled ‘War of Muslim Minds’, delivered by Dr Giles Kepel, professor and chairman of the Middle East Studies at the Institute of Political Studies in Paris.
The lecture was arranged by the Institute of Strategic Studies in collaboration with the French Embassy and the Alliance Francaise on Thursday. Kepel has specialised in Middle Eastern affairs with special focus on radical Islamic movements, which started in the 1960s and 70s and has also authored a book on the fallout of 9/11, titled ‘Jihad’.
The pamphlet was a message, teaching followers that wars were not only fought in battlefields but also in people’s minds, he said. He added that the 9/11 incident backfired and instead of helping Al Qaeda, it provided an opportunity to new conservatives called neo-cons in Washington DC to further their agenda in the Middle East, which was the most complex problem Washington faced before 9/11.
“The neo-cons exploited the opportunity to make changes in the Middle East peace process in favour of Israel and also built a case to attack Iraq under the garb of finding weapons of mass destruction,” he said. He said the neo-cons had been planning to kill Yasser Arafat and replace Saddam Hussain since 1990s, once a darling of the USA, with a “friendly” administration in Iraq.
The motive behind the Iraq War was not only weapons of mass destruction but also to convince the world that the US army was capable of carrying out significant operations independently, he said, adding that that this would not last long as such actions could not be taken unilaterally without popular public support.
“Americans are now trying to divide Iraqis into Shias and Sunnis. This jihad has been detrimental to the real cause in my view,” he said.
“We should not draw causes from conclusions as suggested in the different conspiracy theories, which declare Mosaad and Central Intelligence Agency the masterminds of 9/11.” - Daily Times Pakistan (04/08/05) [Reprinted:  jihadwatch.org]

• April 8, 2005 - Hard to keep firefighters' 9/11 memories secret - News Day (04/08/05)

• April 9, 2005 - 9/11 hijackers spoke Balochi, says new U.S. book on electronic intercepts - NewKerala  (04/09/05)

• April 9, 2005 - Canada Fights Myth It Was 9/11 Conduit - Washington Post (04/09/05)

• April 10, 2005 - U.S. Seeks Access to Bank Records to Deter Terror

U.S. Seeks Access to Bank Records to Deter Terror

"The Bush administration is developing a plan to give the government access to possibly hundreds of millions of international banking records in an effort to trace and deter terrorist financing, even as many bankers say they already feel besieged by government antiterrorism rules that they consider overly burdensome.

The initiative, as conceived by a working group within the Treasury Department, would vastly expand the government's database of financial transactions by gaining access to logs of international wire transfers into and out of American banks.

Government officials said in interviews that the effort, which grew out of a brief, little-noticed provision in the intelligence reform bill passed by Congress in December, would give them the tools to track leads on specific suspects and, more broadly, to analyze patterns in terrorist financing and other financial crimes. They said they were mindful of privacy concerns that such a system is likely to provoke and wanted to include safeguards to prevent misuse of what would amount to an enormous cache of financial records.

Some smaller community banks have sold out to larger companies for fear of increased liability, banking officials say, and banks have dropped some money-transmittal businesses that do significant business overseas because of the risk. Some executives, meanwhile, are steering away from serving on bank boards, concerned that they will be hit with punitive measures, banking industry officials say." - NY Times (04/10/05)

• April 10, 2005 - TV news buries Iraqi civilian deaths - Chicago Sun Times (04/10/05)

• April 12, 2005 - Negroponte Says He'll Reform Spy Agencies - SF Gate (04/12/05)

• April 12, 2005 - Three Indicted on Terror Charges in U.S. - ABC (04/12/05)

• April 13, 2005 - Afghanistan to Request Long-Term U.S. Protection

Afghanistan to Request Long-Term U.S. Protection

"Afghan President Hamid Karzai said on Wednesday he planned to ask President Bush for long-term security protection for Afghanistan.
But in a joint news conference in Kabul, both he and visiting Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld sidestepped questions as to whether this would involve permanent U.S. bases.
Asked if permanent U.S. bases were planned, Karzai said the Afghan people wanted "a longer-term relationship with the United States" after 30 years of war and upheaval.
In Washington, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said discussions on security arrangements in Afghanistan were "ongoing."
Asked if Bush was willing to give Afghanistan long-term security guarantees, he said: "We want to make sure that the Afghan people are able to defend themselves fully and we will continue to support them in those efforts."
Bush has cited Afghanistan's budding democracy as a good example of Washington's push to bring freedom to the world, but major problems remain, including record drug production." - Boston Globe (04/13/05)

(See also:  March 1, 2005 - Turkmenistan, Afghanistan Agree on Pipeline; April 13, 2005 - Afghan pipeline project under review)

• April 13, 2005 - Afghan pipeline project under review - Aljazeera (04/13/05)

(See also:  April 13, 2005 - Afghanistan to Request Long-Term U.S. Protection; May 13, 2005 - Afghan 'pipe dream' draws closer to reality)

• April 14, 2005 - Airports Begin Ban on Cigarette Lighters - ABC (04/14/05)

• April 16, 2005 - One-Time GOP Insider Claims He Has Sept. 11 ‘Smoking Gun’, Architect of GOP Resurgence Says Boeing 737, not 767, Struck South WTC Tower

"A former Republican Party insider turned Bush basher thinks he has stumbled across what may be the “smoking gun,” proving the U.S. government’s official story about the WTC attacks is an “unequivocal lie.”
Karl Schwarz of Little Rock, Ark., who several years ago began exposing corruption amongst the neo-conservative movement in a book entitled A One-Way Ticket to Crawford, Texas, now has set his sights on proving government complicity in 9-11.
For years, the successful business entrepreneur and conservative Republican, once asked by the RNC to run against Bill Clinton for Arkansas governor, has been using his inside political and business clout to expose corruption among the neo-cons in the Bush administration.
He strayed away from the Bush agenda two years after being one of the lead orchestrators in the Republican Party takeover of Congress during the Clinton administration.
After his political reawakening, Schwarz began blasting the neo-cons where it hurt most—in their pocketbooks—coming forward with evidence regarding oil deals and government involvement with the Taliban and Pakistan.
In his book and his ongoing seven-part series of articles entitled “Pop Goes the Bush Mythology Bubble,” he provides inside information about countless financial scams, essentially revealing that the Bush motive behind the Middle East invasion was more about oil profits than the war on terrorism.
Saying the neo-cons within the government are destroying America for their own corporate-global benefits, Schwarz doesn’t mince words and is calling for the impeachment of Bush, as well as removal of any member of Congress who aids and abets the corrupt powers.
Now, moving away from financial corruption, he has turned his attention to the 9-11 truth movement, saying he has found a piece of obscure video footage that shows that the government lied about what type of plane struck the south tower of the WTC.
Schwarz admits he had a “whole lot” of luck when running across the video footage in a French foreign film entitled The Barbarian Invasion.
Contained in the film unrelated to 9-11, is a 1 minute, 52 second, video segment, shot by an unknown amateur photographer at the WTC, which Schwartz says clearly shows a Boeing 737 airliner striking the south tower.
Originally, the government claimed the second jetliner en route to Los Angeles was a Boeing 767. However, Schwarz said the video will not only show the airline dimensions to be those of a 737, but that he also has evidence that the engine recovered in the WTC wreckage was a model type CFM56, which propels a 737, not a 767.
Besides 9-11, Schwartz said three major areas that need to be thoroughly investigated regarding the Bush administration’s present policies include:
• Administration ties with Afghanistan, the Taliban and the Bridas Corp. Schwarz claims a high-ranking Bridas executive is one of his main sources, implicating the Bush administration with corruption involving the Taliban and the Afghan invasion.
• Information implicating 9-11 commission members with direct and indirect financial benefits due to the Bush policies in the Middle East.
Asked how he would describe himself, since many critics may consider him a disgruntled Republican, he said:
“I am conservative, fiscally responsible, an ecumenical Christian and an American patriot who clearly understands fascism and clearly sees this is exactly what is going on within the Bush administration.
“To answer my critics, they can say whatever. However, those who read my book will clearly see that the main problem now facing America has been caused and amplified by the last three presidential administrations, Bush I, Clinton and Bush II.” - Arctic Beacon (04/16/05) [Reprinted at:  American Free Press]

-See this video clip of the airplane flying into the WTC 2 at:  Flame Song

• April 17, 2005 - Did Oklahoma City Bombers Have Help?

"One month after the April 19, 1995, Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people, authorities demolished what was left of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.
Officials said the implosion was a necessary part of the psychological recovery for the citizens of Oklahoma City. But critics question the FBI’s tactics and argue the building came down too soon and the implosion is one piece of a government cover-up.
Survivor VZ Lawton remembers the events after the attack.
“I was in my office at my desk signing papers and all of a sudden the building began to shake,” said Lawton. “The lights went out, debris started falling and then something hit me on the head and knocked me out before the truck bomb ever went off.”
Lawton and some others believe Timothy McVeigh — who was convicted of federal conspiracy and murder charges in the bombing and executed in 2001 — and convicted conspirator Terry Nichols weren't alone in plotting the attack.
During the investigation the FBI circulated sketches of “John Does” and in response received thousands of conflicting tips from across the country.
The FBI quickly identified Timothy McVeigh as John Doe No. 1 — the man who rented the Ryder Truck used in the deadly plot. But, the FBI discounted dozens of eyewitness statements about a John Doe No. 2. And some ask why.
"The government tried to tell us that there was no John Doe 2 in the truck with McVeigh," Lawton said. "We got witnesses that saw him in the truck, saw him get out of the truck, walk across the street and get into a brown Chevrolet pickup with two more John Doe 2's. That makes three."
A number of eyewitnesses said they saw McVeigh with other men at a variety of locations in Oklahoma and Kansas before the attack. Some accounts put McVeigh with other men on the morning of the bombing — but the FBI has ruled them out.
Pictures made from surveillance video at the Regency Tower Apartments are the only images related to the attack that have been released to the public.
Oklahoma City attorney Michael Johnston said the FBI was not given all the tapes from as many as twenty-five cameras that he says were in and around the Murrah Building.
“If they're really non-consequential, it wouldn't hurt anything. If indeed they show something I think the American public, after a decade, has the right to know,” he said.
Johnston, on behalf of twenty-five victims’ families, filed a Freedom of Information (FOI) request for all of the surveillance videos. FOX News also filed a FOI request. The FBI has denied both cases on account that the case is still open.
Racial Tie to Bombing?
Another surveillance tape of interest might have shown McVeigh with some notorious bank robbers, but the FBI admits the video was destroyed.
Between the years of 1992 and 1996, a gang of white separatists who called themselves the Aryan Republican Army robbed banks throughout the Midwest and stole nearly $500,000 before being caught. Rumors have persisted that the ARA was tied to McVeigh.
Peter Langan, one of the gang’s leaders who is serving a life sentence for his role in the robberies, told FOX News in an exclusive interview that some of the Midwest bank robbers were involved in the Oklahoma City bombing.
“Yes I do [believe members of the Aryan Republican Army were involved],” Langan said. “No doubt whatsoever.”
McVeigh's sister, Jennifer, in her own sworn deposition said: "My brother remarked that the money he had in his possession represented his share of the bank robbery proceeds."
Some argue the FBI should have looked harder at phone records they used to track McVeigh and Nichols. The records might hold ignored or missed clues that call for a wider investigation, especially the number of calls McVeigh made to the Philippines.
Repeated calls were made from Terry Nichols' home to a place called Star Glad Lumber in the Philippines.
“Star Glad Lumber is operated by a man whose brother and cousin were both notorious terrorists, splinter groups of the Abu Sayyaf terror group in the Philippines,” according to Johnston, the attorney.
Nichols also repeatedly called a boarding house in Cebu City, an establishment that has been linked to 1993 World Trade Center bombing mastermind Ramzi Yousef. The same kind of ANFO fertilizer fuel bomb was used in New York and in Oklahoma City.
Finally, in McVeigh's trial the prosecution alleged that the bombing was financed by a robbery of an Arkansas gun dealer named Roger Moore. But Langan doesn't agree.
"Moore had himself robbed ... so he could put firearms in the black market without having liability himself," Langan said.
Asked if he believed Moore was not a victim, but part of the scam, Langan told FOX News: "Correct." - FOX News (04/17/05)

(See also:  April 19, 1995 - The Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City is bombed; April 19, 2005 - Reporter's Notebook: An Explosive Story; April 19, 2005 - 10 years later, some seek more answers in bombing)

• April 19, 2005 - Report: Moussaoui Plans to Plead Guilty

"Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person in the United States charged in connection with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, says he plans to plead guilty, The Washington Post reported.
If a judge finds Moussaoui mentally competent, he could enter the plea as early as this week, the Post reported in Tuesday's editions, citing sources familiar with the case.
Moussaoui, a French citizen, tried to plead guilty in 2002 but took back the plea a week later. The Post sources said U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema in Alexandria, Va., is scheduled to meet with Moussaoui this week to determine whether he has the mental capacity to enter a plea.
The paper reported that in recent letters to the government and to Brinkema, Moussaoui said he is willing to accept the possibility of a death sentence. It said if the judge allows a guilty plea, she then likely would schedule a trial to determine a sentence.
The Los Angeles Times reported in Tuesday's editions that the letter was sent two weeks ago and quoted unnamed sources as saying Moussaoui's lawyers wanted his latest request thrown out, arguing that the letter is Moussaoui's naive attempt to win a hearing before the U.S. Supreme Court
Moussaoui was indicted in December 2001, but his trial has been delayed three times. In March the Supreme Court agreed with a lower appeals court that Moussaoui could not have access to three al-Qaida witnesses and that the government could seek the death penalty." - ABC (04/19/05)

(See also:  January 11, 2005 - Supreme Court is asked to rule on Moussaoui case; April 22, 2005 - Moussaoui Pleads Guilty in 9/11 Conspiracy)

• April 19, 2005 - Oklahoma City Marks Bombing Anniversary

"With flowers, teddy bears and poignant memories, people touched by the worst act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history gathered Tuesday at the Oklahoma City National Memorial for the 10th anniversary of the deadly act.
A moment of silence was planned for each of the 168 victims of the bombing that destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995.
Vice President Cheney and former President Clinton were scheduled to speak. Clinton was president when Timothy McVeigh's truck bomb blew off the north side of the building at precisely 9:02 a.m.
McVeigh was convicted of federal conspiracy and murder charges and executed on June 11, 2001. Conspirator Terry Nichols is serving multiple life sentences on federal and state charges." - ABC (04/19/05)

(See also:  April 19, 1995 - The Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City is bombed; April 17, 2005 - Did Oklahoma City Bombers Have Help?)

• April 19, 2005 - Oklahoma City Bombing - Reporter's Notebook: An Explosive Story

"I remember coming to Oklahoma City soon after the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, as this country was still in shock that this horrible tragedy was caused by some of our own.
Soon after, I gained exclusive access to Elohim City, a remote compound on the border of Arkansas and Oklahoma. As my crew and I entered the white separatist compound, young, armed men stood guard at towers, carefully watching as we entered their grounds.
I realize now, 10 years later, there are still so many unanswered questions that need to be resolved once and for all. When Timothy McVeigh wrote me his chilling letter soon before his execution in 2001, he said he alone carried out the bombing, that it was a military mission, and that the 19 children who died in the daycare center in the Murrah building were "collateral damage."
But are only three men — McVeigh, convicted conspirator Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier, who was convicted for failing to warn anyone of the crime and for lying to the FBI — really responsible for this crime?
I asked the leader of Elohim City years ago why someone using McVeigh's calling card, presumably McVeigh himself, called Elohim City right around the time he was inquiring about a Ryder truck? Was it merely coincidence that two weeks before the bombing, a call comes to this specific compound?
The leader smirked — I remember that smirk well — and would simply say to me that he believed McVeigh did call the camp.
Is it also just coincidence that this compound has some of the same leaders from an earlier hate-filled group that wanted to blow up the exact same building in Oklahoma in 1985? These questions have troubled me as a journalist for 10 years now.
Plus, there's the fact that more than two dozen people, credible people, whom I have spoken with face-to-face, say they saw McVeigh with someone else. Prosecutors say all these people are mistaken, that McVeigh was alone in the Ryder truck that fateful day." - FOX (04/19/05)

• April 19, 2005 - 10 years later, some seek more answers in bombing; Oklahoma City survivors, victims' relatives question investigation's conclusions

"Then there is this: a "Day of Truth" rally and speakers forum today and tomorrow, intended to give public airing to the persistent belief among some that the bombing was part of a wider plot, involving other conspirators never caught or brought to justice.
For the government and much of the country, the case of the Oklahoma City bombing ended with the arrest, conviction and execution of Timothy J. McVeigh, an angry ex-soldier with extreme anti-government views, and the life sentences handed down to his accomplice, Terry Nichols.
The prosecutors and government agents who worked the case and won convictions against those two men do not dignify the alternate theories and conspiracy plots with responses. The case is solved and closed, they say.
But three lengthy trials and 10 years have not quieted the lingering questions of some survivors and intrigued observers. They still are searching for the shadowy suspect John Doe No. 2 and gathering evidence they say could link McVeigh to Iraqi agents or a band of white supremacist bank robbers.
"Some people have said we're obsessed with it. Maybe we are," said Charles Key, a former Oklahoma state legislator who is helping organize the Day of Truth events. "I've said everything I can say about it for 10 years now. I think it's important. There's a lot of people who lost their lives that day, and it would be terrible to remember the deaths of all those people with a lie."
So it is with the 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City, where perceived gaps in the official investigation and pure grief have fueled questions for a decade about whether McVeigh really could have carried out alone what still stands as the single worst act of domestic terror in the United States.
Hamm began studying the Oklahoma City case within weeks of the bombing. In a book he wrote two years later, he generally reached the same conclusion as the FBI about the crime - that McVeigh was a "lone wolf" who acted without the help of others. But later, as he studied a group of prolific Midwest bank robbers known as the Aryan Republican Army, Hamm said he reached an alternate theory linking McVeigh to that operation.
In his research, Hamm discovered four instances between 1993 and April 1995 when McVeigh and members of the Aryan Republican Army were in the same small, often obscure, towns on the same days. He thinks McVeigh helped carry out the bank heists, and the crime ring helped plot the federal building bombing - possibly in retaliation for the execution on the same day as the bombing of Richard Wayne Snell, a leader in the white supremacist movement.
Why, after the FBI searched for weeks for a dark-haired suspect dubbed John Doe 2, did they change course and decide the artist's sketch was based on one witness' faulty memory? Why doesn't the government simply release video surveillance tapes - beyond one grainy clip shown at trial - that might reveal who, if anyone, was with McVeigh outside the federal building that morning?
When Lawton filed a request for the surveillance tapes under the Freedom of Information Act, he was told by the government that the tapes existed, but could not be released. He says he does not understand why, with the trials over and McVeigh executed four years ago this spring.
Other, wilder questions persist. Some have asked whether McVeigh was an associate of the Iraq government or of al-Qaida, whether the federal government blew up its own building or knew the explosion was going to happen.
Ivian "I.C." Smith, a retired FBI agent who worked the command center in the early days after the bombing, said flaws in the investigation, such as the purported failure to account for John Doe 2, were left to take on a more sinister taint.
Unsatisfied with the official investigation, Lawton, Key and others, including two women who lost grandchildren in the blast, have tried to pursue the answers themselves. They poured their own time and resources into tracking down witness statements and gathering records through the Freedom of Information Act.
In recent months, U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican, expressed interest in holding congressional hearings on the bombing and subsequent federal investigation. But his plans got a cool reception from other House leaders and from former Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating, who cautioned that the panel could end up "looking silly."
The Day of Truth events planned for today and tomorrow are not included on the long list of formal memorial events, which includes a speech today by Vice President Dick Cheney and a luncheon for survivors of the blast.
But Key said he hoped the alternate anniversary events could draw attention to the case. After so many years, he no longer expects to change people's minds in a day.
"We hoped to have a gotcha, you know, or something - a smoking gun," Key said. "It took me awhile to figure out that we weren't ever going to get that. And we never will. I'm resigning myself to that. There's never going to be headlines that say, 'They were right.' ... What happens is, you just have to keep chipping away at it." - Baltimore Sun (04/19/05)

(See also:  April 19, 1995 - The Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City is bombed; April 17, 2005 - Did Oklahoma City Bombers Have Help?)

• April 19, 2005 - Theologian calls for response to 9/11

"David Ray Griffin asks the tough questions about Sept. 11, contending U.S. officials had some knowledge of what was coming and possibly orchestrated the attacks.
Griffin, whose book, "The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11," came out a year ago, drew an enthusiastic standing ovation from the majority of the 400 or so people who packed his lecture Monday night at Bascom Hall.
His comments Monday night were directed at religious people, who he said need to respond to Sept. 11 - and the American empire that has ensued - based on the moral principles of their religious traditions.
While Griffin noted that his books and talks have not received attention from the mainstream media, C-SPAN had a cameraman at the event and plans to air the lecture at a future date. Madison's public access cable television station, WYOU-TV/Channel 4, meanwhile, will air the talk at 7 p.m. Thursday.
Americans interpret the events of Sept. 11 in one of four ways, Griffin said:
• A first group accepts the official interpretation that Sept. 11 was a surprise attack by Islamic terrorists. It is easy for these people "to think of America's so-called War on Terror as a just war," Griffin said.
• A second group accepts the official line but thinks Sept. 11 has been used opportunistically by the Bush administration to extend the American empire. People who hold this view often believe that America's response to Sept. 11, which has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, is far worse than the attacks themselves, he said.
• A third group believes the Bush administration knew the attacks were coming and let them happen. It shows the government as "deliberate and cold-blooded," advancing its imperial designs while hypocritically portraying itself as promoting a "culture of life," Griffin said.
Although there has been no national survey, a Zogby poll taken last year indicated that almost half of the residents of New York City share this view, he said.
• A fourth group believes that the government orchestrated the attacks. While no poll shows how many Americans believe this, polls in Canada and Germany have found as many as 20 percent of those populations do, Griffin said.
In his follow-up book, "The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions," Griffin examines the questions that he and others in the "9/11 Truth Movement" charge were never examined by the federal government's 9/11 Commission.
Evidence to support the theory that U.S. officials had at least had some foreknowledge of the attacks comes from David Schippers, the chief prosecutor for the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, who reportedly received warnings from FBI agents about the attacks six weeks earlier, Griffin said.
Other government officials, including Attorney General John Ashcroft, would not respond to the warnings, he added.
There was the extraordinarily high volume of "put options" purchased in the three days before the attacks, Griffin said, with investors betting that stock in United and American Airlines - the two airlines used in the attacks - would go down. There were also a suspiciously high number of put options for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, which occupied 22 stories of the World Trade Center.
"U.S. intelligence agencies monitor the market, partly to look for signs of impending attacks," Griffin said. "One wonders how information could be much more specific than this."
Griffin then made a case that government officials planned and executed the attacks.
For one, the United States military neglected to send fighter jets to intercept the hijacked planes. Such interceptions usually occur within 10 to 20 minutes after the first signs of trouble and are routine, happening about 100 times a year, Griffin said.
It seems implausible, he said, that the Pentagon was struck by Flight 77, since it is "surely the best defended building on the planet." The U.S. military has the best radar systems in the world and "does not miss anything occurring in North American airspace," he added.
Griffin also made a case that the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings was brought on by thousands of explosives placed throughout each of the buildings. They went straight down, at free-fall speed, as in controlled demolitions, and many people in the buildings reported that they heard or felt explosions, he added.
"High-rise steel-frame buildings have never - before or after 9/11- been caused to collapse by fire," he said." - Capital Times (04/19/05)

• April 20, 2005 - A proposal by a shareholder to withhold approval from the Board of Directors for failure to investigate signs of insurance fraud on 9/11 has been published on the website of the Allianz Group, one of the world’s largest insurers, but is rejected by the Board because Allianz says the findings of two U.S. government's investigations into 9/11 does not support the allegations submitted by the shareholder.

Shareholder Proposal: Insurer to Investigate 9/11
"Allianz Group published a shareholder proposal on April 20th faulting management for ignoring signs of insurance fraud on 9/11/2001. Allianz carried a significant portion of the insurance coverage on the WTC, and stands to pay a corresponding portion of the $3.5 billion payout currently being litigated in New York. In his proposal, shareholder John Leonard, a California native and a publisher of books on 9/11, pointed to reports that building WTC 7 apparently collapsed by demolition, and for no plausible reason related to the 9/11 attacks. Management replied that it relied on official US government reports which made no mention of such evidence.
The Allianz Group is incorporated in Germany and has approximately 570,000 shareholders. Under German Stock Companies law, publicly held companies are required to publish shareholder proposals that meet certain criteria.
The text of the shareholder proposal, which may also be viewed at the Allianz website, http://www.allianzgroup.com/azgrp/dp/cda/0,,100646-49,00.html [German version], is reproduced below." - PRWeb (05/02/05)

"Mr. John-Paul Leonard, Joshua Tree, California, has submitted the following Shareholder Proposals:
With respect to Item 3 of the Agenda, Approval of the Actions of the Members of the Board of Management
Joshua Tree, 04/19/2005
I propose that approval not be granted.
With respect to Item 4 of the Agenda, Approval of the Actions of the Supervisory Board
I likewise propose that approval not be granted.
Reasoning:
The managing and supervisory boards have taken a passive attitude toward the insurance claims and the suspicious aspects of the WTC insurance loss.
The investigation of insurance losses and insurance damage claims against the Company is naturally one of the chief duties of the management of every insurance firm.
The WTC catastrophe was doubtless one of the biggest insurance incidents in history. A significant portion of the multi-billion dollar loss is expected to be borne by Allianz.
Numerous observers and researchers find the WTC case very suspicious. For example, in a public opinion survey, 49.3% of respondents in New York City agreed that "some of our leaders knew in advance that attacks were planned on or around September 11, 2001, and that they consciously failed to act." [Source: www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews.dbm?ID=855.]
When this belief is so widespread among unrelated parties, haven't the affected insurance companies ever asked whether perhaps the US Government instead of the insurers is responsible for the damages, or whether the possibility of insurance fraud has been investigated?
From reports in the media about the trial in New York between the insurers and the insured WTC leaseholder, no sign of such motions has been made public. The dispute has been mainly over the question, whether to pay out $7 billion or "only" $3 billion, whereby the shareholders are supposed to be relieved at the latter sum as a victory of the "lesser of two evils."
Nor has there been any lack of critical and analytical voices in Germany. Several books in the last few years have posed sharp questions to the official WTC scenario. In 2003, Deutsche Welle published an article entitled, "9/11 Conspiracy Theory Books Dominate Debate at Frankfurt Book Fair."
(www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,1564,993523,00.html.)
Anyone who is interested can quickly obtain similar materials from the Internet free of charge, as well as continuing researches of the background of 9/11 by independent journalists.
Two German-American writers, Jim Hoffman (www.wtc7.net) and Eric Hufschmid, have contributed greatly to the theory of the dynamiting of the Twin Towers and Building WTC-7. Hufschmid's work was translated and published in German (www.painfulquestions.de). They claim that never in history has the structure of a steel building ever been destroyed by fire, and that on the contrary, the evidence points to a controlled demolition. I could find no evidence to gainsay their thesis anywhere.
WTC-7, as is well-known, was never struck by airplanes, and photographs of it show only insignificant fires (www.globalresearch.ca.myforums.net/viewtopic.php?t=523). Nevertheless, the 47-story building at WTC 7 suddenly collapsed at around 17:28 on 9/11/2001. This fact was not even mentioned in the report of the official 9/11 commission. (www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report.pdf)
How can an insurer take such an extreme case simply and casually as business as usual?
There is plenty more such evidence that would be useful in the billion-dollar lawsuit, which every citizen with an Internet connection can confirm. Why aren't Allianz (and the other insurers) able to?
When the managing and supervisory boards take no action to join the investigation of a case as huge and notorious as the WTC, how are the shareholders to know that other cases, too, for whatever reason, are not paid out without being properly investigated?
There is already a private lawsuit against US government officials in connection with the events of
9/11, see http://www.911forthetruth.com.
Position of the Company with respect to the Shareholder Proposals and Election Proposals:
The company considers the shareholder proposals and the election proposals to be unfounded.
Shareholder Proposals by John-Paul Leonard with respect to Item 3 (Approval of the Actions of the Members of the Board of Management) and Item 4 (Approval of the Actions of the Members of the Supervisory Board) of the Agenda:
When the Company makes insurance payments it does so on the basis of careful scrutiny – especially with payments in the order of magnitude referred to here. Two official commissions in the USA have examined the incidents of 11 September 2001 in detail. Their findings provided no indication that the allegations submitted by the proposer are correct." - Allianz Group (04/20/05) [PDF]

• April 20, 2005 - Opinion (Letters to the Editor):  9/11 suspicions growing

"Millions of Americans have ventured to look skeptically at the official story of 9/11 and are now justifiably suspicious of complicity at the highest levels of government. Parts of the official story that we are told about 9/11 appear to be a hoax.
To cite a single example, WTC7 was a 47 story steel structure located 355 feet from the closest of the twin towers. On September 11 at 5:20 p.m. WTC7 collapsed to the ground in free fall after small fires started on two of the floors. Firefighters were told to stand clear before the collapse. The official account that fires caused the collapse remains unquestioned by the press. But the evidence suggests that the collapse was caused by controlled demolition. The collapse of WTC7 is conspicuously omitted from the 9/11 Commission Report.
Examining the official account of 9/11 with due skepticism is painful, but ignoring evidence that refutes what officials and the media are telling us is much worse. The first book to read is "The New Pearl Harbor," by David Ray Griffin. There are many other excellent books and Web sites on this topic.
Geordie Zapalac, Nevada City" - The Union (04/20/05)

• April 20, 2005 - '9/11 effect' won President Bush votes on Democratic turf near Ground Zero.

"In a dramatic sign of how "the 9/11 effect" impacted the 2004 vote, President Bush made some of his biggest and most surprising gains on Democratic turf near Ground Zero — across New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, a new study shows.
"The memory of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks proved searing enough to dislodge large numbers of voters from the Democratic column," Charles Mahtesian writes in the National Journal.
"Bush posted many of his greatest gains in the unlikeliest of places — the blue-state heartland that once stood in the shadow of the World Trade Center, among those who live closest to Ground Zero." - New York Post (04/22/05)

• April 22, 2005 - Moussaoui Pleads Guilty in 9/11 Conspiracy

"With the first U.S. conviction from a Sept. 11 case in hand, federal prosecutors face a new battle over whether Zacarias Moussaoui should receive the death penalty for plotting with al-Qaida against Americans.
Although he pleaded guilty as expected Friday, Moussaoui told U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema, "I will fight every inch against the death penalty." Just last week, he had told her he would plead for execution.
That was among several surprises as the defendant voluntarily admitted his guilt on six counts of conspiring with al-Qaida leaders and the Sept. 11 hijackers to wreak havoc on Americans. Four counts carry a possible death penalty.
Moussaoui also declared for the first time in public that Osama bin Laden personally instructed him to fly an airliner into the White House. The target date was not clear.
The defendant, who had been so volatile and vituperative in three years of legal wrangling, was polite, calm and even able to joke during the proceedings.
Over the objection of his lawyers, Moussaoui admitted guilt as he appeared in a courtroom a few miles from where one of four hijacked planes crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.
Moussaoui admitted to conspiring with the 19 hijackers and al-Qaida leaders in a broad plot to kill Americans using commercial airliners as weapons. The overall conspiracy included the Sept. 11 attacks.
In a "statement of facts" compiled by prosecutors and signed in court by Moussaoui, he acknowledged knowing about the plot to fly planes into prominent U.S. buildings, then lying to federal agents after his arrest in August 2001 to avoid exposing the plot.
But Moussaoui hinted at a possible death penalty defense as he tried to distance himself from the specific events of Sept. 11. He told the court that nothing in the statement he signed declared he was "specifically guilty of 9/11." - ABC (04/23/05)

(See also:  April 19, 2005 - Report: Moussaoui Plans to Plead Guilty; To date, Moussaoui is the only person convicted in the U.S. in connection with 9/11)

• April 22, 2005 - Silverstein Updates Progress Of WTC Construction - NY1 News (04/22/05)

Moussaoui says he's guilty, but not for 9/11 (04/23/05)

• April 23, 2005 - 9/11 researcher, Dr. A.K. Dewdney, is featured in a news story on WSVN-TV 7 News Online of Miami/Ft. Lauderdale, Florida in an article called "Pentagon Plot."

"Several people are now claiming that is not what happened at all. They claim that the plane that crashed was not a passenger jet at all, and that it was all a plot to mislead the American people. Here's the nighteam's Patrick Fraser with his special report: "Pentagon Plot."
WSVN -- We never put a man on the moon, these pictures were taken in the Nevada desert the conspiracy theories claimed...
President Kennedy was not shot just by Lee Harvey Oswald. The CIA was involved...
And now this one..it was not a passenger plan that crashed into The Pentagon on September 11th.
Scientist Dr. A.K. Dewdney: "I mean how much evidence do people need."
A.K. Dewdney is one of several scientists who have investigated the pentagon crash and concluded something devious and diabolical happened that day.
Their proof...
They say a Boeing 757 was never found at The Pentagon, that only one engine was found and that engine does not seem to match the engine from a 757, that airplane crashes leave wreckage, they mess up the ground -- Not at The Pentagon.
Patrick Fraser: "Dr. Dewdney you also wrote that the wings are missing from the crash site -- I thought they were incinerated in the enormous blaze inside The Pentagon."
Dr. Dewdney: "The structure of the wings dictate that the wings should have sheared off. The fact that there is no wing debris outside the building indicates it was not a 757 that struck the pentagon."
Another point the conspiracy buffs make -- the hole in the side of The Pentagon is too small for a 757 to fit thru. One web page even superimposes a 757 onto the ground to prove its point.
Dr. Dewdney: "So all of this evidence is just sitting there waiting for people to examine it."
The conspiracy theories even claim to have video proof from a security camera outside The Pentagon as the plane neared the building -- they claim the picture is not a 757.
But they are not certain what type of craft it is.
Dr. Dewdney: "The guesses vary from an F-16 loaded with a depleted uranium warhead -- possibly a cruise missile."
But if its a cruise missile, what happened to the plane and its passengers. Dr. Dewdney says they don't know, however they say they do know who is behind the conspiracy.
Dewdney says all the September 11th attacks were planned or allowed to happen to fuel a war with terrorists and as an excuse to invade and gain control of the oil in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Dr. Dewdney: "If we are right the implications are profound."
Right or right off the wacko chart, common sense tells you its not likely. In fact common sense tells you its not only outrageous -- its ridiculous and one well known skeptic has another description for it -- laughable.
James Randi from the Randi Educational Foundation: "Come on, in order to do a thing like that you would have to have a conspiracy that would involve thousands of people...all of whom would have to be completely silent. Now that's impossible to do."
We showed James Randi the claims of Dewdney's scientific group, and he countered each one -- beginning with the hole in The Pentagon.
James Randi: "Now the hole isn't big enough. Oh I see now you know how big the hole should be do you? No, that's data that we simply don't have."
As for those missing wings -- easy to explain Randi says.
James Randi: "That the fuselage penetrates the brick wall and the wings fold back just like an umbrella."
Finally the people who helped Dewdney research his theories are all well educated, very intelligent people which Randi says proves one more thing.
James Randi: "Well-educated intelligent people doesn't mean smart people."
Dewdney's reply -- prove him wrong.
Dr. Dewdney: "By all means get in touch with us none of us want to spend our time doing this if we are just wasting our time if we are wrong."
And even if he is wrong, a few people may believe him -- but a few million won't.
By the way we spoke with The Pentagon about the conspiracy theory, and they said, "it's so ridiculous, we don't even address it." - 7 News Online (05/23/05)

• April 23, 2005 - 9/11 suspects go on trial in Spain

"Three al Qaeda suspects charged with helping to plan the September 11 attacks in the United States have gone on trial in Madrid, along with 21 other suspects who allegedly belonged to the al Qaeda cell in Spain.
Spanish court documents said two key suspects on trial "provided cover in Spain for members of the commando that carried out the September 11, 2001 attacks."
They are Syrian-born Imad Eddin Barakat Yarkas, 42 -- the alleged al Qaeda leader in Spain -- and a man considered to be his aide, Moroccan-born Driss Chebli, 33.
The indictment alleges they provided logistical aid for a meeting in July 2001 near Barcelona, two months before the attacks in the United States, that brought together Mohammed Atta, the pilot of the first plane to crash into the World Trade Center and Ramzi Binalshibh, a suspected key plotter who has been in U.S. custody since 2002.
The 9/11 Commission Report issued in the United States devotes several pages to what it calls "the meeting in Spain" between Atta and Binalshibh, who was an alleged courier between Osama bin Laden and the hijackers, but the report makes no mention of the men who are on trial now in Spain.
The third suspect in the Madrid trial directly implicated in the 9/11 attacks is Syrian-born Ghasoub Al Abrash Ghayoun, age 39.
These three prime suspects in the trial, if convicted, face sentences of more than 60,000 years each in prison, based on the maximum sentences for the murders of each of the fatal victims of the 9/11 attacks.
They have proclaimed their innocence, as have the 21 other suspects, who face sentences of nine to 27 years for belonging to a terrorist group and in some cases, for weapons, forgery and fraud charges.
Perhaps the best known defendant is Tayseer Allouni, 50, a correspondent for the Arabic-language Al Jazeera television network who had an exclusive interview with Osama bin Laden less than two months after the September 11 attacks.
The case will be tried by a three-judge panel, but prosecutors may have a difficult time proving the charges, said Ely Karmon, an expert on global terrorism at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzlia, Israel.
"One of the problems of all these arrests is that it's mostly circumstantial evidence," Karmon told CNN in a phone interview. "The suspects spoke on the phone, and they didn't speak much. They spoke in code."
He said that suspects on trial apparently have not revealed much information to Spanish authorities since their arrests.
Court documents show that several of the pre-trial motions by the defendants have sought to question evidence gathered by police wiretaps and other surveillance methods, challenging the accuracy of translations into Spanish of Arabic-language conversations." - CNN (04/23/05)

• April 24, 2005 - Actress Maggie Gyllenhaal:  9/11 our fault

"Actress Maggie Gyllenhaal, star of a new flick about the aftermath of 9/11, believes the United States "is responsible in some way" for the devastating terror attacks.
Gyllenhaal, 27, made the comments at the Tribeca Film Festival, where her new movie "The Great New Wonderful" - which has a plot centered on the destruction of the World Trade Center - premiered Friday.
"I think what's good about the movie is that it deals with 9/11 in such a subtle, open way that I think it allows it to be more complicated than just, 'Oh, look at these poor New Yorkers and how hard it was for them,'" Gyllenhaal told the NY1 cable channel.
"Because I think America has done reprehensible things and is responsible in some way and so I think the delicacy with which it's dealt allows that to sort of creep in," she added." - New York Daily  (04/24/05)

(See also:  April 27, 2005 - Gyllenhaal 9/11 Comments Spark Outcry)

• April 26, 2005 - Progress too slow, say 9/11 panelists

"Congress and President Bush aren't moving fast enough to protect the nation from terrorist attacks, the leaders of the commission that investigated 9/11 said Tuesday.
Former commission chairman Thomas Kean and co-chairman Lee Hamilton said they are planning a half-dozen hearings in June and July to assess the government's progress in responding to the commission's 567-page report, released last summer. Commission members will issue a "report card" in July." - USA Today (04/27/05)

• April 26, 2005 - World Terror Attacks Tripled in 2004 by U.S. Count

"The U.S. count of major world terrorist attacks more than tripled in 2004, a rise that may revive debate on whether the Bush administration is winning the war on terrorism, congressional aides said on Tuesday.
The number of "significant" international terrorist attacks rose to about 650 last year from about 175 in 2003, according to congressional aides briefed on the numbers by State Department and intelligence officials on Monday.
The State Department last year initially released erroneous figures that understated the attacks and casualties in 2003 and used the figures to argue that the Bush administration was prevailing in the war on terrorism.
It later said the number of people killed and injured in 2003 was more than double its original count and said "significant" terrorist attacks — those that kill or seriously injure someone, cause more than $10,000 in damage or attempt to do either of those things — rose to a 20-year high of 175.
The State Department last week unleashed a new debate about the numbers by saying it would no longer release them in its annual terrorism report but that the newly created National Counterterrorism Center that compiles the data would do so." - ABC (04/26/05)

• April 26, 2005 - Gallup: 50% of Americans Now Say Bush Deliberately Misled Them on WMDs

"Half of all Americans, exactly 50%, now say the Bush administration deliberately misled Americans about whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, the Gallup Organization reported this morning.
"This is the highest percentage that Gallup has found on this measure since the question was first asked in late May 2003," the pollsters observed. "At that time, 31% said the administration deliberately misled Americans. This sentiment has gradually increased over time, to 39% in July 2003, 43% in January/February 2004, and 47% in October 2004."
Also, according to the latest poll, more than half of Americans, 54%, disapprove of the way President Bush is handling the situation in Iraq, while 43% approve. In early February, Americans were more evenly divided on the way Bush was handling the situation in Iraq, with 50% approving and 48% disapproving.
Last week Gallup reported that 53% now believe that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was "not worth it." But Frank Newport, editor in chief at Gallup, recalled today that although a majority of the public began to think the Vietnam war was a mistake in the summer of 1968, the United States did not pull out of Vietnam for more than five years, after thousands of more American lives were lost." - Editor and Publisher (04/26/05)

• April 27, 2005 - Gyllenhaal 9/11 Comments Spark Outcry

"Maggie Gyllenhaal has waded into sensitive political waters by raising questions about Sept. 11 and American foreign policy. The 27-year-old actress, who stars in a new film about the 2001 terror attacks on the World Trade Center, said in an interview last week that the United States "is responsible in some way" for the attacks.
A fan Web site devoted to Gyllenhaal was overwhelmed with criticism, forcing the site's editor to remove the ability to post messages "because it's gotten too outta hand."
In a statement issued Monday by her publicist, Gyllenhaal said Sept. 11 was "an occasion to be brave enough to ask some serious questions about America's role in the world. Because it is always useful as individuals or nations to ask how we may have knowingly or unknowingly contributed to this conflict.
"Not to have the courage to ask these questions of ourselves is to betray the victims of 9/11."
She also expressed her grief for "everyone who suffered and everyone who died in the catastrophe."
Gyllenhall stars in "The Great New Wonderful," which features stories about people living in New York in the aftermath of the terror attacks. The movie is being shown at the Tribeca Film Festival, which was founded by Robert De Niro to help revitalize downtown Manhattan after Sept. 11. " - ABC (04/27/05)

(See also:  April 24, 2005 - Actress: 9/11 our fault)


 

• April 27, 2005 - Terror Suspect Takes Stand in 9/11 Trial, Shot Video of Twin Towers

"A terror suspect who allegedly shot detailed video footage of the World Trade Center images described by a Spanish judge as the genesis of the Sept. 11 plots took the stand Wednesday at the trial of an al-Qaida cell accused of helping to plot the suicide airliner attacks.
Ghasoub al-Abrash Ghalyoun, 39, took video of the twin towers in New York and other landmarks during a visit to the United States in 1997, court documents say.
The videotapes eventually were passed on to "operative members of al-Qaida and would become the preliminary information on the attacks against the twin towers," Judge Baltasar Garzon wrote in a September 2003 indictment against the Syrian-born Ghalyoun and other alleged members of a Spanish al-Qaida cell.
Ghalyoun and two other suspects are charged with using Spain as a staging ground to help plot the attacks.
Twenty-one other suspects are charged with belonging to a terrorist organization, weapons possession and other offenses, but not planning the Sept. 11 attacks.
The alleged leader of the cell, Imad Yarkas, testified this week that he had nothing to do with the attacks. He also denied setting up a meeting in Spain in July 2001 at which one of the suspected suicide pilots and an alleged coordinator of the attacks planned last-minute details." - ABC (04/27/05)

Sensenbrenner Statement Regarding Today's Revelation that 9/11 Hijackers Used U.S. Public Libraries Prior to 9/11 (04/28/05)

• May 2005 - Penn, of the comedy duo "Penn & Teller," on his Showtime reality series called "Bullshit!", advocates pushing people down a flight of stairs who are carrying a copy of one of researcher Eric Hufschmid's 9/11 investigation books.

"He wrote a book called 'Painful Questions:  An Analysis of the September 11th Attack'.  We show you the cover because if you ever see anyone carrying it, push them down a flight of stairs!" - Penn & Teller:  Bullshit! - Season 3:  Conspiracy Theories (Click on "Theory on Terror Attack" inside for video preview.) (05/05)  [Listen to audio here.]

Secret 9/11 Miniseries Planned (05/02/05)

9-11 Suspect in Spain Claims Coercion (05/04/05)

9/11 TOWER AXED OVER TERROR FEAR (05/05/05)

FBI lags in hiring intelligence analysts since 9/11: report  (05/05/05)

9/11 kin rip WTC plans (05/07/05)

Ridge reveals clashes on terror alerts (05/10/05)

EPA to sample dust from 150 NYC buildings due to 9/11 attacks (05/10/05)

White House, Congress evacuated in plane scare (05/11/05)

9/11 test flip-flop, EPA to check 30 buildings for debris (05/12/05)

Post 9/11, Muslims experienced backlash (05/12/05)

• May 12, 2005 - Poll Cites GOP Gains Since 9/11.

Poll Cites GOP Gains Since 9/11

"The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, helped redraw the political landscape in America, giving President Bush and the Republicans an advantage over the Democrats, according to a new survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.

The survey underscored how important the issues of terrorism and national security and Bush's personal appeal were in helping the GOP put together a winning coalition of voters in 2004. The findings suggest that Bush's reelection depended not just on motivating the Republican base but also on his success in attracting swing voters and even some Democrats.

"People we're describing as Upbeats and people we're describing as Disaffected had a positive view of Bush's security policies," Kohut said. "The September 11 attacks and the war on terrorism redefined Bush, and that's what carried him" to reelection, he added." - Washington Post (05/12/05)

Timeline of White House Security Scare (05/12/05)

• May 13, 2005 - Afghan 'pipe dream' draws closer to reality; Afghan President Hamid Karzai told donor countries the project was a "top priority."

"Back in the days of the Taliban, Mir Sediq was an engineer for Unocal, working on a pipe dream: bringing natural gas from Turkmenistan down through Afghanistan to Pakistani ports on the Arabian Sea.
Today, Mr. Sediq is minister for Afghanistan's energy, mining, and industrial sector, and he's confident that the pipeline is coming close to reality.
Driven by a Pakistani economy growing at nearly 7 percent a year and higher energy prices, the pipeline, on paper, is the closest thing to a win-win scenario as one can find in Central Asia. For Pakistan, expected to run out of its own reserves in five years, the pipeline will help sustain growth. For Turkmenistan, it helps to provide a market for its substantial gas reserves. And for Afghanistan, it could mean from $200 million to $350 million per year in transit fees.
"This pipeline is an opportunity for Afghanistan, and we would like to keep Afghanistan a place that is open and attractive for foreign investment," says Sediq. "The foreign investment rate of return is 17.5 percent, based on the assumptions that the gas reserves in Turkmenistan are enough and the consumption rate in Pakistan remains high. Only security of the pipeline is left, and the government of Afghanistan is capable of providing security."
It wasn't so long ago that the pipeline was thought to be dead. Taliban attacks in the south appeared to be on the increase, and other sources of energy, such as Iran or Qatar, were more attractive. But growing Pakistani demand, increased Afghan stability, and higher energy prices for Turkmenistan have made the pipeline increasingly feasible. This week, President Hamid Karzai told donor countries the project was a top priority - on a par with the war on terror and opium eradication.
If started Today, the pipeline could be completed in seven years. That comes two years too late for Pakistan, which is running out of reserves.
While Pakistan has doubled its energy output since 1999 - to 4 billion cubic feet per day - its roaring economy is expected to deplete gas reserves by 2010. By 2015, it will need to buy 2.5 billion cubic feet per day from abroad.
In all likelihood, Pakistan will need more than one pipeline project. Pakistan is negotiating with Qatar and Iran over separate projects. The Qatari pipeline is the most politically stable, but it has technical problems. The Iranian pipeline - which would distribute gas to both India and Pakistan - is technically the simplest. But it faces substantial US opposition, as US law precludes giving a government contract to a US company doing business with Indian or Pakistani firms working on the Iranian pipeline. Both India and Pakistan are so desperate to find gas that they are working together as joint customers on the Iranian pipeline.
The TAP pipeline is expected to cost $3.8 billion, and create hundreds if not thousands of jobs for Afghans. Afghan officials say that it might be one of the first projects to generate revenue for the state." - Christian Science Monitor (05/13/05)

(See also:  April 13, 2005 - Afghan pipeline project under review; August 13, 1996 - Unocal and Delta Oil plan to build a gas pipeline through Afghanistan)

Senators say Bush lags on post-9/11 rights, privacy board (05/15/05)

Man sues over botched online sale of 9/11 flag (05/15/05)

US sends new al Qaeda evidence for German 9/11 case (05/15/05)

US won't declassify documents for trial: report (05/15/05)

9/11 suspect says he never gave 'single peseta' for jihad (05/15/05)

Critics of the 'tyrant of Tashkent' say US ally makes Hussein look 'like a choir boy' (05/16/05)

'TERROR' BANKS TARGETED IN 9/11 SUIT (05/16/05)

US 'backed illegal Iraqi oil deals' (05/17/05)

Journalists criticize post-9/11 media (05/17/05)

Islamic Council: US Liberties Plummeting after 9/11 (05/19/05)

Trump rubbishes Ground Zero design, 'Worst pile of crap architecture I've seen.'  (05/19/05)

How Insurance Companies Exploited 9/11 (05/19/05)

Police 'knew 9/11 suicide pilots were ready' (05/19/05)

Suspect denies role in 9/11 meeting (05/19/05)

Bayh says Bush let slip post-9/11 energy effort (05/20/05)

Years After 9/11...No one is in charge of fighting our two biggest threats (05/20/05)

Saudi Arabia, Off The Hook - The 9/11 terrorists were mostly Saudi. Suicide bombers in Iraq are Saudi. And we're allies? (05/20/05)

Al Qaeda captive's story in 9/11 trial spotlight (05/20/05)

Letters to The Editor: Still Wondering Where NORAD Was On 9/11 (05/20/05)

First Lady: Bush Should've Been Notified About Plane (05/20/05)

Mummy Star Picks 9/11 Terrorist for Inspiration (05/20/05)

Qaeda Letters Are Said to Show Pre-9/11 Anthrax Plans (05/21/05)

German magazine names alleged 9/11 messenger (05/21/05)

Blair faces US probe over secret Iraq invasion plan (05/22/05)

Tampa area poll found 15% of area residents think Palestinians were behind 9/11 (05/22/05)

Government audits question contracts issued after 9/11 (05/22/05)

Inside the minds of the 9/11 killers (05/22/05)

• May 23, 2005 - Dr. A.K. Dewdney of Physics911.net talks about the Flight 77/Pentagon conspiracy on a local news station.

Pentagon Plot

"Several people are now claiming that is not what happened at all. They claim that the plane that crashed was not a passenger jet at all, and that it was all a plot to mislead the American people. Here's the nighteam's Patrick Fraser with his special report: "Pentagon Plot."
We never put a man on the moon, these pictures were taken in the Nevada desert the conspiracy theories claimed...
President Kennedy was not shot just by Lee Harvey Oswald. The CIA was involved...
And now this one..it was not a passenger plan that crashed into The Pentagon on September 11th.
Scientist Dr. A.K. Dewdney: "I mean how much evidence do people need."
A.K. Dewdney is one of several scientists who have investigated the pentagon crash and concluded something devious and diabolical happened that day.
They say a Boeing 757 was never found at The Pentagon, that only one engine was found and that engine does not seem to match the engine from a 757, that airplane crashes leave wreckage, they mess up the ground -- Not at The Pentagon.
Patrick Fraser: "Dr. Dewdney you also wrote that the wings are missing from the crash site -- I thought they were incinerated in the enormous blaze inside The Pentagon."
Dr. Dewdney: "The structure of the wings dictate that the wings should have sheared off. The fact that there is no wing debris outside the building indicates it was not a 757 that struck the pentagon."
Another point the conspiracy buffs make -- the hole in the side of The Pentagon is too small for a 757 to fit thru. One web page even superimposes a 757 onto the ground to prove its point.
Dr. Dewdney: "So all of this evidence is just sitting there waiting for people to examine it."
The conspiracy theories even claim to have video proof from a security camera outside The Pentagon as the plane neared the building -- they claim the picture is not a 757.
But they are not certain what type of craft it is.
Dr.Dewdney: "The guesses vary from an F-16 loaded with a depleted uranium warhead -- possibly a cruise missile."
But if its a cruise missile, what happened to the plane and its passengers. Dr. Dewdney says they don't know, however they say they do know who is behind the conspiracy.
Dewdney says all the September 11th attacks were planned or allowed to happen to fuel a war with terrorists and as an excuse to invade and gain control of the oil in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Dr. Dewdney: "If we are right the implications are profound."
Right or right off the wacko chart, common sense tells you its not likely. In fact common sense tells you its not only outrageous -- its ridiculous and one well known skeptic has another description for it -- laughable.
James Randi from the Randi Educational Foundation: "Come on, in order to do a thing like that you would have to have a conspiracy that would involve thousands of people..all of whom would have to be completely silent. Now thats impossible to do."
We showed James Randi the claims of Dewdney's scientific group, and he countered each one -- beginning with the hole in The Pentagon.
James Randi: "Now the hole isnt big enough. Oh I see now you know how big the hole should be do you? No, that's data that we simply don't have."
As for those missing wings -- easy to explain Randi says.
James Randi: "That the fuselage penetrates the brick wall and the wings fold back just like an umbrella."
Finally the people who helped Dewdney research his theories are all well educated, very intelligent people which Randi says proves one more thing.
James Randi: "Well-educated intelligent people doesn't mean smart people."
Dewdney's reply -- prove him wrong.
Dr. Dewdney: "By all means get in touch with us none of us want to spend our time doing this if we are just wasting our time if we are wrong."
And even if he is wrong, a few people may believe him -- but a few million won't.
By the way we spoke with The Pentagon about the conspiracy theory, and they said, "it's so ridiculous, we don't even address it.

Dewdneys Scientific Conclusions - http://www.physics911.net/ " - WSVN-TV (05/23/05)

Pat Tillman's parents rail at Army's 'lies,' They say probe into ex-NFL player's friendly fire death was a sham (05/23/05)

FBI's 9/11 Whistleblower Mulls Congressional Bid (05/23/05)

Senate Briefly Recesses After Plane Scare (05/23/05)

Lawyer: US Evidence Clears 9/11 Suspect (05/24/05)

Statement Questioned in German 9/11 Trial (05/24/05)

CIA Overseeing 3-Day War Game on Internet (05/25/05)

Spanish court frees Sept 11 suspect on bail (05/25/05)

Egyptian Historian Zaynab Abd Al-'Aziz: Vatican Delegated the US to Carry Out 9/11 (05/26/05)

Analysts Behind Iraq Intelligence Were Rewarded (05/28/05)

The Lure of Opium Wealth Is a Potent Force in Afghanistan (05/29/05)

Fahrenheit 2777, 9/11 has generated the mother of all conspiracy theories (June '05 Issue)

White House, N.Y. Face Off Over 9/11 Funds (06/01/05)

Madrid suspect heard in 9/11 case (06/01/05)

FBI Official Was 'Deep Throat' (06/01/05)

At Air Force Academy, Cheney Talks of 9/11 (06/02/05)

Law firm ropes 9/11 riches (06/03/05)

Hijack Code a Secret Signal of Distress - ABC (06/03/05)

Qazi says 9/11 was a planned conspiracy to crush Muslims (06/05/05)

Lawyers Worry About 9/11 Convict's Future (06/05/05)

9/11 Panel Has More Questions (06/06/05)

Citizen 9/11 panel keeps pressure on FBI, Congress (06/07/05)

• June 9, 2005 - "A Personal Decision," by Kevin Ryan, former Underwriters Laboratories manager and 9/11 whistle blower.

"Have you ever found yourself caught between several hundred million people and their most cherished lies? After writing a letter to a government scientist, pleading with him to clarify a report of his work, I found myself in just that situation. The letter was circulated on the internet and for a brief time I became a reluctant celebrity. Of course I stand behind what I wrote, although it was originally intended as a personal message, not an open letter. Since many have asked for clarification, here is my message to all.
To me, the report in question represents a decision point, not just for the US, but for humanity as a whole. We’re at a point where we must decide if we will live consciously, or literally give up our entire reality for a thin veneer of lies. In the US these lies include cheap propaganda that passes for journalism, police-state measures that promise security, and mountains of debt that paint a picture of wealth. Additionally we’ve adopted many implicit self-deceptions, like the idea that we’ll always enjoy a limitless share of the world’s resources, no matter where these are located or who might disagree.
The official conspiracy theory of 9/11 is a key part of our current self-deception. More importantly, this story may be our last chance to see just how critical our situation is so that we can all stop, and begin working together to solve the real problems we face.
Anyone who honestly looks at the evidence has difficulty finding anything in the official story of 9/11 that is believable. It’s not just one or two strange twists or holes in the story, the whole thing is bogus from start to end.[3] In my previous job I was in a position to question one part, the collapse of three tall buildings due to fire. But this isn’t really a chemistry or engineering problem, and may be best approached initially through statistics.
The three WTC buildings in question weren’t all designed the same way and weren’t all hit by airplanes. The only thing they seemed to have in common were relatively small and manageable fires, as indicated by the work of firefighters right up to the moment of collapse. From the government’s report we know that only a small percentage of the supporting columns in each of the first two buildings were severed, and that the jet fuel burned off in just a few minutes.
To follow the latest “leading hypothesis”, what are the odds that all the fireproofing fell off in just the right places, even far from the point of impact? Without much test data, let’s say it’s one in a thousand. And what are the odds that the office furnishings converged to supply highly directed and (somehow) forced-oxygen fires at very precise points on the remaining columns? Is it another one in a thousand? What is the chance that those points would then all soften in unison, and give way perfectly, so that the highly dubious “progressive global collapse” theory could be born? I wouldn’t even care to guess. But finally, with well over a hundred fires in tall buildings through history, what are the chances that the first, second and third incidents of fire-induced collapse would all occur on the same day? Let’s say it’s one in a million. Considering just these few points we’re looking at a one in a trillion chance, using generous estimates and not really considering the third building (no plane, no jet fuel, different construction)." - Scoop (06/09/05)

(See also:  November 16, 2004 - Kevin Ryan is fired from Underwriters Laboratories)

Desertions blow hits Afghan army (06/09/05)

German TV show depicts 9/11 as Bush plot (06/09/05)

Report Shows FBI's Missed Sept. 11 Chances (06/09/05)

Bush Urges Congress to Renew Patriot Act (06/09/05)

Acquittal of 9/11 suspect upheld (06/09/05)

Plaza Hotel 9/11 backlash lawsuit settled (06/09/05)

'Historian' claims 9-11 plot by Vatican, U.S. (06/11/05)

Firefighter Mourned 4 Years After 9/11 (06/11/05)

Web of cold-blooded lies, Eric Margolis is appalled by Anglo-U.S. scheme to scare citizens into backing Iraq war (06/12/05)

FOX News:  U.K. Memo: U.S. Flubbed Iraq Postwar Plan (06/12/05)

• June 13, 2005 - Former Bush administration chief economist Morgan Reynolds thinks 9/11 was an inside job.

"A former Bush team member during his first administration is now voicing serious doubts about the collapse of the World Trade Center on 9-11. Former chief economist for the Department of Labor during President George W. Bush's first term Morgan Reynolds comments that the official story about the collapse of the WTC is "bogus" and that it is more likely that a controlled demolition destroyed the Twin Towers and adjacent Building No. 7. Reynolds, who also served as director of the Criminal Justice Center at the National Center for Policy Analysis in Dallas and is now professor emeritus at Texas A&M University said, "If demolition destroyed three steel skyscrapers at the World Trade Center on 9/11, then the case for an 'inside job' and a government attack on America would be compelling." Reynolds commented from his Texas A&M office, "It is hard to exaggerate the importance of a scientific debate over the cause of the collapse of the twin towers and building 7. If the official wisdom on the collapses is wrong, as I believe it is, then policy based on such erroneous engineering analysis is not likely to be correct either. The government's collapse theory is highly vulnerable on its own terms. Only professional demolition appears to account for the full range of facts associated with the collapse of the three buildings." - Washington Times (06/13/05)

"Bush economist doubts 9-11 story, Ex-Labor Dept. hand says towers brought down by explosive" - WorldNetDaily (06/15/05)

- No More Games, 9/11 Skepticism, 9/11: 80 Minutes of Unilateral Disarmament by Morgan Reynolds

• June 13, 2005 - Large U.S. Military Order for Tasers

"TASER International, Inc. (Nasdaq: TASR), a market leader in advanced non-lethal weapons announced today was received an order for TASER(TM) X26 devices and related accessories through Aardvark Tactical Inc., TASER International's distributor to the U.S. Government General Services Administration (GSA). This order is intended for use by the U.S. military and totals over $1.4 million.
"It is exciting to see the U.S. military place an order of this size after deploying our devices in different locations and capacities around the world," said Tom Smith, President of TASER International, Inc.
This order announced today will ship in the second quarter of 2005." - Taser International/PRNewsWire (06/13/05)

"Taser International, the maker of electric stun guns, has received a $1.4 million order from the General Services Administration for an unspecified number of the weapons for use by the military.
The order, for the X26 model and related equipment, will be shipped this quarter, Taser said yesterday in a statement. It is the company's biggest order this year." - New York Times (06/14/05)

FBI blunder on 9-11? (06/13/05)

• June 14, 2005 - FBI worked hard to cover up a 9-11 cover-up—and then hide it some more, alleged 9/11 hijacker rented room from an FBI informant.

"It's no secret the FBI let at least two 9-11 hijackers—Hazmi and Mihdhar—slip through its fingers when they landed in California in 2000 and proceeded to live openly under their own names in San Diego before moving into position for the attack. What makes the situation especially ludicrous is that one of these hijackers rented a room from a San Diego landlord who was an FBI informant on the Muslim community.
That's bad enough. But after 9-11, when the Joint Congressional Intelligence Committee found out what had been going on, the FBI refused to allow the informant to be interviewed by the committee staff or to testify.
The FBI actually took steps to hide this man so Congress could not find him. All this is described at some length in former senator Bob Graham's book Intelligence Matters—the one book on this entire affair written by an actual participant in the behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing over what was permitted to come into public view about 9-11. Graham was chairman of the joint congressional investigation.
To resolve the informant question, Graham writes, he met with Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI director Robert Mueller, and other top officials. But when he tried to serve a subpoena on one top FBI official, the man shrank away and would not take the piece of paper. In the end, Graham says, he discovered that the FBI was taking its hard line on the informant on orders from the White House.
Now comes the Justice Department's Office of Inspector General with a lengthy description of the FBI's relationship with the landlord asset. Like the congressional committee, the inspector general did not interview the landlord, but relies on secondhand information gathered from FBI agents. The landlord no longer works for the Bureau. The inspector general reports, "In July 2003 the asset was given a $100,000 payment and closed as an asset."
It is interesting to note that the 9-11 Commission was formed in late 2002. The Joint Congressional Inquiry, which discovered the landlord's existence and sought unsuccessfully to question him, issued its final report July 24, 2003." - Village Voice (06/14/05)

New 'Downing Street Memo' says Bush, Blair agreed on 'regime change' in 2002 (06/14/05)

Bush economist doubts 9-11 story, Ex-Labor Dept. hand says towers brought down by explosive (06/15/05)

Pakistani leader says 9/11 did not have to happen (06/15/05)

House Votes to Limit Patriot Act (06/15/05)

Top Bush Aides Have Big Investment Wealth (06/15/05)

$5m payout wrecked my life, says 9/11 widow (06/15/05)

Democrats Urge Inquiry on Bush, Iraq (06/16/05)

US: Bin Laden not likely in Afghanistan (06/16/05)

Halliburton to build new $30 mln Guantanamo jail (06/16/05)

Guantanamo inmates can be held 'in eternity', says US (06/16/05)

University embarrassed by Bush economist (06/17/05)

• June 18, 2005 - Bush says U.S. is in Iraq because of 9/11 attacks.

Facing lagging support, Bush defends war in Iraq

"The United States will settle for "nothing less than victory" in Iraq, President Bush said Saturday in his weekly radio address.
Speaking amid a swirl of lagging support for the war and declining approval ratings for his leadership, Bush defended U.S. operations in Iraq and showed no intention of pulling out of the region.
"We went to war because we were attacked, and we are at war today because there are still people out there who want to harm our country and hurt our citizens," he said." - CNN (06/18/05)

Bush says US is in Iraq because of attacks on US

"President George W. Bush defended the war in Iraq, telling Americans the United States was forced into war because of the September 11 terror strikes.
Bush began a public relations offensive to defend the war as his approval rating has dropped well below 50 percent with Americans expressing skepticism about the invasion." - Turkish Press/AFP (06/18/05)

President's Radio Address

"Today we face two issues of vital importance for all Americans: growing our economy and protecting our citizens from those who wish to do us harm.

As we work to deliver opportunity at home, we're also keeping you safe from threats from abroad. We went to war because we were attacked, and we are at war today because there are still people out there who want to harm our country and hurt our citizens. Some may disagree with my decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power, but all of us can agree that the world's terrorists have now made Iraq a central front in the war on terror.

Our troops are fighting these terrorists in Iraq so you will not have to face them here at home.

This mission isn't easy, and it will not be accomplished overnight. We're fighting a ruthless enemy that relishes the killing of innocent men, women, and children. By making their stand in Iraq, the terrorists have made Iraq a vital test for the future security of our country and the free world. We will settle for nothing less than victory." - White House (06/18/05)

 

Memos Show British Concern Over Iraq Plans (06/18/05)

House panel wants unspent 9/11 funds (06/18/05)

Missed chance on way to 9/11 (06/19/05)

CIA's Goss has 'excellent' idea where bin Laden is-Time (06/19/05)

AP: Terror Expertise Not Priority at FBI (06/19/05)

It has been four years since 9/11 but work has yet to be begin on the Freedom Tower (06/19/05)

The Saudis get blamed for not revealing more after 9/11 (06/20/05)

Gov't. Collected Airline Passenger Data (06/20/05)

City still has 150,000 fewer jobs than before the terrorist attacks (06/20/05)

9/11: No CIA Report Yet (06/20/05)

U.S. law officers seek library patron data - survey (06/21/05)

Moroccan freed in 9/11 case home (06/21/05)

Former Asst. Sec. Of Treasury Under Reagan Doubts Official 9/11 Story (06/22/05)

• June 23, 2005 - NIST World Trade Center Investigation Team refuses to answer questions asked by 9/11 skeptic researcher, Nico Haupt, at a public briefing in New York City about recommendations to improve the safety of tall buildings.

"The U.S. Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) today called on the organizations that develop building and fire safety codes, standards and practices—and the state and local agencies that adopt them—to make specific changes to improve the safety of tall buildings, their occupants and first responders. The recommendations result from the agency’s investigation of the fires and collapses of New York City’s World Trade Center (WTC) towers following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001." - NIST (06/23/05)

- View archived video of press briefing Webcast (Nico Haupt's questions start at 1:23:00)

US acknowledges torture at Guantanamo; in Iraq, Afghanistan - UN (06/24/05)

General admits to secret air war (06/26/05)

Outrage over 9/11 plane debris sale (06/26/05)

Report: U.S. Secretly Met With Insurgents (06/26/05)

Report: NBC Pulls Plug on 9/11 Miniseries (06/28/05)

Bush says Iraq war worth it, cites bin Laden (06/28/05)

Pentagon Aided Halliburton, Official Charges (06/28/05)

First Amendment gains support as fears ease (06/28/05)

9/11 material witnesses suffer power of paranoia and Patriot Act (06/28/05)

Zogby: 42% support impeachment if Bush lied about Iraq (06/30/05)

Army gives $5 bln of work to Halliburton (07/06/05)

Congregants say the Moroccan met with 9/11 pilots (07/06/05)

Spain wraps up 9/11 terror trial (07/06/05)

Israel Official:  Scotland Yard Alerted Israel Pre-Blast  (07/07/05)

London hit by 4 bomb blasts between 8:51am & 9:47am (07/07/05)

• July 7, 2005 - Former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani was near the London Blasts.

Giuliani says attack echoes 9/11

"The Mayor of New York during the 9/11 attacks, Rudolph Giuliani, has spoken of the "eerie" experience of being in London near one of Thursday's blasts.
He told the BBC he was near Liverpool Street station when the first of the four blasts was reported.

"I was right near Liverpool (Street) station when the first bomb went off and was notified of it," he said.
"It was... very eerie to be right there again when one of these attacks takes place."
Mr Giuliani, whose eight-year tenure as mayor of New York will be best remembered for his heart-felt response to the attacks on the World Trade Centre, drew parallels between events on both sides of the Atlantic.
He said "the idea of a surprise attack", as well as "innocent people just going to work being injured and killed", meant the attacks bore similarities." - BBC (07/08/05)

(See also:  9/11 - Giuliani says he was across the street from the WTC 7 in their make-shift command center and then says he was told the WTC was "going to collapse.")

• July 7, 2005 - Israeli Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was near the London blasts.

Netanyahu had been on way to London hotel near blasts

"Israeli Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was on his way to a hotel near the scene of one of the London blasts Thursday when he received a call to stay put, the foreign minister said.

Netanyahu was to have been the scheduled keynote speaker at an Israeli corporate investment conference at the Great Eastern hotel near the Liverpool Street subway station." - USA Today (07/07/05)

Netanyahu was near London blast - Globes Online (07/07/05)

(See also:  9/11 - When Netanyahu was asked what the 9/11 attacks meant for relations between the United States and Israel, he replied, "It's very good.")

Israel's Sharon muzzles ministers on London blasts (07/08/05)

Netanyahu: Advance warning reports 'absolutely false' (07/08/05)

Karzai says bin Laden isn't in Afghanistan (07/08/05)

Second al-Qaida-linked group claims responsibility (07/09/05)

Experts fear 'endless' terror war (07/09/05)

London Blasts Like Past al-Qaida Strikes (07/09/05)

Police: London Blasts Were Seconds Apart (07/09/05)

Anti-terror drill revealed soft targets in London (07/10/05)

Bush aide Rove was Time reporter's source-Newsweek (07/10/05)

'Inside 9/11' tracks terrorist attacks (07/10/05)

Venice author questions 9/11 findings in controversial book; Daniel Hopsicker's 'Welcome to Terrorland'  (07/11/05)

NGC US examines the events of 9/11 (07/11/05)

Feds halt $26M in 9/11 aid  (07/11/05)

Cleric: Bin Laden 'had no part' in 9/11 (07/12/05)

Iraq New Terror Breeding Ground (07/14/05)

Newspaper Claims Former DOJ Officials Confirm Bombing Coverup (07/14/05)

Rove, Libby identified CIA officer (07/17/05)

FBI Monitored Web Sites for 2004 Protests (07/18/05)

Bush: Any Criminals in Leak to Be Fired (07/18/05)

Pilots Careful in Airspace Over D.C. (07/18/05)

Padilla Lawyer: Charge Him or Release Him (07/19/05)

German court frees 'top bin Laden aide' (07/19/05)

9/11: There is more to this story (07/19/05)

9/11 hijacker's father praises bombers (07/20/05)

More than 3,400 airspace violations since 9/11 (07/20/05)

• July 21, 2005 - Halliburton announces a second quarter 284% profit increase and a record operating income of $607 million.

HALLIBURTON ANNOUNCES SECOND QUARTER RESULTS; Halliburton achieves record operating income of $607 million

"KBR revenue for the second quarter of 2005 was $2.7 billion, a 12% decrease compared to the second quarter of 2004. Operating income for the second quarter of 2005 was $122 million compared to an operating loss of $277 million in the second quarter of 2004.
Government and Infrastructure (G&I) operating income for the second quarter of 2005 was $73 million compared to $19 million in the second quarter of 2004, a 284% increase." - Halliburton (07/21/05)

Halliburton announces 284 percent increase in war profits

"Halliburton announced on Friday that its KBR division, responsible for carrying out Pentagon contracts, experienced a 284 percent increase in operating profits during the second quarter of this year.
The increase in profits was primarily due to the Pentagon's payment of "award fees" for what military officials call "good" or "very good" work done by KBR in the Middle East for America's taxpayers and the troops.
Despite the scandals that plague KBR's military contracts, the Pentagon awarded $70 million in "award" fees to the company, along with four ratings of "excellent" and two ratings of "very good" for the troop logistics work under the Army's LOGCAP contract.
The Pentagon has provided preferential treatment to Halliburton on a number of occasions, including the concealment from the public of critical reports by military auditors.
Audits conducted by the Pentagon's Defense Contract Audit Agency determined that KBR had $1 billion in "questioned" expenses (i.e. expenses which military auditors consider "unreasonable") and $442 million in "unsupported" expenses (i.e. expenses which military auditors have determined contain no receipt or any explanation on how the expenses were disbursed).
But the top Pentagon brass ignored these audits and rewarded KBR's work anyway." - Halliburton Watch (07/25/05)

September 11th Victim Families Who Fought to Create 9/11Commission Declare it a Failure on First Anniversary of 9/11 Report (07/21/05)

Musharraf Says He Believes Bin Laden Still Alive (07/21/05)

House reauthorizes USA Patriot Act (07/21/05)

London hit by second set of explosions (07/21/05)

Plame’s identity marked as secret (07/21/05)

Rep. McKinney (D-GA) - The 9/11 Commission Report One Year Later:  A Citizens’ Response – Did They Get It Right? (07/22/05)

• July 23, 2005 - McKinney reopens 9/11, Conspiracy theories implicating president aired at 8-hour hearing

"Revisiting the issue that helped spur her ouster from Congress three years ago, Rep. Cynthia McKinney led a Capitol Hill hearing Friday on whether the Bush administration was involved in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The eight-hour hearing, timed to mark the first anniversary of the release of the Sept. 11 commission's report on the attacks, drew dozens of contrarians and conspiracy theorists who suggest President Bush purposely ignored warnings or may even have had a hand in the attack - claims participants said the commission ignored.
"The commission's report was not a rush to judgment, it was a rush to exoneration," said John Judge, a member of McKinney's staff and a representative of a Web site dedicated to raising questions about the Sept. 11 commission's report.
The White House and the commission have dismissed such questions as unfounded conspiracy theories.
McKinney first raised questions about Bush's involvement shortly after the attacks in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, generating a furious response from fellow Democrats in Washington and voters in Georgia, who ousted her in 2002.
"What we are doing is asking the unanswered questions of the 9/11 families," McKinney, a DeKalb County Democrat who won back her seat in 2004, said during the proceedings.
She rebuffed a reporter's repeated attempts to ask her why she would so boldly embrace the same claims that led to her downfall.
"Congresswoman McKinney is viewed as a contrarian," panelist Melvin Goodman, a former CIA official, said. "And I hope someday her views will be considered conventional wisdom."
Though she left the testimony and questioning of panelists to others, McKinney was the main attraction, presiding over more than two dozen participants, including the author of a book that claims the U.S. government had advance knowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack and allowed it to happen, and Peter Dale Scott, who wrote three books on President John F. Kennedy's assassination.
Nearly a dozen 9/11 enthusiasts lined one side of the room, camcorders at the ready, broadcasting the hearing live over the Internet or recording it for later release. C-SPAN cameras documented the hearing, and a DVD recording of the proceedings will soon be available.
Ten people sat in a section reserved for family members of 9/11 victims.
"Nine-eleven could have been prevented," said Marilyn Rosenthal, a University of Michigan professor who lost a son in the attacks, echoing the premise of the hearing.
Panelists maintained that Bush ignored numerous warnings from the CIA, the Federal Aviation Administration, foreign governments and others who told him before 9/11 that Osama bin Laden was planning to attack the United States and that terrorists were likely to use hijacked airliners as weapons.
But why would the president or his administration want the 9/11 attacks to occur? Power, the panelists agreed.
In the wake of the attacks, the administration was able to greatly expand the president's power and the reach of the federal government, they said, but whistle-blowers and other potential witnesses who could have testified to the Sept. 11 commission about such things were either prevented from speaking or ignored in the commission's final report. Panelists called the commission's report "a cover-up."
"The American people have been seriously misled," said Scott." - Atlanta Journal-Constitution (07/23/05) [Reprinted at:  9/11 Blogger.com]

(See also:  March 25, 2002 - McKinney gets blasted for her comments alleging that the Bush administration may have had advanced warnings about the 9/11 attacks; May 16, 2002 - McKinney releases a statement saying she feels vindicated by the Bush Administration's admission that they receiving advanced warnings)

Poll: Americans Say World War III Likely (07/23/05)

Experts: No Single al-Qaida Mastermind (07/23/05)

Al-Qaida-Linked Group Claims Egypt Attack (07/23/05)

Egypt resort hit by blasts, killing at least 88 (07/23/05)

British police admit shooting wrong man in bomb hunt (07/23/05)

Ex-CIA Officer Rips Bush Over Plame Leak (07/23/05)

Bin Laden did London/Egypt bombings, say terror experts (07/24/05)

9,000 Britons holidaying in resort at time of blasts (07/24/05)

Flight 93 film to air on 9/11 (07/24/05)

Merchants Who Stayed After 9/11 Are Now Told to Go (07/24/05)

Gonzales: Blasts show Patriot Act needed (07/24/05)

Letters:  Rove opened Pandora's box on causes of  9/11 (07/25/05)

Blair: World slept after 9/11 (07/26/05)

Author Paul J. Landis Reveals 9/11 Insights in New Book "A Real 9/11 Commission" (07/27/05)

When Osama tried to annihilate Americans with poison pills (07/27/05)

2nd 'Atta' Busted (07/27/05)

Sheikh still believes US was behind 9/11 (07/27/05)

Non-Secret Intelligence Gets Cold Shoulder (07/28/05)

Stone Slams Bush Reaction to 9/11 (07/28/05)

First 9/11 Miniseries Starts Filming (07/28/05)

Subcontractor who got rich in wake of 9/11 investigated (07/29/05)

Congressman Calls FEMA's 9/11 Funds Disbursement "Bureaucratic Nonsense" (07/30/05)

Coroner to release Flight 93 crash site (07/30/05)

Congressman Calls FEMA's 9/11 Funds Disbursement "Bureaucratic Nonsense" (07/30/05)

KOCO-TV Suppresses an Explosive 9/11 News Report - Bella Ciao (07/31/05)

'Qaeda suspect claims tortured at foreign prisons US flew him to (08/02/05)

Vacationing Bush Poised to Set a Record (08/02/05)

FBI slow to adjust to post-9/11 law enforcement changes?  (08/02/05)

Conspiracy Theories and the Fight for Truth (08/02/05)

Dust Masks Used At WTC After 9/11 Attacks Are Recalled (08/03/05)

9/11 rescue workers plead for fund restoration  (08/03/05)

14 Marines Killed in Iraq as President Bush Vacations (08/03/05)

• August 4, 2005 - Osama bin Laden's No. 2 man in al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has threatened more attacks in the UK and U.S.

"Osama bin Laden's No. 2 man in al Qaeda has threatened more destruction in London, saying that British Prime Minister Tony Blair would be to blame.
In a video broadcast Thursday on Arabic-language TV station Al Jazeera Ayman al-Zawahiri also issued a warning for the United States.
Al-Zawahiri, a 54-year-old Egyptian doctor, is bin Laden's closest adviser. After the September 11, 2001 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people, the U.S. State Department offered a $25 million award for information leading to al-Zawahiri's apprehension.
In the video, al-Zawahiri also issued several warnings for the United States.
He also warned the United States to "stop stealing our oil and wealth and stop supporting corrupt rulers."
Al-Zawahiri reminded the United States and its allies of the "hudna" (truce) that bin Laden offered last year in return for the withdrawal of foreign troops from Muslim lands.
A U.S. intelligence official told CNN the video was being analyzed, but quickly pointed out that "there has never been a false tape" from al-Zawahiri.
Another U.S. official did not read much into the fact that al-Zawahiri and not bin Laden made the videotape. The official said there have been few videotapes of bin Laden since the September 11 attacks, and most of the time it has been hard to determine when the tapes were made because there is either no audio or the message did not contain any timely references.
The last time bin Laden released a statement was in an audiotape late last December when he praised Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and designated him the al Qaeda leader in Iraq.
Al-Zawahiri made no mention of the July 23 bombings in the Egyptian resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh that killed at least 83 people and injured more than 200 others, which could indicate the tape was made before that date." - CNN (08/04/05)

Four Years After 9/11, FDNY Will Release Remaining EMS Recordings (08/05/05)

9/11 conspiracy DVD sent to French media (08/05/05)

LIVE on C-SPAN: 9/11 CitizensWatch Co-founder Confronts Commissioner over 9/11 Report's Omission of Pakistani Wire Transfers to Atta (08/06/05)

Ex-POW Jessica Lynch says US used her as Iraq war symbol (08/07/05)

Bush & Co: Still Stonewalling on 9/11 - ThinkProgess.org (08/07/05)

9/11 Group Says White House Has Not Provided Files (08/07/05)

57% say Iraq war has made US more vulnerable to terrorism (08/08/05)

German Prosecutors: el Motassadeq Knew of 9/11 (08/08/05)

Secret military unit tracked hijackers before 9/11 (08/09/05)

FEC Clears 'Fahrenheit 9/11' (08/09/05)

9/11 Commission Want Atta Claims Pursued (08/10/05)

Pentagon to host 9/11 march, show (08/10/05)

9/11 Commission's Staff Rejected Report on Early Identification of Chief Hijacker (08/11/05)

'Able Danger' Intel Could Rewrite 9/11 History  (08/11/05)

9/11 report omitted reference to data about lead hijacker (08/11/05)

9/11 Panel Reviews Files for Atta Links (08/11/05)

Spy Snafu 'Horrifies' 9/11 Kin (08/11/05)

GOP Paying Legal Bills of Bush Official Accused of Suppressing Democratic Voters (08/11/05)

Record Prices Mean Record Profits for Oil Companies (08/11/05)

Congressman Wants Another Look at 9/11 Commission Probe (08/11/05)

9/11 commissioners defend intel omission  (08/12/05)

Angry widow calls for new 9/11 panel (08/12/05)

FDNY to release 9/11 radio transmissions today (08/12/05)

9/11 Archives Show Heroism Amid Chaos (08/13/05)

9/11 Rescuer Recalls Fear and Faith (08/14/05)

Was Mohammed Atta Overlooked? (08/14/05)

Al-Qaeda, a Secret Service Operation? (08/15/05)

Biz files a 9/11 'Flight' plan (08/15/05)

Film series tackles 9/11 questions; film features a speech made by Dr. David Ray Griffin (08/15/05)

'I Provided 9/11 Attackers with Passports' (08/15/05)

The 9-11 smoking gun (08/15/05)

9/11 dramas head for big, small screens (08/16/05)

9/11 detainees 'abused'  (08/16/05)

Fears of backlash kept pre-9/11 data from FBI (08/16/05)

DOJ: Federal prison failed to turn over 9/11 interview tapes (08/16/05)

Verdict near for 9/11 hijackers' pal

Washington Post Backs Out of 9/11 Event  (08/16/05)

The ‘reel story’ of 9/11 attacks, The new conspiracy theory is 9/11 (08/17/05)

Planning for post-Saddam regime change began as early as October 2001 (08/17/05)

Intelligence officer faults 9/11 commission (08/17/05)

'Able Danger' stopped from informing FBI (08/17/05)

State Dept. Says It Warned About bin Laden in 1996 (08/17/05)

State Dept. Warned of Poor Iraq Planning (08/17/05)

Angry Kin Call for a New Panel on 9/11 (08/18/05)

Mayor: Recovering 9/11 remains from landfill 'totally impractical' (08/18/05)

Moroccan to learn fate at Hamburg 9/11 retrial  (08/18/05)

U.S. Held Meetings With Taliban in 2000 (08/19/05)

Man who helped 9/11 hijackers gets 7 years (08/19/05)

Thompson’s timeline:  Pacific Beach author takes aim at 9/11 and the government stupor that colored it  (08/19/05)

Bush invokes Sept 11 to defend Iraq war  (08/20/05)

CIA 9/11 report still not at Congress  (08/20/05)

Was 9/11 preventable?  (08/20/05)

9/11 factors boost Gulf economies (08/21/05)

GOP Senator Says Iraq Looking Like Vietnam (08/21/05)

House GOP leaders backed Able Danger plan (08/22/05)

Pentagon Disputes 9/11 Intel Claim (08/22/05)

No Evidence of Atta Claims, Pentagon Says (08/23/05)

Summit leader's 9/11 'plot' theory (08/23/05)

CIA delivers 9/11 intelligence report to congressional panel  (08/24/05)

Hamburg 9/11 suspect may face third trial (08/24/05)

Bin Laden was not capable of carrying out 9/11 attacks: Qazi, suspects Zionists (08/25/05)

William Rodriguez, a 9-11 Survivor (08/25/05)

Program to monitor health of 9-11 workers vanishes (08/27/05)

Patriotic 9/11 pins are made in China (08/27/05)

Disputed 9/11 Pentagon flag destroyed to end controversy (08/27/05)

Republican joins Democrats in backing Downing Street memo bill (08/28/05)

Getting Agnostic About 9/11, interview with David Ray Griffin (08/28/05)

FBI Document Labels Michigan Affirmative Action and Peace Groups as Terrorists (08/29/05)

Local girl takes second place in 9/11 art contest (08/29/05)

US: CEOs with Defense Firms Double Salaries Since 9/11 (08/30/05)

Most Americans don't know goal of Patriot Act (08/30/05)

Egypt, U.S. to hold joint war games, operation "Bright Star" (08/30/05)

Israel and 9/11: New Report Connects the Dots - AntiWar.com (08/31/05)

Twenty Things We Now Know Four Years After 9/11 (08/31/05)

Sept. 11 riddles remain (08/31/05)

CIA should release new 9/11 report (08/31/05)

Paper: Tenet won't become fall guy for 9/11 intelligence - Raw Story (09/01/05)

New Orleans Mayor: "CIA Will Wipe Me Out" (09/03/05)

CIA videos reveal the missed chances to kill Bin Laden (09/04/05)

Report says US data secrecy expanding and getting costlier (09/04/05)

BOOKS: 9/11 Revealed: Challenging the Facts behind the War on Terror (09/04/05)

What does $2.8B buy in post-9/11 lower Manhattan? (09/05/05)

Memorial planned at site of 9/11 plane crash (09/05/05)

Still studying 9-11 attack (09/05/05)

Lombardi: 9-11 Dust Victims Demanding EPA Action (09/06/05)

Barbara Bush: Katrina relocation 'working very well' for poor (09/06/05)

Meyssan: On 9/11, We Were Not Told Everything (09/07/05)

Bush Job Approval Hits 41%—All Time Low; Would Lose to Every Modern President (09/08/05)

9/11 Loan Money Missed Targets (09/08/05)

• September 9, 2005 - FAA Believed Second 9/11 Plane Heading Towards NY for Emergency Landing

FAA Believed Second 9/11 Plane Heading Towards NY for Emergency Landing;

Released 9/11 Hijacking Reports Further Detail Confused U.S. Response

"Ten minutes after American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) controllers in New York saw United Airlines Flight 175 heading "right towards the city," [p.13] but thought it was aiming for an emergency landing at a New York airport, according to FAA documents released this week under the Freedom of Information Act and posted on the web by the National Security Archive. Minutes later, Flight 175 hit the south tower of the World Trade Center.
The FAA documents, which are referenced extensively in Chapter 1 of The 9/11 Commission Report, provide further detail on the report's chronology of the hijackings and its overall observation that the FAA was woefully unprepared and disorderly in its response to the attack. Distracted by Flight 11, the FAA notified the military at about 9:03 am that Flight 175 had been hijacked, almost the exact time the plane crashed into the second World Trade Center tower. Records show Flight 175 first exhibited signs of distress at 8:46 am." - National Security Archives (09/09/05)

9/11: Attack or gift from heaven? (09/09/05)

9/11 a US plot, Aussie Islamic newspaper claims no Boeing hit Pentagon (09/09/05)

Controlled collapse of World Trade Center Building 7? - Al Jazeera (09/10/05)

Bin Laden's whereabouts remains mystery 4 years after 9/11 attacks (09/10/05)

Pentagon Opens 9/11 Crash Site to Public (09/10/05)

• September 11, 2005 - Ceremonies mark 4th 9/11 anniversary - CNN (09/11/05)

Pentagon Studies Pre-Emptive Nuclear Strikes  (09/11/05)

Protestors gather at 9/11 commemoration  (09/12/05)

9-11 Conspiracists Invade Ground Zero (09/12/05)

Officials downplay threat on purported al Qaeda tape (09/12/05)

Fresh details of 9/11 findings declassified, FAA received reports on threats daily (09/14/05)

U.S. military denies report bin Laden seeking medical help (09/14/05)

Laden's escape on horseback revealed! (09/14/05)

UN investigating use of Shannon by CIA ‘torture plane’ (09/14/05)

Bush Urges World to Crack Down on Terror (09/14/05)

9/11 Panel Says U.S. Hasn't Enacted Crucial Reforms  (09/14/05)

FAA was told of al Qaeda hijack threat in 1998, Warning revealed in previously secret part of 9/11 report (09/14/05)

Congressman says Atta documents destroyed (09/15/05)

9/11 warning ignored (09/17/05)

Bush wants bigger military role for US disasters (09/17/05)

CIA director urged to release agency 9/11 report (09/17/05)

Burried Truths: The Big Issue in Scotland (09/19/05)

Translation of bin Laden Speeches Released  (09/19/05)

Report: Sharon raised illegal campaign funds in New York, Larry Silverstein a contributor (09/19/05)

U.S. Military Deaths Top 1,900 in Iraq (09/20/05)

FAA to Propose Security Cameras on Planes (09/20/05)

Peace Activist Cindy Sheehan Says She Was Roughed Up at New York Rally Scuffle (09/20/05)

Spanish prosecutors seek 75,000-year sentence for 9/11 suspects (09/20/05)

Stone plans 9/11 terror attack film (09/20/05)

The day that Iraqi anger exploded in the face of the British occupiers (09/20/05)

Cellphones-on-planes era poised to begin (09/21/05)

Pentagon forbids officer to testify on pre-9/11 knowledge (09/21/05)

Theologian talks about 9/11 truths (09/21/05)

Bush Says U.S. Must Not Retreat on Iraq, weak terror response led to 9/11 (09/22/05)

Nato-controlled Afghan regions record huge increase in opium production (09/23/05)

9/11-CENTER PLAN BURIES DEAD UNDER HEAP OF NONSENSE (09/23/05)

McKinney's panel drums up more Sept. 11 conspiracy theories (09/23/05)

Arabs See Bush Greater Threat Than Bin Laden: Panel (09/24/05)

Navy Secretly Contracted Jets Used by CIA (09/24/05)

Pentagon, Senate committee bicker over 9/11 probe  (09/24/05)

Man whose home was searched on 9/11 gets $2.5M award (09/24/05)

Clinton Weak in Responding to Al-Qaida = 9/11  (09/24/05)

FAMILY DEMANDS THE TRUTH, New inquiry may expose events that led to Pat Tillman’s death  (09/25/05)

Pakistan Says Bin Laden Is Isolated (09/25/05)

Sheehan Arrested During Anti-War Protest (09/26/05)

300,000 protest against Iraq war in DC (09/26/05)

Spain jails 9/11-linked al-Qaida suspect (09/26/05)

Outgoing US military chief warns defeat in Iraq would invite another 9/11 (09/27/05)

March Of The Conspiracy Theorists - CBS/Weekly Standard (09/27/05)

Spain's 9/11 trial condemned as a failure (09/27/05)

Senate Panel Postpones 9/11 Hearing (09/27/05)

Military May Take Lead Role After Natural Disasters (09/28/05)

9/11 scares off insurers (09/29/05)

Computer Stolen With Data on Thousands Involved in 9/11 Cleanup, Police Say (09/29/05)

Bush threatens defense bill veto, warning on prisoners (09/30/05)

9/11 Conspiracy Discussed on Iranian TV (09/30/05)

FDNY Chaplain Resigns After Remarks About 9/11 Conspiracy Theory (09/30/05)

Pentagon Revokes Clearance of Officer Who Claimed Military Unit Identified Four 9/11 Hijackers (09/30/05)

• October 2005 - A promo for the cartoon 'The Boondocks' shows it's main character, Huey Freeman, speaking to a crowd of rich snobby socialites and tells them that the government is "lyin' about 9/11".

"Excuse me?  Everyone I have a brief announcement to make:  Jesus was black, Ronald Reagan was the devil, and the government is lyin' about 9/11.  Thank you -- for your time and goodnight." - [Video clip] The Boondocks

Three bomb attacks rock Indonesia's Bali, 25 dead (10/01/05)

Air sampler detected possible disease agent during protests (10/01/05)

Sept. 11 conspiracy theories abound (10/01/05)

Gen. Richard B. Myers Returns to Civilian Life (10/02/05)

Imam expresses regret for remarks on 9-11 attacks (10/02/05)

Bali Suicide Bombing Suspects Linked to al-Qaida (10/02/05)

Revealed: British link to Bali bombs (10/02/05)

9/11: An Inside Job in the White House? (10/03/05)

LAWSUIT TO OPEN 9/11 PROBE OF SAUDI INVOLVEMENT (10/03/05)

Biggest Defense Contractors Raise CEOs' Pay 200% Since 9/11 (10/03/05)

FBI cuts criminal case work in half since 9/11, report says (10/03/05)

Bush Considers Military Role in Flu Fight (10/04/05)

Weak Responses Led To 9/11, Cheney Asserts (10/04/05)

NY fireys put out imam over 9/11 (10/04/05)

Pak arrests Taliban's chief spokesman (10/05/05)

US scientists resurrect deadly 1918 flu (10/05/05)

Ex-Pentagon analyst pleads guilty in Israel-linked case (10/05/05)

9/11 JAVA JACKASS (10/05/05)

9/11 Fantasies on Iranian TV (10/05/05)

CIA head won't order 9/11 accountability reviews (10/05/05)

Espionage Case Breaches the White House (10/05/05)

Study: Dust from 9/11 collapse causing long-term health problems for NYC firefighters (10/06/05)

Bin Laden planning another 9/11 on US: ex-CIA official (10/06/05)

Bush: Militants Seek to Establish Empire (10/06/05)

NYC Increases Subway Security After Threat (10/06/05)

Bush rejects Iraq critics, sees more sacrifice (10/06/05)

Bush: U.S. Foiled at Least 10 Terror Plots (10/06/05)

White House denies Bush God claim (10/06/05)

BBC: Bush said God told him to invade Afghanistan and Iraq (10/06/05)

Pentagon: Bin Laden deputy complains about money, Iraq tactics (10/07/05)

Privacy has suffered since 9/11, report says (10/07/05)

The Big Wedding: 9/11, the Whistle-Blowers and the Cover-Up (10/07/05)

Officials: NYC Terror Plot Uncorroborated (10/09/05)

Feds Prepare for Super-Flu Disaster (10/09/05)

Clinton aides challenge claim by ex-FBI chief (10/09/05)

Did 9/11 Panel Squelch Freeh Bombshell? (10/09/05)

S. Asia Quake Hits Area Where Osama Hides (10/09/05)

9:11 am: South Asia quake kills more than 30,000; Pakistani president appeals for help (10/09/05)

Venezuela calls 'crazy' Robertson's Chavez-bin Laden link (10/10/05)

Iraq rebuilding slows as U.S. money for projects dries up (10/10/05)

INTERNET SWELLS WITH 9/11 QUESTIONS (10/10/05)

Theologian discusses 9/11 (10/10/05)

Film examines 9/11 Jewish conspiracy theories (10/10/05)

Pat Robertson renews Chavez attacks (10/10/05)

Pentagon wants new spying powers in US (10/11/05)

• October 11, 2005 - Cheney's Halliburton stock options rose 3,281% last year, senator finds

Cheney's Halliburton stock options rose 3,281% last year, senator finds

"An analysis released by a Democratic senator found that Vice President Dick Cheney's Halliburton stock options have risen 3,281 percent in the last year, RAW STORY can reveal.
Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) asserts that Cheney's options -- worth $241,498 a year ago -- are now valued at more than $8 million. The former CEO of the oil and gas services juggernaut, Cheney has pledged to give proceeds to charity.

Cheney continues to hold 433,333 Halliburton stock options. The company has been criticized by auditors for its handling of a no-bid contact in Iraq. Auditors found the firm marked up meal prices for troops and inflated gas prices in a deal with a Kuwaiti supplier. The company built the American prison at Guantanamo Bay.
The Vice President has sought to stem criticism by signing an agreement to donate the after-tax profits from these stock options to charities of his choice, and his lawyer has said he will not take any tax deduction for the donations.
However, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) concluded in Sept. 2003 that holding stock options while in elective office does constitute a “financial interest” regardless of whether the holder of the options will donate proceeds to charities. CRS also found that receiving deferred compensation is a financial interest.
Cheney told "Meet the Press" in 2003 that he didn't have any financial ties to the firm.
“Since I left Halliburton to become George Bush's vice president, I've severed all my ties with the company, gotten rid of all my financial interest," the Vice President said. "I have no financial interest in Halliburton of any kind and haven't had, now, for over three years.”
Cheney continues to received a deferred salary from the company. According to financial disclosure forms, he was paid $205,298 in 2001; $162,392 in 2002; $178,437 in 2003; and $194,852 in 2004." - Raw Story (10/11/05)

9/11 conspiracy theory tonight in Manchester (10/11/05)

Report: Informant Admits Subway Threat Was Hoax (10/11/05)

Rice says US will stay in Afghanistan as long as needed (10/12/05)

Only 28 percent believe U.S. headed in right direction (10/12/05)

9/11 body parts split by good and evil (10/12/05)

Levee Breaks, 9-11 Part of Govt. Plot, Farrakhan Implies (10/13/05)

Bush Teleconference With Soldiers Staged (10/13/05)

Terror tip for rich, E-mails warned bigs of city attack (10/13/05)

White House was worried about rogue CIA group: reporter (10/17/05)

United Airlines seeking a 9/11 deal (10/17/05)

AP: $1 out of $5 in 9/11 loans in default (10/17/05)

9/11 families sue New York, demand removal of remains from landfill (10/17/05)

White House Watch: Cheney resignation rumors fly (10/18/05)

The Bloomberg administration's fight for 9-11 secrecy (10/18/05)

 NY official get 9/11 `bonuses` (10/18/05)

Gitmo inmate says he’s sad about 9/11, had nothing to do with it (10/18/05)

9/11 was good for the Muslim world (10/18/05)

Rice Won't Rule Out U.S. Troops' Presence in Iraq in 10 Years, or Using Force Against Syria, Iran (10/19/05)

9/11 panel faults government: NYT (10/19/05)

Agent Reinstated After 9/11 Criticism (10/19/05)

Are we going to war with Iran? (10/19/05)

Bush whacked Rove on CIA leak (10/19/05)

Letter to Editor:  Sweeney perpetuates myth of Iraq- 9/11 link (10/19/05)

9/11 AGENTS LAX ... BUSH KNEW? (10/20/05)

'Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal' hijacked US foreign policy: former Powell aide (10/20/05)

US planning invasion, says Chavez (10/20/05)

US probe into 'Taleban burnings' (10/20/05)

Iran 'has proof' of British role in bombings (10/20/05)

Cheney, CIA Long at Odds (10/20/05)

Bush Calls for U.N. Action Against Syria (10/21/05)

Mission improbable: Author challenges the official story of 9/11 (10/21/05)

Iran's Khamenei says US seeking to dominate the world (10/22/05)

Poll shows Iraqis back attacks on UK, US forces (10/22/05)

U.S.: Zarqawi's Terror Network Growing (10/22/05)

Osama Bin Laden Is Dead And Buried: Multan Newspaper (10/23/05?)

Bloomberg Looks To Jump-Start Development Of WTC Site, believes Silverstein should be removed from process (10/23/05)

ACLU Reports 21 Homicides in U.S. Custody in Iraq and Afghanistan (10/24/05)

Does Bush care about bin Laden? (10/24/05)

Zarqawi's terror network rivals bin Laden's, US intelligence says (10/24/05)

Sheehan: Oppose Clinton if She Backs War (10/25/05)

Peace activists to "die symbolically" outside White House (10/25/05)

Majority of Americans now feel Iraq war was wrong: poll (10/25/05)

Bush says Iraq war will require more sacrifice (10/25/05)

Cheney Told Aide of C.I.A. Officer, Lawyers Report (10/25/05)

FBI infractions since 9/11 raise civil liberty concerns (10/25/05)

Logic, data connect U.S. to 9/11 (10/25/05)

Griffin raises 9/11 questions (10/25/05)

U.S. Military Deaths Reach 2,000 in Iraq (10/25/05)

Jury Faults Port Authority in '93 WTC Bomb (10/26/05)

New York Firefighters to Sue over 9/11-related Disability Decision (10/26/05)

Woman claims Moore manipulated '9/11' scene (10/27/05)

COPS CALL FOR END OF DRUG WAR - FreeMarketNews (10/28/05)

'Scooter' Libby Indicted in CIA Leak Case, Resigns (10/28/05)

DAMAGED 9/11 BUILDING REOPENS (10/28/05)

Saddam accepted UAE exile plan to avert Iraq war-TV (10/29/05)

3 New Delhi Explosions Kill at Least 49 (10/29/05)

A secret cabal ruled in Bush's first term, This shadowy process was guided by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld (10/30/05)

Rajah Soliman group aided US attackers: Probers (10/30/05)

Rumsfeld's stake in Tamiflu (10/31/05)

• November 2005 - Fulton College Response to Professor Steven Jones’s Statements Regarding Collapse of World Trade Center

"Brigham Young University has a policy of academic freedom that supports the pursuit and dissemination of knowledge and ideas. Through the academic process, ideas should be advanced, challenged, and debated by peer-review in credible venues. We believe in the integrity of the academic review process and that, when it is followed properly, peer-review is valuable for evaluating the validity of ideas and conclusions.
The University is aware that Professor Steven Jones's hypotheses and interpretations of evidence regarding the collapse of World Trade Center buildings are being questioned by a number of scholars and practitioners, including many of BYU's own faculty members. Professor Jones's department and college administrators are not convinced that his analyses and hypotheses have been submitted to relevant scientific venues that would ensure rigorous technical peer review. The structural engineering faculty in the Fulton College of Engineering and Technology do not support the hypotheses of Professor Jones." - BYU/Fulton College (11/05)

The '9/11 Truth Movement' raises questions about 9/11 attacks (11/01/05)

Bush OKs Nuclear Reactor for Venezuela (11/02/05)

Carter: White House Manipulated Iraq Intel (11/02/05)

White House Deflects Intel Questions (11/02/05)

CIA runs secret terrorism prisons abroad - WPost (11/02/05)

Security Heightened at U.S. Afghan Base (11/02/05)

U.S. Could Restrict Travel to Prevent Flu (11/02/05)

9/11 firefighters show long-term lung damage (11/03/05)

Bush's Job Approval Hits New Low: 35% approval, Cheney at 19% (11/03/05)

Film to explore the mind of John Lennon's killer (11/03/05)

Mysterious signals jamming garage door openers in Ottawa, U.S. military device suspected (11/04/05)

British cartoon band Gorillaz stage world's first 3D hologram performance (11/04/05)

Bin Laden publicly quiet for longest stretch since 9/11 (11/04/05)

Cheney Pushes Senate for CIA Exemption in Torture Ban Bill (11/04/05)

Bush Sidesteps Questions About CIA Leak (11/04/05)

Thousands in Argentina Protest Bush (11/04/05)

Suspect captured in Pakistan linked to 9/11 attacks, US says (11/04/05)

Fire Starts at Petronas Towers in Malaysia (11/04/05)

• November 6, 2005 - A declassified military intelligence document shows that the Bush Administration was warned back in February 2002 that a captured Al Qaeda operative had given fabricated information that Iraq was training Al Qaeda members to make WMD's, yet the Bush Administration would later use these statements as the foundation for military action in Iraq.

Report Warned Bush Team About Intelligence Suspicions

"A high Qaeda official in American custody was identified as a likely fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the foundation for its claims that Iraq trained Al Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons, according to newly declassified portions of a Defense Intelligence Agency document.

The document, an intelligence report from February 2002, said it was probable that the prisoner, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, "was intentionally misleading the debriefers" in making claims about Iraqi support for Al Qaeda's work with illicit weapons.
The document provides the earliest and strongest indication of doubts voiced by American intelligence agencies about Mr. Libi's credibility. Without mentioning him by name, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state, and other administration officials repeatedly cited Mr. Libi's information as "credible" evidence that Iraq was training Al Qaeda members in the use of explosives and illicit weapons." - NY Times (11/06/05)

(See also:  February 2002 - US intel warned Bush administration that its key source on Al Qaeda's relationship with Iraq provided "intentionally misleading" data; October 16, 2002 - President Bush uses information he was warned may be faulty in a speech to try to link Iraq to Al Qaeda)

Report Warned Bush Team About Intelligence Suspicions (11/06/05)

CONSPIRACY THEORIES, The truth is out there - maybe (11/06/05)

John McCain: No 'Torture' for 9/11 Mastermind (11/06/05)

9/11 terror link found at Net site in Springs (11/06/05)

Garage doors work after mysterious radio signal disappears in Ottawa, U.S. denies responsibility (11/07/05)

US intel on Iraq-Qaeda ties 'intentionally misleading': document (11/07/05)

'Shock and Awe' fireworks packaging provokes outrage with pic of missiles exploding into Twin Towers (11/07/05)

Bush Declares: 'We Do Not Torture' (11/07/05)

Letters: Was Iraq war a conspiracy? (11/07/05)

Australia Says Major Terror Attack Foiled (11/07/05)

US 'uses incendiary arms' in Iraq (11/08/05)

Stocks reveal true 9-11 causes - Daily Beacon (11/08/05)

Congress May Curb Some Patriot Act Powers (11/09/05)

Pentagon interrogation rules allow exceptions (11/09/05)

Suicide Bombers hit 3 Amman, Jordan hotels (11/09/05)

CDC May Distribute 1918 Killer Flu (11/09/05)

Oil Company Execs Defend Huge Profits (11/09/05)

• November 10, 2005 - BYU physics professor Steven E. Jones releases an academic paper online for peer-review stating "pre-positioned explosives" most likely brought down the WTC 1, 2, and 7 buildings, not planes or fire.

- Why Indeed Did the WTC Buildings Collapse? By Steven E. Jones, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Brigham Young University

Y. professor thinks bombs, not planes, toppled WTC

"The physics of 9/11 — including how fast and symmetrically one of the World Trade Center buildings fell — prove that official explanations of the collapses are wrong, says a Brigham Young University physics professor.
In fact, it's likely that there were "pre-positioned explosives" in all three buildings at ground zero, says Steven E. Jones.
In a paper posted online Tuesday and accepted for peer-reviewed publication next year, Jones adds his voice to those of previous skeptics, including the authors of the Web site www.wtc7.net, whose research Jones quotes. Jones' article can be found at www.physics.byu.edu/research/energy/htm7.html.

Jones, who conducts research in fusion and solar energy at BYU, is calling for an independent, international scientific investigation "guided not by politicized notions and constraints but rather by observations and calculations.
"It is quite plausible that explosives were pre-planted in all three buildings and set off after the two plane crashes — which were actually a diversion tactic," he writes. "Muslims are (probably) not to blame for bringing down the WTC buildings after all," Jones writes.

Previous investigations, including those of FEMA, the 9/11 Commission and NIST (the National Institutes of Standards and Technology), ignore the physics and chemistry of what happened on Sept. 11, 2001, to the Twin Towers and the 47-story building known as WTC 7, he says. The official explanation — that fires caused structural damage that caused the buildings to collapse — can't be backed up by either testing or history, he says.
Jones acknowledges that there have been "junk science" conspiracy theories about what happened on 9/11, but "the explosive demolition hypothesis better satisfies tests of repeatability and parsimony and therefore is not 'junk science.' "

In a 9,000-word article that Jones says will be published in the book "The Hidden History of 9/11," by Elsevier, Jones offers these arguments:
• The three buildings collapsed nearly symmetrically, falling down into their footprints, a phenomenon associated with "controlled demolition" — and even then it's very difficult, he says. "Why would terrorists undertake straight-down collapses of WTC-7 and the Towers when 'toppling over' falls would require much less work and would do much more damage in downtown Manhattan?" Jones asks. "And where would they obtain the necessary skills and access to the buildings for a symmetrical implosion anyway? The 'symmetry data' emphasized here, along with other data, provide strong evidence for an 'inside' job."
• No steel-frame building, before or after the WTC buildings, has ever collapsed due to fire. But explosives can effectively sever steel columns, he says.
• WTC 7, which was not hit by hijacked planes, collapsed in 6.6 seconds, just .6 of a second longer than it would take an object dropped from the roof to hit the ground. "Where is the delay that must be expected due to conservation of momentum, one of the foundational laws of physics?" he asks. "That is, as upper-falling floors strike lower floors — and intact steel support columns — the fall must be significantly impeded by the impacted mass. . . . How do the upper floors fall so quickly, then, and still conserve momentum in the collapsing buildings?" The paradox, he says, "is easily resolved by the explosive demolition hypothesis, whereby explosives quickly removed lower-floor material, including steel support columns, and allow near free-fall-speed collapses." These observations were not analyzed by FEMA, NIST nor the 9/11 Commission, he says.
• With non-explosive-caused collapse there would typically be a piling up of shattering concrete. But most of the material in the towers was converted to flour-like powder while the buildings were falling, he says. "How can we understand this strange behavior, without explosives? Remarkable, amazing — and demanding scrutiny since the U.S. government-funded reports failed to analyze this phenomenon."
• Horizontal puffs of smoke, known as squibs, were observed proceeding up the side the building, a phenomenon common when pre-positioned explosives are used to demolish buildings, he says.
• Steel supports were "partly evaporated," but it would require temperatures near 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit to evaporate steel — and neither office materials nor diesel fuel can generate temperatures that hot. Fires caused by jet fuel from the hijacked planes lasted at most a few minutes, and office material fires would burn out within about 20 minutes in any given location, he says.
• Molten metal found in the debris of the World Trade Center may have been the result of a high-temperature reaction of a commonly used explosive such as thermite, he says. Buildings not felled by explosives "have insufficient directed energy to result in melting of large quantities of metal," Jones says.
• Multiple loud explosions in rapid sequence were reported by numerous observers in and near the towers, and these explosions occurred far below the region where the planes struck, he says.
Jones says he would like the government to release 6,899 photographs and 6,977 segments of video footage for "independent scrutiny." He would also like to analyze a small sample of the molten metal found at Ground Zero." - Deseret News Utah (11/10/05)

BYU Professor Has Theory About 9/11 Attacks

"A BYU professor has developed a new theory about the terrorist attack in New York on September 11, 2001. He believes planes alone did not bring down the world trade center.
Both towers collapsed in place after the attacks, and later that day, 7 World Trade Center, which was never hit by a plane, fell in less than seven seconds.
BYU professor Steven E. Jones says that planes alone did not bring down the towers.
The images are seared into the minds of people across the globe. We saw the planes hit, the explosions and fire so hot, fortress towers could not stand. Jones says not so fast.
"They're sticking with this one hypothesis. Its almost like they have blinders on – and its got to be fires and damage,” says Jones.

Jones is a 20-year physics professor at BYU, who's penned an academic paper raising another hypothesis – explosives may have been pre-positioned in the buildings.
Especially intriguing to Jones was the destruction of 7 World Trade Center, damaged and ablaze from tower debris but never hit by a plane." - KUTV/CBS (11/10/05) [KUTV video coverage]

- Alex Jones interviews Stephen Jones

- Prof. Jones Talks to Arctic Beacon; Advised in for Whirlwind 9/11 Ride, after Claiming WTC Was a Controlled Demolition - Arctic Beacon (11/12/05)

- BYU Prof. Has Plenty of Company, 60 Faculty Members from 2 Utah Universities Concur a Controlled Demolition Brought Down the WTC - Arctic Beacon (11/13/05)

95 bishops from Bush's church said they repent their "complicity" in the "unjust and immoral" invasion of Iraq (11/10/05)

Palestinian spy chief killed in Jordon blast (11/10/05)

Operatives say CIA exemption on torture a mistake (11/10/05)

BYU professor thinks bombs, not planes, toppled WTC

BYU Forms New Theory About 9/11 Attacks (11/10/05)

GOP memo touts new terror attack as way to reverse party's decline -Capitol Hill Blue (11/10/05)

MIT study: Do tinfoil helmets really work? (11/10/05)

Israelis evacuated before hotel attack (11/10/05) Flashback: AP story said Israeli embassy tipped off before London attack; Odigo says workers were warned of 9/11 attack

Jordan Blast: Bomb in Ceiling (11/10/05)

Bali bomber blows himself up in ambush (11/10/05)

Zarqawi group claims Jordan blasts (11/10/05)

Iraq-Al Qaeda Link Examined, claim by captured Qaeda operative has since admitted he was lying (11/11/05)

Former Cleveland Mayor Reported Flight 93 Landed at Cleveland Airport on 9/11 and Flight 175 in Vicinity -Arctic Beacon (11/11/05)

(*See also:  What really happened to Flight 93?)

Poll: Most Americans Say Bush Not Honest (11/11/05)

Prof. Jones Talks to Arctic Beacon -Arctic Beacon (11/12/05)

Al-Zarqawi myth U.S.'s own creation (11/12/05)

GOP Memo Wishes for Another Terror Attack (11/12/05)

Moussaoui's life could depend on what U.S. knew (11/12/05)

Jordan says Qaeda behind blasts (11/12/05)

Ethics panel clears senator in 9/11 leak probe (11/13/05)

Ex-intel Official: Bush Admin Will Restrict Liberties After Next Terror Attack (11/13/05)

Bush Didn't Mislead on War, NSA Adviser Says (11/13/05)

Muslim becomes mayor after anonymous flier alleges terror ties (11/13/05)

Bruce Willis offers $1 million to anyone who turns in al-Qaeda terror leaders (11/13/05)

BYU Professor Has Plenty of Company, 60 Faculty Members Concur with Controlled Demolition -Arctic Beacon (11/13/05)

• November 14, 2005 - BYU physics professor Steven E. Jones calls for a new 9/11 investigation after believing bombs, not planes, brought down the three WTC towers.

Prof. calls for 9/11 investigation

"BYU Physics Professor Steven E. Jones doesn't look like a conspiracy theorist.

But now, what he will try to tell you, in his quiet, confident way, is that official explanations of what happened on Sept. 11 — that the World Trade Center buildings collapsed from damage and superheated fires — are shaky, if not unscientific.

"It just does not add up," says Jones, referring specifically to the 47-story building known as WTC 7. "It doesn't add up that this [collapse] was caused by planes hitting the other buildings."

Jones, who studies fusion and solar energy at BYU, has lately turned his attention to Sept. 11 research and has turned more than a few heads in the process.

In a paper posted online Tuesday, Jones suggests that "pre-positioned explosives," not planes, were what brought down the three World Trade Center buildings — the two Twin Towers and WTC 7. Jones' article, which has been accepted for peer-reviewed publication next year, can be found at www.physics.byu.edu/research/energy/htm7.html.

"It is quite plausible that explosives were pre-planted in all three buildings and set off after the two plane crashes — which were actually a diversion tactic," he writes in his article. "Muslims are (probably) not to blame after all."

Jones says previous government investigations, including those by FEMA, the 9/11 Commission and NIST (the National Institutes of Standards and Technology), failed to address even the possibility of pre-planted explosives. This, despite the fact that WTC 7 wasn't even hit by a plane and that fire damage has never brought down a steel building before or since Sept. 11, he says.

"[WTC 7] is the most mysterious collapse and it does suggest an inside job," Jones says. "If the explosive hypothesis…" He corrects himself: "If the explosive demolition hypothesis — it is rather explosive — if this hypothesis is correct, that would imply an inside job because to bring a building down symmetrically using explosives … takes a lot of planning."

He mentions a few lesser-known details about the Sept. 11 attacks, appending little comments like "and that's a fact" or "and that's on tape" at several points along the way:

- Larry Silverstein, WTC leaseholder, insured the buildings against terrorist attack for billions of dollars less than two months before Sept. 11, Jones says.

- The towers were loaded with asbestos — "not anymore," Jones adds, "but they were. There was discussion for a long time: 'We've got to either get rid of the asbestos in these buildings or take them down and start over.'"

- In the aftermath of the buildings' collapse, Silverstein said of WTC 7, "We decided to pull it." Jones says "pull" is a common demolition term. "To pull a building means you initiate the demolition."

- Much of the steel from the collapsed towers was shipped to Asia for recycling, Jones says. "This was done over the objections of serious scientists and engineers, saying, 'Look, you're destroying evidence. We want to know how fire and damage could have possibly caused these buildings to collapse.'"

"You didn't know that, did you?" Jones says. He leans back farther in his chair. "We need an investigation," he says again.

At this Jones swivels his chair around to face the computer, accesses his paper online, and brings up several video clips of WTC 7's collapse.

One clip is from the CBS Evening News. You watch the 47-story tower tremble, dip slightly in the middle, then drop beneath the cityscape. You hear Dan Rather's distinctive voice: "It's reminiscent of those pictures we've all seen of buildings that are deliberately destroyed by well-placed dynamite …"

Jones replays the clip. "That's a perfect demolition," he says. "It's just what they shoot for. Middle goes down, they pull the core supports, the sides lean in, and then it goes straight down at near free-fall speed.

"And again, I'm not saying this proves it," he adds. "There's just a lot of evidence, and so it needs to be investigated."

Now Jones shows a different clip, from a different angle. The building trembles, dips, falls again.

"See that fall?" Jones says. "It's symmetric. Notice it dips in the middle. Did you see that? It dips in the middle first, which implies that the core supports there in the middle were pulled before the other supports. And that's common for demolition."

In his paper, Jones says the Twin Towers dipped in a similar way. He includes video footage of the north tower's antenna dropping some 10 feet before the rest of the tower begins to move.

Given the implications of Jones' research, the professor says he was extra careful in preparing it. He stresses how the paper was peer-reviewed and then explains something of that rigorous, anonymous process.

He also mentions the seminar he gave — on Sept. 22, as it happened — to a group of colleagues from the BYU Physics and Astronomy Department. It was a sort of dry-run test for how his research would be received, a final behind-closed-doors check before he went public with his provocative suggestions.

After the seminar, all but one of Jones' colleagues said they agreed an investigation was in order, Jones says. And the lone dissenter, physics professor Harold Stokes, came around the next day." - BYU NewsNet (11/14/05)

• November 14, 2005 - BYU physics professor Steven E. Jones is a guest on MSNBC's 'The Situation with Tucker Carlson' to discuss his WTC controlled demolition hypothesis in which the show "wasn't able" to play a video clip Mr. Jones sent them showing the mysterious collapse of the WTC 7.

Video: 'Explosive Theory' - MSNBC

Questioning what happened on 9/11
Professor believes planes didn't cause all the damage around the WTC

"Millions of people watched the horror of 9/11 right before their very eyes, live on television. Two planes, crashing into the World Trade Center. Less than a couple of hours later, both towers, of course, collapsing.
On Monday, Tucker Carlson welcomed Brigham Young University Professor Steven Jones to the 'Situation.' Jones, a professor of physics, believes that the hijackers may not have brought down the towers by themselves.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, just sum up this-obviously your theory, just the one sentence that I just explained, in the intro, contradicts what we all think we know about how these towers collapsed. Quickly sum up your explanation for what's happened.

STEVEN JONES, BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY: ... What I'm doing, Tucker, is presenting evidence, but it's a hypothesis to be tested. That's a big difference from a conclusion, and so I just wanted to clarify that. But to sum up that I have looked at the official reports by FEMA, and so on... regarding the collapse of-yes, of these buildings. ...
I'd like to look at the collapse of building seven in just a minute. It was not even hit by a jet. So we'll look at that one.
CARLSON: The two towers. The explanation has been that the fire inside was so intense that it weakened the structural steel and that each floor collapsed down upon the next in a pancake fashion, and they imploded in on themselves. That's essentially, I think, what people think.
JONES: Yes, that's basically it, yes. And so what I've done is to analyze these reports.
I would like to do a little experiment with you, Tucker, if I could. I sent out a video clip of the collapse of Building seven, because most people haven't actually seen that one, and that's the crux of the argument.
CARLSON: Can you sum up very quickly the argument for us? You believe there were explosives in the buildings planted by someone, detonated?
JONES: Well, yes.
CARLSON: Is that correct?
JONES: ... There are two hypotheses here. One is fire and damage caused all three buildings to collapse.
CARLSON: OK.
JONES: The other is that explosives in the buildings may have caused the collapse. And so, then we analyze and see which fits the data better, and I've done that in my 25-page paper.
CARLSON: I want to read you a quote from the 'Deseret Morning News,' a paper in Utah, from you. I'm quoting now.
"It is quite plausible that explosives were pre-planted in all three buildings and set off after the two plane crashes, which are actually a diversion tactic. Muslims are probably not to blame for bringing down the World Trade Center buildings after all."
That's, I would think, pretty offensive to a lot of the people listening. Do you have any evidence for that?
JONES: Well, not-not to the Muslims, I might say.
CARLSON: Well, that's good.
JONES: I have a lot of e-mails.
CARLSON: I'm sure your writings greeted with just glee in Islamabad, and Peshawar and places like that. But for Americans.
JONES: Well, I haven't received notes from there, but just good people. I have Muslim friends. Let me read, for example, but I'm not going to let you off the hook. I really want to do this experiment with you.
CARLSON: We don't have a lot of time for experiments, Professor. But if you could just ... give us one thing to hold onto. How-you make these claims, or appear to make these claims ...
JONES: Tucker, sure, sure. Let's start with the collapse of Building seven. Can you roll the video clip that I sent to you?
CARLSON: OK. I am not sure if we can, but that is the World Trade Center. It's smaller than the other two it was not hit by a plane.
JONES: Let's try.
CARLSON: Of course, it collapsed.
JONES: Right. It's 47 stories.
CARLSON: That's right.
JONES: Twenty-four steel columns in the center.
CARLSON: Right.
JONES: Trusses, asymmetrically supported. Now, I can't see what you're seeing. Are we rolling that?
CARLSON: No. We just see the building. And just so our viewers know, the explanation that I think is conventional is that there was a large tank of diesel fuel stored in the lower level of that, which caught fire, and the resulting fire collapsed the building.
JONES: Well, that's basically it, yes, but as we read in the FEMA report, it says here, and I put this in my paper, of course. "The best hypothesis, which is the only one they looked at, fire, has only a low probability of occurrence. Further investigation analyses are needed to resolve this issue, and I agree with that."
CARLSON: OK.
JONES: But they admit there's only a low probability, and if you look at the collapse, you see what I have studied is the fall time, the symmetry, the fact that it first dips in the middle. That's called the kink. Which is very characteristic, of course, of controlled demolition.
CARLSON: Professor, I am sorry that we are out of time ...
JONES: Whoa, one other thing I want to mention.
CARLSON: Ok. If you can hit it - hit it quickly.
JONES: OK. All right. Here we go. Molten metal in the basements of all three buildings.
CARLSON: Right.
JONES: And yet all scientists now reasonably agree that the fires were not sufficiently hot to melt the steel, so what is this molten metal? It's direct evidence for the use of high-temperature explosives, such as thermite, which produces molten iron as an end product.
CARLSON: OK.
JONES: It's very short time, but people will read the paper, then I talk about the molten metal, the symmetry of the collapse, and the weaknesses and inadequacies of the fire hypothesis.
CARLSON: Professor, we are going to have to leave it to our viewers who are interested enough to follow up to do just that. We appreciate you coming on, even if I don't understand your theories, we appreciate you trying to explain them. Thanks." - MSNBC (11/15/05) [Video at:  MSNBC, Revere Radio Network, 9/11 Blogger, Info Wars]

'The Situation with Tucker Carlson' for Nov. 14th

Read the transcript to the Monday show

TUCKER CARLSON, HOST: Thanks to you at home for staying with us tonight. We appreciate it, as we always do.

Also talk to a BYU professor with a shocking theory on what really brought down the Twin Towers on 9/11.

Still to come, meet a controversial college professor who thinks bombs, not just airplanes, brought down the World Trade Center.

CARLSON: Coming up, four years have passed since 9/11, so why is one college professor suddenly revealing his explosive theory about the collapse of the Twin Towers?

CARLSON: Coming up, were pre-positioned explosives behind the collapse of the Twin Towers on 9/11? We‘ll talk to a BYU University professor who says Muslims probably not to blame for bringing down the buildings after all when THE SITUATION RETURNS." - MSNBC (11/15/05)

- Did MSNBC censor the "collapse" video of Building 7 during Tucker Carlson's interview w/ BYU Prof. Steven Jones? - Revere Radio Network

9/11 Panel Gives White House Mixed Review (11/14/05)

BYU Prof. calls for 9/11 investigation (11/14/05)

Drones with video to fly over US cities -Drudge Report (11/14/05)

CIA accused of using airport in Mallorca (11/14/05)

CIA allegedly hid evidence of detainee torture - report (11/14/05)

More Miraculous or Perhaps Planted 9/11 Evidence Uncovered [ATM Card] -Arctic Beacon (11/14/05)

Israeli Mossad establishing Trinidad & Tobago base against Venezuela -VHeadline (11/14/05)

9/11 commissioners fault administration for treatment detainees (11/14/05)

Salem funded Atta's 9/11 suicide squad -India Monitor (11/14/05)

U.S. Held Iraqi With Same Name As Jordon Bomber (11/14/05)

• November 15, 2005 -  In response to his interview with BYU professor Steven E. Jones about his theory that bombs brought down the three WTC buildings, Tucker Carlson says 9/11 skeptics should "leave this country" because their tax dollars go to support the U.S. government which makes 9/11 skeptics "complicit".

Transcribed by Killtown

"Thanks Mark [referring to a caller], uh your one of dozens, scores, maybe hundreds of people who called and wrote after our segment last night with Steven Jones, he's the BYU professor who claimed in his writings anyway, but not on our show, that he believes the U.S. government had a role in blowing up the World Trade Center, that it was not done by terrorists and looks like bombs were planted in those buildings.  We were open minded enough to have him on and gave him more time really then we've given almost anybody since this show has been on the air and he was unable to explain himself.  It was a very frustrating segment last night that drew an amazing response from a lot of viewers who thinks... if you really believe the U.S. government killed 3,000 of its own citizens for no reason and lied about it and invaded Afghanistan as a result of something it did, you ought to leave this country because that's so terrible, so evil that your tax dollars go in to support it -- make you complicit in it.  If you really believe that, you ought to leave.  Ah but we're gonna keep an open mind, so if there's more evidence of lies, that the government's lying about it, you'll hear about it on this show." [Video at:  911blogger, douglas ascott]

Former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds tells of dispute (11/15/05)

Moussaoui wins 9/11 evidence appeal (11/15/05)

Afghanistan: The war with no end (11/15/05)

9/11 Death Penalty Trial Delayed (11/15/05)

Pak remains sanctuary for terror: 9/11 Comm (11/15/05)

• November 16, 2005 - Tucker Carlson again tells 9/11 skeptics to leave the country if they think the U.S. government's complicit with 9/11 because staying in the country would mean keep paying taxes to the government which would make them just as complicit.

9/11 theorist clearly hits a nerve (Tucker Carlson)

"We've never had an e-mail response like the one we got after Monday's segment with Stephen Jones, a professor in the department of physics and astronomy at Brigham Young University. Jones believes that the World Trade Center buildings were likely brought down by bombs, rather than by hijacked planes on 9-11. "Use of powerful, pre-positioned explosives in the WTC buildings would imply an 'inside job'," Jones writes in a paper available on the BYU website. "Clearly, we must find out what really caused the WTC skyscrapers to collapse as they did."
When one of my producers first told me about him, my first thought was: Stephen Jones is insane. And he may be. On the other hand, he does have a legitimate job and a responsible-sounding title. He's not living in the park, or writing me letters in crayon. How crazy could he really be? In the interest of open-mindedness, we booked him.
That was probably a mistake. Talking about 9-11 is a lot like discussing someone else's religion: You can do it, but you've got to tread carefully. Most of the time, it's best to stick to platitudes and move on. The subject is still too raw for debate, particularly here in the New York area. (The little town where I live lost six people on September 11th; the town next door lost more than 20.) Professor Jones wasn't up to the job. If you saw last night's show, you know what an uncomfortable six minutes it was. If not, I'll summarize: Jones was almost totally incapable of explaining his own ideas. By the end of the interview I understood no more about his hypothesis than when it began. He was an epically bad guest.
Yet - and here's the interesting part - he seemed to connect with a huge number of viewers. Some who e-mailed were offended that Jones would dare question the official version of 9-11. Some were confused by what he was trying to say. But the overwhelming majority wrote to thank me for my "courage" in putting him on, and to complain that we didn't give him more time to explain the conspiracy.
In other words, a lot of people seem to think it's possible that the U.S. government had a hand in bringing down the World Trade Center buildings.
Ponder that for a second: The U.S. government killed more than 3,000 of its own citizens. For no obvious reason. Then lied about it. Then invaded two other countries, killing thousands of their citizens as punishment for a crime they didn't commit.
If you really thought this - or even considered it a possibility - how could you continue to live here? You couldn't. You'd leave the United States on the next available flight and not come back. You'd have no choice. Continuing to pay taxes to a government capable of something so evil would make you complicit in the crime.
So of course most of the people who wrote to say they think the government might have been behind 9-11 don't really think the government might have been behind 9-11. For whatever reason, they just like to say so. Which as far as I'm concerned makes them phony and irresponsible.
Incidentally, we still have an open mind here on the Situation, even after Professor Stephen Jones. So if evidence ever does arise that the government lied substantially about what happened on September 11th, we'll be on it immediately. I promise." - MSNBC (11/16/05)

BYU prof. releases study into the collapse of WTC (11/16/05)

Madonna:  "9/11 was too ambiguous," she tells the magazine. "You couldn't prove how the government was somehow in on the deal. There were too many arguments against it. You could say, 'Oh, that's just Michael Moore,' 'Oh, that's just hearsay.' New Orleans was undeniable irresponsibility." - People (11/16/05)

Sheehan Demands Trial on Protest Charge (11/16/05)

Cheney says war critics 'dishonest, reprehensible' (11/16/05)

Concern widens in Europe over CIA prisoner flights (11/16/05)

9/11 attacks cost $660bn so far: Report (11/16/05)

Hate crimes soar after 9/11 attacks (11/16/05)

Bush Gang Swore Saddam Was Behind 9/11 In Lawsuit - Sierra Times (11/16/05)

Prof. Jones cancels interview with Wing TV - Wing TV

Bush's current job approval rating at 34% (11/17/05)

Madonna Can’t Prove Government Was in on 9/11 'Deal' (11/17/05)

Freeh: 9-11 panel ignored 'Able Danger' (11/17/05)

They Left Him No Choice (11/17/05)

Senators Threaten to Hold Up Patriot Act (11/17/05)

Hawkish Democrat Calls for Iraq Pullout

(11/17/05)

'Holocaust revisionist' David Irving arrested in Austria

(11/17/05)

More than 80,000 held by US since 9/11 attacks (11/18/05)

Perle says out with the Saudis (11/18/05)

Jonesing on conspiracy theories (11/20/05)

No evidence? It must be conspiracy (11/21/05)

Cheney Slams War Critics, Praises Murtha (11/21/05)

9-11 Probers Leave Questions Behind (11/22/05)

Report: 9/11-Iraq link refuted days after attack; Saddam viewed al-Qaida as threat rather than ally (11/22/05)

Dirty Bomb Suspect Jose Padilla Indicted After 3 Years In Custody (11/22/05)

Man Convicted In Plot To Kill Bush (11/22/05)

Report: Bush talked of bombing Al-Jazeera (11/22/05)

Iraq's factions urge a schedule for troop pullout (11/22/05)

Oil majors may rob Iraq of billions (11/23/05)

More challenges to 9/11 circulating myths -Al Jazeera (11/24/05)

A 9/11 tip-off: Fact or fancy? (11/24/05)

US Air Force unveils hand-held laser gun (11/25/05)

Al-Jazeera demands answers after claim that Bush wanted to bomb headquarters (11/25/05)

Torture claims 'forced US to cut terror charges', main evidence of Padilla's involvement came from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (11/25/05)

Two 9/11 Airliners, Flight 93 and 175, Just Recently Taken Off FAA 'Active' List -Arctic Beacon (11/25/05)

What did U.S. military know before 9/11? (11/26/05)

Iran president: Charge Bush for war crimes (11/26/05)

The Gay Experiment That Started AIDS In America - Dr. Alan Cantwell (11/27/05)

White House lays foundation for US troop withdrawal (11/27/05)

Questions About Suicide of Colonel Who Investigated Contractors Corruption (11/27/05)

Pentagon Expanding Its Domestic Surveillance Activity (11/27/05)

Retooling after 9/11, the CIA starts to blog; And it now mines the Web for useful, public information (11/27/05)

Former Top FBI Agent Wants Deeper OKC Bombing Investigation (11/28/05)

N.C. Judge Declines to Protect Voting Machine Maker Diebold Inc.; Vendor May Pull Out (11/28/05)

Supreme Court denies FBI translator's case, Sibel Edmonds (11/28/05)

San Diego-area Rep. Cunningham pleads guilty to bribery, resigns (11/28/05)

Ex-Powell Aide Criticizes Detainee Effort (11/28/05)

CIA boss: ‘We know more’ on bin Laden, others (11/29/05)

Cleared, the bomber's sister who 'praised 9/11' (11/29/05)

John McCain: Torture Worked on Me - Newsmax (11/29/05)

Bush: Early Iraq Exit Would Be a Mistake (11/29/05)

Hillary Clinton Defends Pro-War Vote (11/29/05)

Pilots Complain About Cheney's Airspace (11/29/05)

Killings Linked to Shiite Squads in Iraqi Police Force (11/29/05)

Syria accuses US of launching lethal raids over its borders (11/29/05)

Some audience members praise Sheehan speech; Korey Rowe of 'Loose Change' gave her a copy of 9/11 doc - (11/30/05)

Hundreds of Questions Await Moussaoui Jury Pool (11/30/05)

EPA to Scale Back Testing at Ground Zero (11/30/05)

September 11 Student Documentary - WICZ FOX 40 (12/01/05)

Part 2: Student Documentary on 9-11 - WICZ FOX 40 (12/02/05)

Fodder for a foothills get-together: conspiracy theories surrounding Sept. 11 (12/01/05)

Small scissors to be allowed back on U.S. planes (12/01/05)

Intelligence chief: U.S. safer since 9/11 (12/02/05)

9/11 Panel Gives Gov't Poor Marks on Reform (12/02/05)

9/11 Conspiracy Documentary Fails To Convince (12/02/05)

Top Al Qaeda commander killed in Pakistan (12/03/05

Exposed: Map of Ground Zero spoils, Where the money went to clear Trade Center debris (12/04/05)

4-year scandal of the 9/11 billions (12/04/05)

Former 9/11 Commissioners: U.S. at Risk (12/04/05)

John Lennon's Death Lingers for Witnesses (12/04/05)

Open and Shut; Four years later, we still have ten big questions about 9/11 (12/05/05)

Censor rumors quelled; BYU gag order on Prof. Steven E. Jones exaggerated (12/05/05)

9/11 panel shuts down, issuing final warning (12/05/05)

S. Dakota's tallest building resists demolition (12/05/05) (See also here)

9/11 Stories Attract Masses To Website (12/06/05)

Magical Realism; 9/11 Survivor William Rodriguez Detects Sleight of Hand

Prosecutors to share 9/11 stories during Moussaoui sentencing (12/06/05)

Plane plows into Tehran building, no collapse (12/06/05)

Moussaoui Prosecutors Ask to Limit Testimony (12/06/05)

9/11 widow: no surprises in commission's dismal report card (12/06/05)

• December 7, 2005 - $50,000,000.00 Reward Offer for 9/11 Conspiracy Proof

"WhatDoesItMean.Com today announces that we are offering a reward of $50,000,000.00 (fifty-million dollars) to any present or former United States Government Public or Military Official having direct knowledge and verifiable proof that the events of September 11, 2001 were not caused by Islamic Terrorists.
Cabinet Secretaries of the Administration, Military Officers with a Rank of Brigadier General or higher, present or former Directors of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, United States Senators and United States Congressional Leaders are only those eligible to claim this reward.
On December 7, 1941 the United States was attacked by the Military Forces of the Japanese Empire, an event which then plunged to World into Total War.
New historical evidence has now proven that the Japanese Attack upon the United States Military Forces located at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii was known about by the President of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the United States War Department.
Upon being attacked, the United States declared war on the Japanese Empire, and to which their German and Italian Axis Allies then Declared War upon America.
The events of September 11, 2001 have likewise been a catalyzing event from which the seeds of Total Global War have been sown.
United States Military forces are currently at War in both Afghanistan and Iraq, with potentially new War actions being planned in Syria, Iran and North Korea.
United States Military forces are also now reported to be in the South American Nation of Paraguay, and which many South American Leaders believe is the Americans reaction to many of these Nations either having already elected, or about to elect Presidents that are opposed to US polices in that region.
The potential for Total Global War exists should the United States expand its operations and recent changes by the American Military now allow them First Strike capability with their Nuclear Forces.
September 11, 2001, being the single catalyzing event which has propelled the United States present Global War on Terror, likewise provides the World with its Last Chance to avert the catastrophic event of Total Global War.
By any of the aforementioned United States Political or Military Leaders claiming this reward it will provide the proof needed to convince the American People that their present War on Terror was based on lies and deception.
Upon the American People being offered such proof the present atmosphere within the United States for making war will change, and with this change will come the standing down of American Military Forces from their present actions as the American People will know that their true enemies were never outside of their borders, but within them.
It is our sincere hope that with this offer of $50 million there remains among the Political and Military Leaders of the United States at least ONE individual of faith and courage. And should this Individual exist they deserve this reward.
For information on claiming this reward please email to: sorchafaal@fastmail.fm" - WhatDoesItMean.com (12/07/05)

International Researcher Sorcha Faal announces $50 million reward for information proving 9/11 Conspiracy. - PRWeb (12/09/05)

Were the levees bombed in New Orleans? (12/07/05)

Moussaoui Jurors Might See All 9/11 Victims' Photos (12/07/05)

Ex-top general disputes claim that 9/11 boss Atta was identified in 2000 (12/07/05)

Air Marshal Kills Passenger, Citing Threat (12/07/05)

UQ Wire: Dutch TV Documentary On 9/11 Questions (12/08/05)

Bush on the Constitution: 'It's just a goddamned piece of paper' -Capitol Hill Blue (12/09/05)

$50,000,000.00 Reward Offer for 9/11 Conspiracy Proof (12/09/05)

US told Saudis about Qaeda plane threat pre-9/11 (12/09/05)

Michael Moore questions Pentagon strike -911blogger (12/13/05)

BOXER 9/11 REPORT CRITIC (12/13/05)

Investigator: U.S. Shipped Out Detainees (12/13/05)

Weldon expects green light for 'Able Danger' hearings (12/13/05)

Clinton, Nadler call for investigation of EPA response to 9-11 (12/13/05)

Project Bojinka: The Pre-Plan to 9/11 (12/13/05)

Law firm says filed suit against Diebold (12/13/05)

Diebold CEO Resigns (12/13/05)

Is the Pentagon spying on Americans? (12/14/05)

Senate GOP Fights to Sustain Patriot Act (12/14/05)

Bush: Iraq Invasion My Responsibility (12/14/05)

Bob Novak Says President Knows Leak Source (12/14/05)

9/11 ID computer was sham, doc sez (12/14/05)

• December 15, 2005 - Bush Secretly Lifted Some Limits on Spying in U.S. After 9/11, Officials Say

Bush Secretly Lifted Some Limits on Spying in U.S. After 9/11, Officials Say

"Months after 9/11, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans without court-approved warrants." - NY Times (12/15/05)

Elections Official: Some Voting Machines Could Be Hacked (12/15/05)

Reichstag re-designer to design WTC tower (12/15/05)

Weldon to get his chance to prove 9/11 accusations (12/15/05)

Shocked Lawmakers Demand Spy Program Probe (12/16/05)

Bush Won't Discuss Report of NSA Spying (12/16/05)

Reports: Bush Authorized NSA to Spy in U.S. (12/16/05)

Anti-terror Patriot Act renewal blocked in Senate (12/16/05)

FOIA requests on UFOs, September 11, and President Bush's National Guard records - Raw Story (12/16/05)

Bush defends eavesdropping, pushes Patriot Act (12/17/05)

Bush: Spying program to continue (12/19/05)

Pentagon's Intelligence Authority Widens - Washington Post (12/19/05)

$50,000 reward offered for info on missing explosives, 550 pounds of explosives missing in New Mexico (12/20/05)

U.S. senator says he was wrong about 9-11 terrorists coming from Canada (12/20/05)

Cheney Says President Has Spying Authority (12/20/05)

Rumsfeld Doubts Bin Laden in Full Command (12/20/05)

Analysis: Bush Ties Surveillance to 9/11 Law (12/20/05)

Bush pardons Denver attorney; MDC counsel was sentenced in '84 cocaine case (12/21/05)

Bush’s Snoopgate, The president was so desperate to kill The New York Times’ eavesdropping story (12/21/05)

Diebold Hack Hints at Wider Flaws (12/21/05)

Cheney Calls for Stronger Presidential Powers, "You know, it's not an accident that we haven't been hit in four years." (12/21/05)

Senate Passes Patriot Act Extension (12/21/05)

Secret spying captured some domestic calls: report (12/21/05)

Hussein: White House 'No. 1 liar in the world' (12/22/05)

Bush Administration Defends Spying Program (12/22/05)

Key House Republican Balks at Patriot Act (12/22/05)

Former 9/11 Terror Suspect To Sue Met Police (12/22/05)

File the Bin Laden Phone Leak Under 'Urban Myths' (12/22/05)

News of Surveillance Is Awkward for Agency (12/22/05)

Court Bars Transfer of Padilla To Face New Terrorism Charges (12/22/05)

Daschle: Congress Didn't OK Spying Authority (12/23/05)

FBI Official Defends Radiation Monitoring (12/23/05)

Mosques monitored for radiation: report (12/23/05)

U.S. Troop Cuts Would Lead to Fewer Deaths (12/23/05)

Alito Defended Officials From Wiretap Suits (12/23/05)

Italy warrants for 22 purported CIA operatives (12/23/05)

Fidel Castro Says Bush 'Very Much a Fool' (12/23/05)

Radical Muslim cleric 'predicted London bombings': television (12/23/05)

9/11 CELL CALLS SAID FALSE? -FreeMarketNews (12/23/05)

Osama's Niece Poses in Racy Photo Shoot (12/23/05)

Report: Spying Broader Than Acknowledged (12/24/05)

Taliban still operating in Pakistan: U.S. report (12/24/05)

US Deaths in Iraq Projected to Meet 9/11 Rate in January 2007 -Hammer of Truth

Bush's 9/11 mantra doesn't confer carte blanche powers (12/25/05)

Powell sees nothing wrong with domestic spying (12/25/05)

Condoleezza Rice’s star rising (12/25/05)

US to reduce troop numbers in Afghanistan very soon (12/26/05)

Report finds fault with Hub’s terror response (12/26/05)

Bush Presses Editors on Security (12/26/05)

Secret surveillance up sharply since 9/11 (12/27/05)

NSA just one of many federal agencies spying on Americans (12/27/05)

Rice authorized National Security Agency to spy on UN Security Council in run-up to war, former officials say -Raw Story (12/27/05)

U.S. Allies Reducing Troop Levels in Iraq (12/27/05)

Spying pattern a legacy of 9/11 (12/27/05)

Mayor: London has thwarted 10 terror attacks since 9/11 (12/27/05)

NSA Web Site Puts 'Cookies' on Computers (12/28/05)

Ted Koppel: "If 9/11 had Happened on Bill Clinton's Watch, he Would have gone into Iraq" (12/28/05)

Pentagon Shakes Up Emergency Hierarchy, revises plans for succession in doomsday scenario (12/29/05)

Homeland Security poorly managed: audit (12/29/05)

Free Saddam to end woes in Iraq, lawyer tells Bush (12/29/05)

Pre 2001 • 2001 • 9/11 • 2002 • 2003 • 2004 • 2005 • 2006