Sunday 27 January 2013

Charter Meeting of the Dick Cheney Executive Assassination Team Survivors Support Group.


http://www.cce.umn.edu/media/greatconversations/hersh_jacobs_mondale/hersh_jacobs_mondale.mp3


“Yuh. After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet. That does happen.

"Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command -- JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently.

They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. ...

"Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths.

"Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.

"It’s complicated because the guys doing it are not murderers, and yet they are committing what we would normally call murder. It’s a very complicated issue. Because they are young men that went into the Special Forces. The Delta Forces you’ve heard about. Navy Seal teams. Highly specialized.

"In many cases, they were the best and the brightest. Really, no exaggerations. Really fine guys that went in to do the kind of necessary jobs that they think you need to do to protect America. And then they find themselves torturing people.

"I’ve had people say to me -- five years ago, I had one say: ‘What do you call it when you interrogate somebody and you leave them bleeding and they don’t get any medical committee and two days later he dies. Is that murder? What happens if I get before a committee?’

"But they’re not gonna get before a committee.”

“Under the Bush Administration’s interpretation of the law, clandestine military activities, unlike covert C.I.A. operations, do not need to be depicted in a Finding, because the President has a constitutional right to command combat forces in the field without congressional interference.”


"I’ll make it worse. I think he’s put people left. He’s put people back. They call it a stay-behind. It’s sort of an intelligence term of art.

When you leave a country and, you know, you’ve been driven out the, you know, you’ve lost the war.

You leave people behind. It’s a stay-behind that you can continue to have contacts with, to do sabotage, whatever you want to do.

Cheney’s left a stay-behind.

He’s got people in a lot of agencies that still tell him what’s going on.

Particularly in defense, obviously. Also in the NSA, there’s still people that talk to him. He still knows what’s going on.

Can he still control policy up to a point? Probably up to a point, a minor point.

But he’s still there. He’s still a presence."




Now, That's What I Call an October Surprise....

Iran-Contra and Arms-for-Hostages Scandals: Salem bin Laden

Form History Commons:

October 1980: Osama’s Oldest Brother Allegedly Involved in ‘October Surprise’


Salem bin Laden in 1975.[Source: Corbis]


Salem bin Laden, Osama’s oldest brother, described by a French secret intelligence report as one of two closest friends of Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd who often performs important missions for Saudi Arabia, is involved in secret Paris meetings between US and Iranian emissaries this month, according to a French report. Frontline, which published the French report, notes that such meetings have never been confirmed. Rumors of these meetings have been called the “October Surprise” and some have speculated that in these meetings, George H. W. Bush negotiated a delay to the release of the US hostages in Iran, thus helping Ronald Reagan and Bush win the 1980 Presidential election. All of this is highly speculative, but if the French report is correct, it points to a long-standing connection of highly improper behavior between the Bush and bin Laden families. [PBS FRONTLINE, 2001]









The Strange Death Of bin
Laden's Brother In Texas

By Bud Kennedy





budk@star-telegram.com





Ft Worth Star-Telegram





9-27-1
SCHERTZ - One chapter in the enigmatic story of Osama bin Laden might lead to a Texas pasture, where his oldest brother died 13 years ago in an accident that is still something of a mystery.
What we do know is that Salem bin Laden, 42, and the oldest of Saudi Arabia's bin Laden brothers, was on one of his frequent visits to Texas when he and friends went out for a Sunday afternoon of fun - flying low-power ultralight aircraft at an air park north of San Antonio.
What we don't know is why Salem bin Laden took off in the tiny aircraft and turned toward a nearby row of high-power electrical towers. He climbed, but not high enough to clear the upper power line. The Sprint ultralight got tangled and crashed into the ground 115 feet below.
"Of everybody who was there, nobody could figure out why he tried to fly over the power lines," said Gerry Auerbach, 77, of New Braunfels, a retired pilot for Saudi Arabian Airlines and for the bin Laden brothers, multimillionaire builders who long ago disowned Osama.
"It was kind of a weird deal," said Schertz police Lt. Stephen Starr, at the time the city's acting police chief. "He just drifted up into the wires."
It has been turned into an even weirder deal by conspiracy theorists - with the unlikely help of the Public Broadcasting Service.
In the 2000 PBS Frontline special report, Hunting bin Laden, PBS reported that Salem bin Laden died in a 1988 Texas plane crash - not in a hobby-kit-type, one-man ultralight, but in a full-size British Aerospace BAC 1-11. The death "revived some speculation that he might have been 'eliminated,' " PBS reported, adding that an accident report was "never divulged."
That's news to Starr. He and officer Lori Flowers, now an officer in nearby Windcrest, wrote a report that remains public record.
On May 29, 1988, they were called to the Kitty Hawk Field of Dreams Ultra-Lite Flying Field on the edge of Schertz, a San Antonio suburb. Bin Laden had already been taken by ambulance to an Army hospital in San Antonio, according to the police report. Officers found the crumpled remains of a crashed ultralight.
No federal investigators came to the scene, Starr said. Federal investigators do not review ultralight or glider crashes.
Salem bin Laden was not wearing a helmet and died of head injuries from the fall, the Bexar County medical examiner concluded. The wind was blowing about 30 mph, usually too strong to fly an ultralight.
The Schertz officers interviewed several witnesses. Their report concludes simply: "Freak accident."
Now armed with the PBS misreport, some conspiracy writers think Osama bin Laden blames the United States for the death of his oldest brother, the family's leader throughout most of the 1970s and '80s after their father's death in 1967.
"I don't think so," Auerbach said. "I flew Salem everywhere, and I never met Osama. I think I saw him once."
That was in the 1970s. Osama bin Laden would have been a teen-ager. "He walked through the room," Auerbach said.
"Salem said: 'Oh, that's my brother. He's probably going to pray.' "
Several of the bin Laden brothers - not Osama - owned a fleet of aircraft and visited Texas often in the 1980s, Auerbach said. He chartered a Texas company named Binladen Aviation to manage part of the family fleet.
On that particular 1988 Sunday - over a drizzly and windy Memorial Day weekend - Salem bin Laden was visiting as a guest at the wedding of Auerbach's son, he said. Bin Laden had also planned to ask about having an older BAC 1-11 refurbished in San Antonio, Auerbach said. But he was simply out for fun with friends at the ultralight park that afternoon.
"He was outgoing, a little bit flamboyant - a nice guy," Auerbach said.
He was expecting bin Laden to come by the house later that day.
Now, Auerbach said he's "like everybody else in America - I'm shocked."
"The fact that one of his brothers might be involved doesn't make any difference," Auerbach said. "What matters is - there's a nut case out there somewhere on the loose."
Things are weird enough.
There's no reason to make a weirder story out of a tragic accident in Texas.
http://web.star-telegram.com/content/fortworth/2001/09/27/state/fw010402-0927-X B001-kennedy.htm
Bin Laden's family link to Bush 
by PETER ALLEN, Daily Mail 
In summer 1971, Osama and Salem Bin Laden enjoyed a holiday in Sweden with some of their 55 brothers and sisters. 
Yet within a few years, the two teenagers' lives had taken stunningly different turns. 
As the world knows to its cost, Osama embraced Islamic fundamentalism and 30 years later was named the world's most wanted man. He is prime suspect in the murder of nearly 7,000 in the worst ever terrorist atrocities in the U.S. earlier this month. 
Incredibly, Salem went on to become a business partner of the man who is leading the hunt for his brother. In the 1970s, he and George W Bush were founders of the Arbusto Energy oil company in Mr Bush's home state of Texas. 
Photos reveal the brothers on family holiday to the Swedish town of Falun, 150 miles north-west of Stockholm, when Osama was 14 and Salem around 19. 
The brothers had recently inherited a fortune from their construction magnate father, Mohammed. He left millions to each of his 57 children by 12 wives after dying in a plane crash in 1968. 
Osama and Salem first visited Falun in 1970, arriving in a blue Rolls-Royce flown to Copenhagen by private jet. They liked the town so much they returned with other family members a year later. 
Learning that the Bin Ladens, originally from Saudi Arabia, were staying at the Astoria Hotel, a local photographer asked the unusual visitors to pose. 
Astoria owner Christina Akerblad said last night: 'They were beautiful boys, so elegantly dressed. Everybody loved them. 
'Osama played with my two boys, Anders and Gerk. 
'What's happened since is absolutely terrible. The first time I realised Osama had turned into a terrorist was when I saw his photograph in a magazine article about the bombing. He and his brother were such nice boys.' 
At that time the brothers both delighted in their enormous wealth. Salem - wearing a polo neck and slacks as he crouches three places from Osama, in jeans and a skinny rib jumper - put a large part of his money into business ventures, including Arbusto Energy. 
Mr Bush was not long out of Harvard Business School when he started the company in 1978. 
Salem watched it grow into a hugely successful business until his death in a microlight plane crash in Texas in 1983. 
As he built his own business empire, Salem Bin Laden had an intriguing relationship with the president-to-be. 
In 1978, he appointed James Bath, a close friend of Mr Bush who served with him in the Air National Guard, as his representative in Houston, Texas. 
It was in that year that Mr Bath invested $50,000 (about �34,000) in Mr Bush's company, Arbusto. It was never revealed whether he was investing his own money or somebody else's. 
There was even speculation that the money might have been from Salem. In the same year, Mr Bath bought Houston Gulf Airport on behalf of the Saudi Arabian multimillionaire. Three years ago, Mr Bush said the $50,000 investment in Arbusto was the only financial dealing he had with Mr Bath. 
Last night a White House spokesman was unavailable for comment. 
Before his death, Salem was married to Briton Caroline Carey, now 35. 
She has never spoken about her brother-in-law Osama, who was disowned by the rest of his family in 1991 when he was expelled from Saudi Arabia for his anti-government activities. 
Now living in luxury in a Cairo villa, she has married twice into the Bin Laden family - first to Salem, and now to a younger brother, Khaled. She has a daughter by each brother. 
Three years ago a family friend said: 'She first met Salem when she was just a child - no more than five years old. 
'He was a friend of the family but at that stage no one would have dreamed that they would end up marrying. 
'When they met again as adults, Caroline was 20 and Salem twice her age. 
'Salem was the head of the Bin Laden family as the oldest of all the brothers and sisters. 
'He was a man with a powerful presence.' 
They married and, after his death, Caroline decided to bring up her daughter in Saudi Arabia. 
'Caroline was a widow for nearly ten years before deciding to marry Khaled,' said the friend. 'He is one of the younger brothers and very quiet and loving. 
'She can never speak publicly about her marriage, or anything else for that matter, or she would be cut off from the family.' 
Caroline's father, a retired psychology lecturer from Hampstead, said: 'My daughter is very happy with Khaled. She decided to stay on in Saudi Arabia because she found her family there to be so loving and supportive.' 
Yesterday FBI agents swooped on a Boston suburb where around 20 of the wealthy relatives of Bin Laden live. They questioned them at a condominium complex in Charlestown. Agents even began visiting nightclubs to collect credit cards of younger members of the family. 
Bin Laden's younger brother Mohammed, who is said to have moved back to Saudi Arabia with his wife and children several years ago, owns a ten-bedroom mansion in nearby Wayland. 
Another younger brother, Abdullah, is a 1994 graduate of Harvard Law School. The family has given it �2million in endowments to research Islamic law. 
Most of Bin Laden's family have in the past strongly denounced the 44-year-old fugitive, now living in Afghanistan. 
The FBI in Boston has long been aware of his extended family and began monitoring their activities after the 1998 terrorist bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa. 
The Bin Ladens still run one of the biggest construction companies in the world.


Omar bin Laden claims to be one of the sons of Osama bin Laden.

Omar has written a memoir, with the help of an American called Jean Sasson.

The memoir has the appearance of CIA propaganda.

John R. MacArthur, the publisher of Harper's magazine, has called Jean Sasson "a propagandist for hire."



Osama bin Laden, at Oxford, far right.
Reportedly, from 1991 to 1996, Omar was with Osama in Sudan, and then in 1996 Omar traveled with Osama to Afghanistan.
Reportedly, Omar left Osama and his group in 2000.
Omar now lives in Qatar.


Omar married Zaina, a British grandmother nearly twice his age.
In July 2010, it was reported that Omar had mental problems.
Zaina split with Omar and Omar entered a mental hospital. 

In Syria, Lawson and Omar visit a nightclub called Les Caves de Boys where Moslems drink whiskey and watch Russian strippers.
According to Lawson, Omar, as a child in Afghanistan, befriended the teenage sons of men who plotted bombings.
According to Omar's memoir, one of Omar's closest friends was raped by a group of men.
"The rapists added insult to the attack and injury by snapping photographs of the young man during and after the rape," Omar writes in his memoir.
Excerpted from a report dealing with prominent Saudi families of Yemeni origin. Although FRONTLINE cannot vouch for the accuracy of this report, it does come from French intelligence sources. 
Today one of the biggest construction groups in the kingdom [of Saudi Arabia] and the Middle East, the "bin Laden empire" traces its origins to Sheik Mohammed bin Laden, a native of the Chafeite (Sunni) Hadramout who emigrated [from South Yemen] to Saudi Arabia at the beginning of the century.
The beginnings of his activity are shrouded in mystery. It is said that, having satisfied King Abdul Aziz with construction work on the royal palace, Mohammed bin Laden was awarded a much more prestigious contract: the renovation of Mecca. Whatever the actual circumstances, it is a fact that the Saudi royal family gave the bin Laden family--and group--exclusive rights to all construction of a religious nature, whether in Mecca, Medina or--until 1967--the Holy Places in Jerusalem. This enabled the bin Ladens to establish an industrial and financial empire which now extends far beyond religious construction projects.
The relationship between the bin Ladens and the Saudi royal family is quite exceptional in that it not simply one of business ties: it is also a relationship of trust, of friendship and of shared secrets. This is particularly the case with regard to the group's present-day leaders and the Soudairi clan.
Thanks to the renovation of Mecca, Sheik Mohammed bin Laden did not become merely Kin Abdul Aziz' official contractor, but his friend and confidant as well. This friendship has been handed down to their children. The bin Laden sons went to the same schools as the numerous offspring of King Abdul Aziz and they all followed the same path.
One of the connections which still explains many of the personal ties existing throughout the Middle East is the Victoria College in Alexandria, where the bin Laden boys attended classes along with schoolmates such as King Hussein of Jordan, Zaid Al Rifai, the Kashoggi brothers (whose father was one of the king's physicians), Kamal Adham (who ran the Saudi [security] services under King Faisal), present-day contractors Mohammed Al Attas, Fahd Shobokshi and Ghassan Sakr and actor Omar Sharif.
The relationship of trust between the royal family and the bin Laden group has never been repudiated, although it is known to have undergone some serious crises. The most important was doubtless the 1979 Mecca affair. Because the bin Laden company had the exclusive contract for repairs in the Holy Places, its trucks entered and left Mecca at all hours without being inspected. And the rebels used "bin Laden" trucks to get weapons into the city. One of the bin Laden sons, Mahrous, was actually arrested on account of his ties with the Islamists, but was later freed. He is currently manager of the group's Medina branch.
The reason is as follows: after studies in England, where he had kept company with Fadli (son of the ex-sultan of the Abdin region in South Yemen, now leader of a Yemeni fundamentalist group and arrested in Aden last January), Mahrous struck up friendships with a group of Syrian Moslem Brothers in exile in Saudi Arabia. Subsequent Saudi intelligence investigations showed that these Moslem Brothers had taken advantage of Mahrous to use bin Laden trucks without his knowledge.
There was a touch of irony to the episode: when the insurrection broke out, the Saudi security services had to go for help to the bin Ladens, the sole parties in possession of maps of Mecca enabling the Saudi (and Western) police to find their way through the city's underground passageways.
In any case, the episode also demonstrated the strength of the ties between the royal family and the bin Laden Group. Had it been some other group, there is no doubt that Mahrous--whether accomplice or patsy--would have been thrown into prison and the group barred from further economic activity in the kingdom, the sentence serving as a warning to others. This was not the case.
Likewise, the Saudi authorities' decision to issue an arrest warrant for Osama bin Laden on 16 May 1993 does not threaten to affect the relationship between the bin Ladens and the royal family. Osama, one of Mohammed's youngest son, has been known for years for his fundamentalist activities. ...The arrest warrant was issued both because of his support for fundamentalist groups involved in terrorist operations in Algeria and Egypt and his ties with upstart religious circles that tried to establish an independent human rights organization in Saudi Arabia at the beginning of May.
Contrary to appearances, both the Osama and the Mahrous incidents testify to the bin Laden's influence within the kingdom.
The ties of friendship binding bin Laden family members to King Fahd and his brothers make them prime confidantes and advisors. They play an obvious advisory role in Saudi-Yemeni relations. Still, they hold very few economic or financial interests in their ancestral homeland and certainly do not flaunt their family origins.
King Fahd's two closest friends were: Prince Mohammed Ben Abdullah (son of Abdul Aziz' youngest brother), who died in the early '80s and whose brother, Khaled Ben Abdullah (an associate of Suleiman Olayan), still has free access to the king; and Salem bin Laden, who died in 1988.
Like his father in 1968, Salem died in a 1988 air crash...in Texas. He was flying a BAC 1-11 which had been bought in July 1977 by Prince Mohammed Ben Fahd. The plane's flight plans had long been at the center of a number of investigations. According to one of the plane's American pilots, it had been used in October 1980 during secret Paris meetings between US and Iranian emissaries. Nothing was ever proven, but Salem bin Laden's accidental death revived some speculation that he might have been "eliminated" as an embarrassing witness. In fact, an inquiry was held to determine the exact circumstances of the accident. The conclusions were never divulged.

FRONTLINE Editors' Note:
The above paragraph is inaccurate. Salem bin Laden was piloting a light aircraft, not a BAC 1-11, when he crashed. As for "secret Paris meetings between US and Iranian emissaries" in October 1980, such meetings have never been confirmed. 
In spite of Salem's death, the bin Ladens are still part of the small group of friends surrounding the king which includes, in particular, Prince Khaled Turki Al Soudairi (married to one of Fahd's sisters), Prince Faisal Ben Turki Al Abdullah (married to another sister and father of Prince Abdullah Ben Faisal, head of the Royal Jubail Commission) and the family of Moona (Fahd's wife), the Ibrahims.
As trusted servants of the royal family, the bin Ladens have also often acted as chaperones to the king's sons, helping them get their start in business. This was the case with both Prince Mohammed Ben Fahd and Prince Daud Ben Nayef, two of the most active second-generation princes and both at the head of financial empires during the '80s. Both princes were often encountered along with one or another of the bin Laden sons at the head of international companies.
Appointed governor of the Eastern Province in the mid-'80s, Prince Mohammed Ben Fahd resigned from the chairmanships of his companies, putting Prince Saud in his place. The latter, named vice-governor of the Eastern Province last June, has also since withdrawn from a number of business activities.
There was also a political aspect to Salem bin Laden's financial activities. Like Ali Ben Moussalem, Salem bin Laden played a role in the US operations in the Middle East and Central America during the '80s.


Meet The Bin Ladens: Osama's Road to Riches and Terror

By Georg Mascolo and Erich Follath
The Bin Laden family disowned black sheep Osama in 1994. But have they really broken with the mega-terrorist? Recently revealed classified documents seem to suggest otherwise. Osama's violent career has been made possible in part by the generosity of his family -- and by his contacts with the Saudi royals.
Osama bin Laden remains at large. More questions are now being asked as to exactly how much help he has received from his family.
AFP
Osama bin Laden remains at large. More questions are now being asked as to exactly how much help he has received from his family.
In early spring 2002, American intelligence agents tipped off authorities in Bosnia-Herzegovina that something wasn't quite right with the "Benevolence International Foundation." Their reaction was swift; special forces stormed eight offices of the Islamic foundation in Sarajevo and in Zenica. They found weapons and explosives, videos and flyers calling for holy war. More importantly, however, they discovered a computer with a mysterious file entitled "Tarich Osama" -- Arabic for "Osama's Story."
After printing out the file -- close to 10,000 pages worth -- the intelligence experts quickly realized they had stumbled upon a true goldmine. They were looking at nothing less than the carefully documented story of al-Qaida, complete with scanned letters, minutes of secret meetings, photos and notes -- some even written in Osama Bin Laden's handwriting. CIA experts secured the highly sensitive material, dubbed "Golden Chain," and took everything back to the United States. To this day, only fragments of the material have been published. Now, however, SPIEGEL magazine has been given complete access to the entire series of explosive documents dating from the late 1980s to the early 1990s.
During that time, Osama bin Laden, known as "OBL" in CIA parlance, was primarily interested in "preserving the spirit of jihad" that had developed during the successful Afghanistan campaign -- a fight which saw an international group of Muslim fighters stand up to the mighty Soviet army. Bin Laden wanted to expand the group's activities to battle "the infidels" in the West. A full decade before the attacks on the Twin Towers, the documents make horrifyingly clear, bin Laden was already dreaming of "staging a major event for the mass media, to generate donations."
Finances are the focal point in these early al-Qaida documents. OBL, as one of the heirs of a large construction company, had a substantial fortune at his disposal, but it was still not enough to finance global jihad. The Saudi elite -- and his own family -- came to his assistance.
"Be generous when doing God's work"
The evidence lies in the most valuable document investigators managed to acquire: a list of al-Qaida's key financial backers. The list, titled with a verse from the Koran, "Let us be generous when doing God's work," is a veritable who's who of the Middle Eastern monarchy, including the signatures of two former cabinet ministers, six bankers and twelve prominent businessmen. The list also mentions "the bin Laden brothers." Were these generous backers aware, at the time, that were not just donating money to support the aggressive expansion of the teaching of the Islamic faith, but were also financing acts of terror against non-believers? Did "the bin Laden brothers," who first pledged money to Al-Qaida and then, in 1994, issued a joint press statement declaring that they were ejecting Osama from the family as a "black sheep," truly break ties with their blood relatives -- or were they simply pulling the wool over the eyes of the world?

Bin Laden became a household name after the dramatic Sept. 11 attacks.
REUTERS
Bin Laden became a household name after the dramatic Sept. 11 attacks.
Vincent Cannistraro, former head of counterterrorism for the CIA, says, "I tracked the bin Ladens for years. Many family members claimed that Osama was no longer one of them. It's an easy thing to say, but blood is usually thicker than water."
Carmen bin Laden, a sister-in-law of the terrorist, who lived with the extended family in Jeddah for years, says, "I absolutely do not believe that the bin Ladens disowned Osama. In this family, a brother is always a brother, no matter what he has done. I am convinced that the complex and tightly woven network between the bin Laden clan and the Saudi royal family is still in operation."
French documentary filmmaker Joël Soler even goes so far as to refer to the family as "A Dynasty of Terror," in his somewhat speculative made-for-TV piece.
But could this really be possible? Are the bin Ladens (or "Binladins," as they more commonly spell it), with their 25 brothers, 29 sisters, in-laws, aunts and, by now, at least 15 children of Osama, nothing but a clan of terrorists? Or are relatives being taken to task for the crimes of one family member, all on the strength of legends and conspiracy theories?
American celebrity attorney Ron Motley plans to file a lawsuit against alleged Saudi backers of al-Qaida on behalf of hundreds of families who lost relatives in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Listed among the defendants summoned by federal judge Richard Casey at Motley's request in January 2005 were Osama and one of his brothers, as well as the family's billion-dollar business in Jeddah, the "Saudi Binladin Group."
Tracking the bin Ladens across the globe
To form an impression of this rather unique extended family, one would have to travel to the desert kingdom, where it has its roots, as well as to Washington, Geneva, London and the border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan -- in other words, to all those places where the bin Ladens have left their tracks or where they live today. And the best way to get to the bottom of this clan is to piece together its many parts. Only then will it become more apparent whether the bin Ladens are a clan of terrorists or (with one well-known exception) a terribly affable family.
The bin Laden story, with its dramatic twists and turns, almost comes across as an Arab version of Thomas Mann's novel "Buddenbrooks." In both cases, it's the story of an imposing patriarch, who has managed to hold the clan together, and of his sons, who cannot or do not wish to stop the family's moral decline.

Al-Qaida has supporters the world over.
AP
Al-Qaida has supporters the world over.
JEDDAH, ON THE RED SEA, IS A MAJOR CITY AND AN IMPORTANT TRANSIT PORT FOR SAUDI ARABIA. It's also one of the main ports of entry for pilgrimages to the Muslim holy city of Mecca -- and to the headquarters of the family dynasty, the Saudi Binladin Group (SBG).
"We have a mayor and all kinds of political heavyweights. But the truly ruler of Jeddah is Bakr bin Laden," says an informer who agreed to speak only under condition of anonymity. "But Bakr is never seen in public, and when he does occasionally go to the Intercontinental Hotel for dinner -- usually with Osama's son Abdullah -- he has the entire restaurant closed. During a tour of the city, the source points out a glass and steel palace not far from the city's downtown area, with its twisting alleyways and smattering of restored old houses. It's the headquarters of SBG, the secretive realm of Bakr Bin Laden, 58, the son of the family's patriarch and chairman of the company's board of directors.
Jeddah is the place where the clan's founding father began his astonishing career. And it's also the place where the first family member became connected with Islamic terrorism -- not Osama, but his older brother, Mahrus bin Laden. US authorities have also clearly linked another member of the clan, Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, who is married to one of Osama's sisters, to terrorist attacks abroad.
Although Bin Laden senior -- Mohammed bin Laden -- was practically illiterate, he was blessed with tremendous energy and keen sense of business. In 1930, he left his village, Ribat, in the desperately poor Yemeni region of Hadramaut, and headed north. In Jeddah, then a small city, he eked out a living as a porter for pilgrims, steadfastly saving his earnings to start his own company.
A year later, when the desert kingdom of Saudi Arabia gained its independence, the immigrant from the south was still struggling to make ends meet. But he quickly recognized the two factors that were becoming increasingly important in his adopted country: oil, which had been flowing from Saudi wells since 1938, and, with its enormous profits, was revolutionizing the country's traditional society and causing nomadic tribes to take up roots; and the country's authoritarian king, whose patronage sometimes determined survival, but always determined social advancement.

Despite a worldwide manhunt -- and an assault on Tora Bora in Afghanistan, bin Laden has managed to evade capture.
AFP
Despite a worldwide manhunt -- and an assault on Tora Bora in Afghanistan, bin Laden has managed to evade capture.
A third factor that was critical to the success of the state, and was symbiotically linked with the monarchy from the very beginning, was the religious establishment in its uniquely Saudi form. The principles of Wahhabism-- as Saudi Islam is known -- have their roots with the 18th century radical zealot Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the Sauds' most powerful ally in their efforts to take control of the peninsula. After the founding of the Saudi state, fundamentalism became the official religion.
The royal court builder
Mohammed bin Laden had no quarrels with either the preachers or the princes; his only goal was to make it to the top, and the construction business was the ideal launching pad. The kingdom needed roads, railroads and airports. Bin Laden senior built ramps in the palace for the handicapped King Abd al-Aziz's wheelchair and highways into the mountains for his luxury cars. Bin Laden was later named Minister of Public Spending, and the royal family even awarded him the contract to renovate the country's holy sites. The family business, SBG, quickly developed into the court builder for the entire Saudi infrastructure.
Following an old Islamic tradition, the bin Laden senior kept numerous wives. In 1956, he sired child number 17 with a Syrian woman from Latakia, and the boy was named Osama. It must have been difficult for the patriarch to keep track of his family; ten years later, child number 54 was born -- Mohammed bin Laden's last offspring. In 1968, the patriarch was killed when his Cessna, piloted by an American, crashed -- a foreshadowing of things to come.
The king placed the family business, SBG, under the management of a trustee, making the bin Laden sons the de facto wards of the monarch. Osama was ten years old at the time and he was occasionally allowed to ride along on the company's bulldozers. But he had hardly known his father -- a deficit he recognized only later in life when he elevated the family's patriarch to the status of Spiritus Rector in matters of Islamic fundamentalism.
Even as a boy, Osama was always considered the "holy one" in the family. He drew attention to himself when he denounced school soccer tournaments as a godless waste of time and assiduously monitored the houses of neighbors, taking it upon himself to enforce the state's prohibition of music. He enrolled in the economics program at Jeddah's King Abd al-Aziz University, where the curriculum was determined by anti-Western agitators from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.

Bin Laden with some of his top deputies.
AP
Bin Laden with some of his top deputies.
The family became divided, into a more stationary branch, and an "international" branch that settled across the globe. One member of the latter camp was Salem bin Laden. He attended a British university, married a woman from an upper-class British family, and vacationed in Disneyland. In 1972, when the Saudi government relinquished control over SBG, Salem, as the family's eldest son, was named head of the company and quickly made it clear that he had no compunctions about doing business with the United States.
Salem bin Laden established the company's ties to the American political elite when, according to French intelligence sources, he helped the Reagan administration circumvent the US Senate and funnel $34 million to the right-wing Contra rebels operating in Nicaragua. He also developed close ties with the Bush family in Texas. But Salem's successors, not Salem, were the ones who were able to fully capitalize on these connections. In 1988, Salem died in a plane crash near San Antonio, Texas, when the aircraft he was piloted became entangled in a power line. After Salem's death, Bakr took control of SBG.
Brother terrorist
In the meantime, trouble was brewing at home in Saudi Arabia -- in Mecca, of all places, and with the presumed involvement of a family member. In November 1979, insurgents occupied and barricaded themselves into Islam's holiest site, demanding an end to corruption and wastefulness in Saudi Arabia and charging the royal family with having lost its legitimacy by currying favor with the West. It was an act of terror that foreshadowed every major plank of the al-Qaida platform of radical fundamentalism -- and it was no coincidence that this radical group was lead by members of the Muslim Brotherhood with ties to Osama's professors.
At the time, Osama was still entrenched in Saudi society, but his older brother, Mahrus, maintained ties to the fanatics. It's even speculated that he may have used his access to SBG's offices to obtain the renovation plans for the Great Mosque, together with all its secret passageways, and handed them over to the radicals. In any event, the fanatics forced their way onto the mosque's grounds in a truck that was later identified as a Binladin company vehicle.
Mahrus bin Laden was arrested, but was then released for lack of evidence. The terrorist attack turned into a nightmare for the authorities. With the help of French special forces, the Saudis managed to overcome the attackers, but only after a two-week siege and a bloody battle claiming more than a hundred lives. For Mahrus's career, however, the affair proved to be nothing more than a minor speed bump and he later resurfaced as head of SBG's office in Medina.
In late 1979, Osama, with the royal family's blessing, set off for Afghanistan to participate in the jihad against the Soviet Union, which had invaded its neighbor to the south. Both the CIA and Saudi Arabia helped fund the Mujahedeen's armed struggle against the communist "infidels." Prince Turki, head of the Saudi secret service, visited Osama several times in Afghanistan and heavy equipment provided by the SBG family business was used to excavate secret tunnels. For Osama, the support of the Saud family and the bin Ladens became a reliable source of funding.

Osama bin Laden with his son Mohammed and Mohammed Atif.
AFP
Osama bin Laden with his son Mohammed and Mohammed Atif.
In 1990, after his triumph in Afghanistan, OBL offered the Saudi royal family the use of his troops to battle Saddam Hussein, whose forces had invaded Kuwait. But King Fahd decided instead to bring in American forces. The decision proved to be a financial coup for the family business, which helped build military bases for the outsiders, but it was turning point in Osama's life. Embittered, he went to Sudan in 1992, where he built training camps and organized attacks with his al-Qaida group, especially against "infidels" from the United States. He also made sure that the planning of terrorist activities remained in the family. His brother-in-law, Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, was involved in the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. On his visa application for the United States, he had listed his occupation as an "employee of the Saudi Binladin Group." Khalifa was briefly detained in the United States, but was then deported to Jordan, where he was released because of formal legal errors. In the past, he had also been implicated as a financial backer of the Philippine Abu Sayyaf terrorist organization.

Meet The Bin Ladens, Part II: Tracking Osama's Kin Around the World

By Erich Follath and Georg Mascolo
Osama bin Laden's family has disavowed itself from its terrorist "black sheep," but the discrepancies are considerable. In interviews with his family that took our reporters to Paris, Arlington, Virginia, Geneva and the furthest-flung corners of Pakistan, we take a closer look and the ties he may or may not still have to his relatives.
Osama also stayed in touch with his friends from the Saudi intelligence agency, even after Libya issued a warrant for his arrest, charging bin Laden with alleged involvement in the murder of two Germans -- an official working for Germany's Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and his wife. Prince Turki sent Osama's mother, Hamida, and his brother Bakr to the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, several times to convince Osama to abandon his terrorist activities. The visits were so frequent that Israel's intelligence agency, the Mossad, believed at the time that Osama was a Saudi spy. Washington increasingly came under pressure to do something about OBL, especially after his involvement in attacks in Somalia and Yemen. The US government met with Saudi officials behind the scenes, confronting them with satellite images of al-Qaida training camps in northern Sudan. In April 1994, King Fahd finally revoked Osama bin Laden's Saudi Arabian citizenship. The bin Laden family followed suit, issuing a sparse, two-sentence statement, signed by Bakr, disowning Osama.
Despite these actions, OBL was still far from being a "black sheep" with no ties to his native country. Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki visited bin Laden several times after he had moved from Sudan to Afghanistan to join forces with the radical Taliban. Turki allegedly brought along expensive gifts to Kandahar, in the form of dozens of pickup trucks. According to a former member of the Taliban intelligence service, Prince Turki and OBL made a deal: The Saudis would support al-Qaida financially, but only under the condition that there would be no attacks on Saudi soil. (Prince Turki, now Saudi Arabia's ambassador to Great Britain, has denied these claims, telling SPIEGEL that they are "nothing but fantasy.")
On Jan. 9, 2001, OBL attended his son Mohammed's wedding in Kandahar, accompanied, according to CIA sources, by his mother and two of his brothers. The CIA also claims that "two of Osama's sisters traveled to Abu Dhabi" a month later, where they met with an al-Qaida agent at the Gulf emirate's airport to deliver large sums of cash.
In mid-January 2005, New York federal judge Richard Casey wrote, in his grounds for allowing the civil suit against SBG filed by the families of 9/11 victims, that "the Saudi Binladin Group maintained close relationships with Osama bin Laden at certain times," and that it remains "unclear" whether these ties continued when OBL became involved in terrorism.
Can this global company, with its close ties to the Saudi royal family, truly be brought to trial, or will the US government, officially allied with Riyadh in its "war on terror," work behind the scenes to have the case dismissed? SBG has already demonstrated its willingness to work with the West by entering into joint ventures with Motorola and a deal with Disney, and has also been Porsche's official agent in the kingdom. Moreover, SBG is developing new airport security equipment in Saudi Arabia, as well as building housing for US managers working in the oil industry.
In Kazakhstan, the Saudi Binladin Group is helping build the country's new capital, Astana. In Syria, SBG and a Spanish company jointly operate the country's biggest olive oil processing plant. And in Dubai, the family company has just submitted a bid for a portion of the construction of what will be the world's tallest building. Next to aircraft, it seems, the bin Ladens see towers as a special challenge.
PARIS, AVENUE MONTAIGNE, NEAR THE CHAMPS-ELYSÉES AND THE LUXURY HOTEL "PLAZA ATHÉNÉE". A dinner appointment with Yeslam bin Laden at one the French capital's most expensive and exclusive restaurants.
He did not reserve a table. Was it because he doesn't like to identify himself as a bin Laden on the phone? "No no," says Osama's brother, "despite everything, I am proud of our family's name. But they know me here, so I don't need a reservation." Indeed, the staff, apparently accustomed to princely gratuities, practically bends over backward for bin Laden, a regular here, and seats us at the best table in the restaurant. Yeslam bin Laden, 55, orders a steak, medium rare. "Osama and I grew up very differently, and I never shared his system of beliefs," says Yeslam bin Laden.
When Yeslam was six, his mother sent him to a school in Beirut, because it was far more liberal there than in Saudi Arabia. He later attended schools and universities in Sweden and England. Although he spent his vacations at home, he saw his father "rarely," and his "half-brother Osama no more than three or four times, the last time in 1987 or thereabouts." He says that his only clear memory of Osama is of his strict condemnation of music, and his religious fanaticism, which struck Yeslam as odd. Yeslam himself believes religion is a personal matter, and he refuses to take responsibility for others. "Am I my brother's keeper?" he asks, calling himself an "enlightened Muslim," clearly alluding to the biblical story of Cain and Abel.
As a young man, Yeslam went to night clubs, drove a Porsche and earned his pilot's license. He studied business administration in Los Angeles. Photos from his college days show him with his Persian fiancée, a long-haired, happy hippy couple ensconced in the California lifestyle. He rarely received visitors from Saudi Arabia. One of these visitors was his devout brother Mahfus, who brought news of the bin Laden family, the Saudi royals and the Wahhabite clerics. But despite his worldly influences, Yeslam bin Laden retained his Saudi roots and insisted on a wedding in Jeddah. Against his wife Carmen's will, the women were fully veiled at the ceremony.
After living in the United States, Yeslam spent more than a decade and a half in Saudi Arabia -- from 1977 to 1984 -- where he was one of the leading executives in the family company in Jeddah. After a dispute with his brothers over SBG's finances, Yeslam went to Geneva, where he founded an investment company that specialized in managing large fortunes. There were soon rumors that Yeslam had reconciled with Bakr and was involved once again in business dealings with the bin Laden family. He dreamed of the birth of a son, and probably of rising to the top of SBG management in Jeddah.
When Yeslam's third daughter was born in April 1987 and he began spending long periods away from home, his marriage failed. According to his wife Yeslam, worried about his business, he became increasingly tense. Members of the Saudi royal family were now traveling to Geneva regularly and demanding his attention, especially the influential Prince Mishal. Yeslam bin Laden's divorce developed, as he himself says, into a bitter "War of the Roses." But in 2001, after years of troubles, he was finally successful on another front when he was granted Swiss citizenship. What is Yeslam's relationship with his brother Osama, who, as he claims, he last saw 18 years ago?
"9/11 was a tremendous shock for me," says Yeslam, now an upstanding citizen of Geneva who has also donated many thousands of dollars to the local film festival. "Osama had long since become a stranger to me, nothing but a name one reads in the newspaper," he says. "I felt that I was being held responsible for the crimes of a relative." The offices of his Geneva-based Saudi Investment Company (Sico) and his properties near Cannes were searched by the authorities, "just like that, on the strength of suspicion," he says. In early 2001, he registered the name "Bin Laden" as a trademark. He planned to establish a fashion house that would sell Bin Laden jeans but then, heeding the advice of friends, he abandoned the idea after 9/11: "After the incidents in New York, it would have been seen as a label in poor taste."
He developed a new business idea in the fall of 2004, a line of perfume. It's named "Yeslam," after its inventor and, according to its advertising, marries the scents of jasmine and lilies of the valley with an underlying note of sandalwood. In ads for the perfume, this combination of scents produces "a penetrating but gentle message for those who yearn for inner peace." The company plans to sell 60,000 bottles to its peace-loving customers.
Everything could work out for the best in Yeslam's world -- if only these new, hateful accusations would go away. A shadow lies over the man who tries to be pro-American and anti-Osama with every fiber of his being. In late December 2004, the French paper Le Monde reported that examining magistrate Renaud von Ruymbeke plans to investigate the bin Laden family's allegedly dubious financial dealings.
At the center of the investigation is an account that brothers Omar and Heidar bin Laden opened in 1990 with Swiss bank UBS with an initial deposit of $450,000. According to documents presented to the court, this account was still in existence in 1997, and only two people were authorized to conduct transactions: Yeslam and Osama bin Laden. The French court also intends to investigate information suggesting that €241 million were funneled from Switzerland to shadowy bank accounts in Pakistan through Akberali Moawalla, a former business partner of Sico and an acquaintance of Yeslam. Could all this have occurred with Yeslam's involvement or knowledge?
"I am not involved in money-laundering, and especially not with al-Qaida," says Yeslam bin Laden, his voice becoming slightly hoarse and edgy. He says that he never used the alleged UBS account and, probably for this reason, forgot about it. He takes pains to point out that he has not been charged with anything, neither by the New York court nor the French judge. He says that he is "innocent until proven guilty" -- another Western concept that this man living between cultures values, knowing full well that it carries no particular weight in his native country.
ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA, HOME OF THE AMERICAN CEMETERY FOR WAR HEROES AND "HARRY'S TAP ROOM". It's a relatively inconspicuous burger-and-seafood restaurant conveniently located halfway between the White House and CIA headquarters in nearby Langley, Virginia. We are here for a meeting with the CIA agent who hunted down Osama, tried to shed light on the bin Laden family's business dealings, and probably knows a great deal about the mysterious departure of more than a dozen bin Laden family members from the United States after 9/11. This is the man who published the bestseller "Imperial Hubris" last year under the nom de plume "Anonymous."
Anonymous now has a name and a face. His name is Mike Scheuer, and a gray beard partially covers his finely-chiseled academic face. He resigned from the CIA after 22 years of service, because he was no longer able to remain anonymous. Journalists were on the verge of uncovering his identity, and his book was facing harsh criticism from the White House. "That was when I did what had to be done," says Scheuer, 52, before taking a bite of his hamburger. He leaves his French fries untouched, glancing at his stomach. Being overweight isn't exactly part of the image someone wants to convey who, as a CIA field agent, helped arm the mujahedeen to fight the Russians in Afghanistan and who, in 1996, was placed in charge of "Alec," the top-secret unit authorized by former President Bill Clinton to hunt down bin Laden.
It was the first time an entire CIA station focused on a single man. Scheuer headed the special unit for three years until his superiors, angered by his complaints that the hunt for the world's top terrorist was being conducted half-heartedly, reassigned him for the first time. But he was brought back after Sept. 11, 2001, when it became clear that his bleak predictions had come true. But Scheuer's criticism of the Iraq war ultimately destroyed his good standing with the White House. "Bush strengthened the terrorists with his invasion, but it was a truth that they didn't want to hear."
Scheuer's axis of evil differs markedly from the president's. He believes that Pakistan and, even more so, Saudi Arabia are the epicenters of global violence. "Many Saudis support the terrorists in Iraq to this day - but we're the ones who are putting up the money -- by paying $50 for a barrel of oil and making ourselves dependent on oil imports."
Scheuer, an experienced intelligence expert, doubts that the entire bin Laden family has severed ties with Osama: "I haven't seen anything in the last 10 years that's convinced me that would be the case." In his view, SBG still derives some of its profits from business dealings in the Islamic world that can be linked to the family's supposed "black sheep." "He's treated as a hero almost everywhere over there," says Scheuer.
The CIA came close to capturing OBL several times. On one occasion, during the al-Qaida leadership's hasty retreat from the Afghan city of Kandahar in the fall of 2001, family passports were inadvertently left behind. Saad, a son of Osama bin Laden, was supposedly sent back to al-Qaida headquarters to make sure the documents wouldn't fall into the hands of the Americans. When he realized he had forgotten the combination for the safe, he used a cell phone to get the information, directly violating his father's strict instructions. Several different intelligence agencies picked up the call, but by then it was too late to act.
According to Scheuer, members of the bin Ladin family who were doing business in the United States or studying at US universities were almost completely inaccessible. "My counterparts at the FBI questioned one of the bin Ladens," the former CIA agent recalls. "But then the State Department received a complaint from a law firm, and there was a huge uproar. We were shocked to find out that the bin Ladens in the United States had diplomatic passports, and that we weren't allowed to talk to them."
Scheuer believes that these diplomatic privileges also helped the bin Ladens get out of the United States quickly after September 11, in a bizarre episode that has even been probed by the US Congress and an investigative commission.
Only two days after the attacks, when the US government had just reopened US air space, charter jets began taking off from various cities. Nine pilots flew 142 Saudi Arabians back to the kingdom. On Sept. 20, 2001, the "bin Laden jet" took off from St. Louis, making stops in Los Angeles, Orlando, Washington and Boston. At each stop, the plane picked up more half-brothers, nephews, nieces and cousins of public enemy number one. At that point, the FBI had already begun investigating two of the bin Ladens who were flown out of the country. They both lived in Falls Church, a suburb of Washington, and were officials in the "World Assembly of Muslim Youth."
Richard Clarke, for many years the chief of counterterrorism at the White House, has revealed that he was responsible for the flights. He says that he grantedhis approval after having been asked to handle the issue. And by whom? Perhaps by Bush's chief of staff, Andrew Card, after coordinating the plan with Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar, a close friend of the First Family? "I would be happy tell you, but I don't remember," Clarke told a Senate investigating panel -- few believe he was telling the truth.
Of course, former CIA agent Scheuer is well aware that the bin Ladens, as investors in and customers of the Carlyle Group, an investment company, had common business interests with the Bushs. In fact, until October 2003 George W.'s father and predecessor in the White House still worked as an "advisor" for Carlyle, which is also involved in the defense sector. Although Scheuer is no wild-eyed conspiracy theorist, he also believes that the US government was "unusually" accommodating to the bin Ladens. Does he regret leaving the CIA, and does he dream of returning? Scheuer, a father of four, says: "I liked my job. I wanted to protect the country against its enemies -- but not the president against his critics."

http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/meet-the-bin-ladens-part-ii-tracking-osama-s-kin-around-the-world-a-359831.html

Private Gun Ownership - What's the Point?



People who say that private gun ownership prevents crime and helps ensure public safety.

They also often advocate small, weak government, isolationism and self-interest.

I don't know why they delude themselves always into forgetting that if nothing else, we know this:

Bullies always run in packs and are smart enough to recognise there is strength in numbers.

It does not matter how strong you are or how well prepped or armed - this is an interdependent world and unless you have friends and allies, you are prey.

Great Moments in Aviation and Structural Engineering 101






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Wednesday 23 January 2013

Treasonous Coup Plotting Admiral fired by Panetta was Intended Recipient of "Bin Laden" Corpse






"Subject: FEDEX," May 2, 2011, 2:02 AM and related emails, released in response to an Associated Press FOIA request to the Department of Defense, Secret.

Hours after bin Laden was killed, Rear Admiral Charles Gaouette, Deputy Commander of U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet, emailed Samuel Perez, Rear Admiral of the strike group including the USS Carl Vinson, tersely asking, "Sam, Any news on the package for us?" The "package" was the body of Osama bin Laden. At 2:02 AM at a location somewhere in the North Arabian Sea, Rear Admiral Perez emailed back: "Sir, FEDEX delivered the package. Both trucks are safely enroute home base."

To date, these emails (ten in all) relating to bin Laden's burial at sea are the only documents of his death released through FOIA. After the raid, the Department of Defense changed its FOIA policy so that all requests relating to the raid are now handled by the Secretary of Defense's FOIA office, not the DOD components which created and maintain the documents, as is the usual DOD FOIA policy.

Other emails describe the procedures taken to ensure the secrecy of the burial. In one email, Gaouette wrote, "The paucity of documentary evidence in our possession is a reflection of the emphasis placed on operational security during the execution of this phase of the operation." Another email asked "if soldiers knew what was occurring or who the burial was for." "No" was the eventual response.

An email addressed to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen describes the burial at sea: "Traditional procedures for Islamic burial was [sic] followed. The deceased's body was washed (ablution) then placed in a white sheet. The body was placed in a weighted bag. A military officer read prepared religious remarks, which were translated into Arabic by a native speaker. After the words were complete, the body was placed on a prepared flat board, tipped up, whereupon the deceased's body slid into the sea."




BCCI Sandstorm report, 1991





BCCI "Sandstorm" report. This previously released, partly redacted, confidential investigative report was commissioned by the Bank of England and kicked off the international BCCI banking scandal. The report has disappeared from the internet, despite its importance to world history, the Madoff and Stanford frauds and the current political crisis in Pakistan.

Download
File | Torrent | Magnet

Check out this video on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiczqeT_RDg&feature=youtube_gdata_player

The First Aviation Crash after 9/11


"The city was sealed off after a series of strange events there. Controls were so tight you couldn’t even move between different districts within the city, let alone make your way out of Grozny on foot.

On that day, 17 September, a helicopter carrying a commission, headed by Major-General Anatoly Pozdnyakov, from the General Staff in Moscow was shot down directly over the city. The general was engaged in work quite unprecedented for a soldier in Chechnya.

Only an hour before the helicopter was shot down, he told me the task of his commission was to gather data on crimes committed by the military, analyse their findings, put them in some order and then submit the information for the president’s consideration.

Nothing of the kind had been done before.

The helicopter in which they were flying out of Grozny was shot down almost exactly over the city centre. All the members of the commission perished, and since they were already on their way to Khankala airbase to take a plane back to Moscow, so did all the material they had collected."

"This is one of Chechnya's main problems. It's not the militants' craftiness or armaments or the foreign origins of their weapons, but the betrayal by its own "defenders."

Those who want the war to go on are capable of anything.

For example, the total blockade of Grozny that on September 17, 2001, created all the necessary conditions for antiaircraft rocket shooting at certain generals.

Shooting without witnesses.

—Anna Politkovskaya, A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya, p. 65


Tuesday 22 January 2013

YouTube DMCA Censorship: Evidence of Revision - The Assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Forces, it seems, have conspired to make this content unavailable and unviewable via Google/YouTube on MLK Day. Apparently, the Smithsonian has a problem with you viewing it. Cuts into their profit margin.

Colour me shocked.




Clearly, that's incorrect.

Good job I have a Vimeo Plus account and a copy of the original.





Enjoy.


Riots after Martin Luther King assassination, 1968 - WGBH Open Vault

Riots after Martin Luther King assassination, 1968 - WGBH Open Vault


This is why all you pansy-assed FEMA-fearing, Illuminati-baiting Second Ammedment America Firsters really piss everyone off.

You want to pretend like the apparatus to suspend constitutionality and impose martial law wasn't always there and wasn't always in place.

It just hasn't been used against white people yet.

Monday 21 January 2013

"Do they know about Martin Luther King yet?"



Bobby Kennedy was always the consummate politician - an absolute born of nature communicator.

He knew how to listen and he knew when and how to talk.

Those of us with an interest in the deep politics might note here that Bobby exconerates the Cubans.

And though he says and confirms "I, too had a brother; and he was murdered by a white man",

he never makes clear precisely which white man he has in mind...

Susan Lindauer

"The false federal prosecution, trial, and imprisonment of CIA contract agent, Susan Lindauer





Susan Lindauer asserts that she was hired by and worked for the CIA from 1995 till 2003. She is the daughter of a one-time Republican gubernatorial candidate in Alaska. Her father was a former chancellor at the University of Alaska and owner of a chain of newspapers and television stations and his second wife, was an heiress to a concrete business.

Lindauer is a Smith College graduate with a master's degree in public policy from the London School of Economics. She then was a reporter and researcher at U.S. News & World Report in 1990 and 1991. She worked on the staff of Representative Peter DeFazio, D-Oregon (1993) and then Representative Ron Wyden, D-Oregon (1994) before joining the office of Senator Carol Moseley Braun, D-Illinois, where she worked as a press secretary and speech writer.


Lindauer became a member of a peaceful group that was protesting the 1990 UN sanctions against Iraq that banned all trade and financial resources except for medicine and "in humanitarian circumstances" foodstuffs. A UN inter-agency mission assessed that "the Iraqi people may soon face a further imminent catastrophe, which could include epidemic and famine, if massive life-supporting needs are not rapidly met.


David Sole, of the Detroit Water & Sewerage Department, argued that because high rates of diseases from lack of clean water followed the Gulf War and sanctions, liquid chlorine should be sent to Iraq to disinfect water supplies. It was banned from importation to Iraq. Estimates of civilian deaths during these sanctions range from 100,000 to over 1.5 million.

The UN Resolutions had the express goals of eliminating weapons of mass destruction and extended-range ballistic missiles, prohibiting any support for terrorism, and forcing Iraq to pay war reparations and all foreign debt. But the US policy under Clinton was the removal of Saddam Hussein.

Because of her protest activities regarding Iraq, the CIA recruited her to develop rapport with Iraqi officials who worked at the UN. She was tasked from August, 1996 to work as a secret US back channel contract with the Iraqi government as the US had no diplomatic relations with Iraq.

For years Iraq had been one of the best sources about anti-terrorism in the Middle East. Saddam hated Islamic fundamentalists and he arrested and tortured them. After the USS Cole was attacked in 1999, the US demanded from Saddam permission to send in an FBI, Interpol or Scotland Yard, Task Force to set up a base in Bagdad and with the authority to do investigations and make arrests. Saddam's reply was that he was doing all he could to indentify terrorists, his government secret services were deporting them. In February or March 2001, Saddam also agreed to let the international community came into Iraq to help him control his borders from immigrant terrorists. Iraq had been one of the US's best sources on terrorism prior to 9/11.

In April and May 2001 Susan Lindauer was tasked by her CIA case officer Dr. Richard Fuisz to go to the UN in New York and talk to Iraqi diplomats and confront/demand any knowledge they may have had about any possible future airplane hijackings and airplane bombings. She was told to threaten the Iraqis with an invasion/war by the US (I assume she means to threaten them into disclosing anything they knew about a pending terrorist attack on the US). Over the summer of 2001 Lindauer had weekly meetings with Fuisz.

Lindauer states that in June 2001 her CIA team identified the World Trade Center as the target of the attack. They had "weekly meetings and at "practically every meeting" they talked about this attack." She was warned on August 2, 2001 not to go into New York City by Dr. Fuisz. On order from her boss, CIA officer/ Dr. Richard Hughes, Susan Lindauer claims she called the office of Attorney General John Ashcroft on about Aug. 8th, 2001. And her office "put out an Emergency Broadcast Alert throughout all agencies about any information regarding airplane hijackings specifying an attack on World Trade Center."

On the instructions from the John Ashcroft's staff, she says she then contacted the office of Counter-terrorism.

Appearing on the "Imus in the Morning" radio show, CBS reporter Dan Rather said he "believed" his network's report a week ago that the White House received a CIA briefing before 9-11 on possible al-Qaeda hijackings prompted the administration to issue the alert for political damage control. Rather also accused Attorney General John Ashcroft of taking advantage of insider information about terrorist warnings to fly on private jets, while the public was kept in the dark about the secret alert, telling Imus:



"If the attorney general is given information that convinces him, 'Hey, I don't want to be on any commercial airliners just now. I'm gonna take government planes everywhere."

http://www.rense.com/general25/ratherbush.htm




Dr. Richard Hughes told Lindauer to stay out of New York because they expected massive causalities terrorist attack.

Lindauer claims that after 9/11 there were on-going peace negotiations and Saddam had agreed to give US corporation's construction contracts for health care and drug companies, transportation, and telecommunications. Iraqi diplomats asked her, "What is it America wants? They said they would give the US anything to prevent a US invasion. They even offered to buy one million American cars for ten or twenty years. Saddam also offered to gave the FBI financial documents proving that Islamic terrorism was being financed heroin trafficking in the Middle East and these documents would have helped the US shut down this drug trafficking. However, the US did not want to take the records.

In the two weeks prior to the US invasion of Iraq, March 19, 2003, Lindauer felt she had a duty to prevent to US making war unnecessarily against Iraq (I assume), and so she says she went to her second cousin, Andrew Card, the Chief of Staff to Pres. Bush and told him about the peace options offered by Iraq. Furthermore, to make sure Congress also knew, she went to every member of the US Congress and told them about the peace option offered by Iraq.

Lindauer was arrested in March 11, 2004 after she volunteered to testify before a blue ribbon commission on pre-war intelligence on Iraq. Lindauer approached Trent Lott of Mississippi and John McCain of Arizona with her offer of testimony about intelligence. It was after she made her approach that she was arrested on charges of acting on behalf of Iraq's government.

The FBI wiretapped of her phone calls with Senator staffs of Trent Lott and John McCain, telling them she wanted to testify before Congress. Yet 30 days later, 20 FBI agents arrested Lindauer accused of being paid by an Iraqi diplomat of buying her three lunches for $90.00. She was indicted by a grand jury and organizing protests against US embargo of Iraq prior to the Iraq war. Under indictment for 18 months

While in jail she tried to get attorneys who could prove the Dr. Richard Fuisz was a CIA case officer. Dr. Richard Fuisz gets $13 million "in pay offs."








Susan Lindauer, 41, was arrested on March 11, 2004 in Takoma Park, Maryland. She was released on bond on March 13, 2004 to attend an arraignment the following week. "U.S. Magistrate Judge Susan Gauvey in Baltimore released Lindauer, on a $500,000 bond. But she was ordered to stay at a halfway house and to undergo a psychiatric examination."

Susan Lindauer and her lawyer were denied access to evidence in her defense because it was considered "secret" or "classified".

The Assistant US Attorney Edward O'Callaghan, had the right to ask a jury to convict me of those two undisclosed charges without revealing a shred of evidence to support the charges whatsoever. The Patriot Act authorized the prosecutor to ask a jury to "take it on faith" that some unspecified evidence would prove that some unspecified law had been broken.

In other words, the Federal Judge could have instructed the jury before deliberations, the to ignore the lack of presentation of evidence in weighing whether to convict me. The Judge could simply instruct a jury that the Justice Department regarded the evidence as "sufficient" to constitute a crime and that would be "sufficient knowledge" for their review. That kind of instruction practically requires a jury to convict a defendant.

Because in America US persons are consider innocent until proved guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, NO ONE SHOULD BE FOUND GUILTY by a jury unless the jury hear or sees all the evidence against the accused.

DAMN! $500.000 sounds pretty extreme for a non-violent crime and first time conviction. Lindauer was arrested at a time when George Bush appeared to be loosing to Senator John Kerry in the tight presidential race of 2004. She claims she was arrested to keep her quit about Iraq willingness to comply with UN inspections for WMD and that Iraq was willing to do anything the US wanted to prevent an invasion.

Numerous times Susan Lindauer told the Court that the FBI had verified her story and that Mr. O'Callaghan was falsifying his claims about the availability of witnesses to authenticate her story.

May 28, 2004: Ashcroft stating Al Quada's is now 90% ready to conduct their next attack on the US (up from the 70% intelligence agencies' estimate) An attack planned on America for sometime in the coming months. That may happen, but NBC News has learned one of Ashcroft's sources is highly suspect. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5087301/



July 9, 2004: Homeland Security Chief, Tom Ridge Warns of "Credible" al-Qaida Plot




I suspect that the above fake terror alerts may have been done for the purpose of making sure Susan Lindauer could not tell her story in court per the Patriot Act.

Also on July 9, 204, the US House GOP Defends Patriot Act Powers


House Republicans, under strong pressure from the White House, narrowly defeated an effort yesterday to water down the Bush administration's signature law to combat domestic terrorism.



By a 210 to 210 tie vote that GOP leaders prolonged for 23 tumultuous minutes while they corralled dissident members, the House rejected a proposed change to the USA Patriot Act that would have barred the Justice Department from searching bookstore and library records. White House officials, citing the nearly three-year-old law's importance as an anti-terrorism tool, warned that an attempt to weaken it would be vetoed.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37480-2004Jul8.html




Lindauer states, "He (the Assistant US Attorney) flat out lied about my identity and activities to a senior federal judge. I mean, come on. We (with her defense attorney) interviewed those witnesses, too. We know what they told the FBI. I challenged the Court to subpoena the witnesses and question them directly under oath. For FIVE YEARS, I told the Court that all questions could be cleared up in ten minutes, with a simple pre-trial evidentiary hearing."

In five years under indictment, I had two separate attorneys with very different levels of security clearances, including a former Assistant US Attorney, the outstanding Mr. Brian Shaughnessy of Washington, DC, who regularly handles the most high level and complicated security cases. Neither attorney was ever able to determine what those two "secret charges" were. Neither attorney ever saw the "secret evidence." More disturbingly, if her attorney was even shown the secret evidence is strictly prohibited from revealing any part of that "secret evidence" to the Defendant. The Defendant cannot see it or know about it, and therefore cannot provide an effective response to the attorney to rebut it. Thus, ironically, the Patriot Act handicaps the defendant's ability to assist in the preparation of their Defense strategy.

During the five years, Lindauer could only guess about those two secret charges. She surmised that in October 1999, she was indicted for blocking the Iraqi Government from making financial campaign contributions to the George W. Bush Presidential Campaign.

Because Lindauer was working as a covert back channel CIA contract agent to talk to Iraqi officials at the UN, she says she stopped Iraq from making illegal campaign contributions to the 2000 Bush Election campaign. I will explain her what she did, her work, for the CIA below.

We have speculated that perhaps Saddam gave money to the Bush Campaign in 2000 through somebody else and some other channel. And the Republicans don't want anybody to know about it. Perhaps I was indicted to stop the Democrats from investigating campaign contribution records.


Consider that Andy Card was warned of Iraq's attempts in two progress reports on March 1, 2001 and December 2, 2001. The Republican leadership that attacked me was very much aware that this question of illegal campaign contributions was hanging out there. And I was indicted for stopping it from happening.

Lindauer suspects the second secret charge filed by Assistant US Attorney Edward O'Callaghan against her involved her efforts to collect health statistics from Baghdad regarding depleted uranium left behind by the United States in the first Gulf War. "They didn't want my case to raise the profile of that health risk for Americans (and Iraqi civilians) in Iraq. None of that health information was ever returned to me in discovery. "

Lindauer says, "They (the Bush Administation) saw that I would be sidelined in legal wrangling until after the November election. I would be gagged from telling the full and accurate story of Iraqi Pre-War Intelligence and the government's advance warnings of a 9/11 style attack. This gave Republicans a significant advantage over the Democrats, shielding them from criticism during their campaigns. After November, the charges against me would be declared bogus, and the case would be dismissed for lack of merit. I would ultimately win, whereas American voters would have lost an opportunity to make informed decisions about which candidates to support. They would be flying blind just the way politicians wanted. "

Lindauer claims that on Oct. 3, 2004 Judge Michael Mucasy told her that if she demands a hearing that she would be seized immediately and her bail would be forfeited. The judge gave her the option to go to a Texas military base for four months and have a psychological evaluation. After four months, someone recommended that she be placed in indefinite prison for ten years.

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0903/S00130.htm

http://extremeprejudiceusa.wordpress.com/about/

In 2006, she was released from prison after Michael B. Mukasey ruled that Lindauer was unfit to stand trial and could not be forced to take antipsychotic medication to make her competent to stand trial.

In 2008, Loretta A. Preska of the Federal District Court in New York City reaffirmed that Lindauer was mentally unfit to stand trial.

On January 16, 2009 the government decided to not go ahead with the prosecution saying "prosecuting Lindauer would no longer be in the interests of justice."

Comment:

"Susan Lindauer was a covert CIA contract agent, who was also OUTED by the Bush Administration who was falsely accused, imprisoned and her good name destroyed. There needs to be a Congressional hearing to determine whether or not Susan Lindauer was in fact a CIA contract agent as she claims and who in the government authorized or participated in this false prosecution, trial, and imprisonment

It does not matter whether or not the Iraqi UN officials knew she was working for the CIA or not. This is just like the CIA officer Valerie Plaine case.

Susan Lindauer is the author of the book Extreme Prejudice, which include more details about all this."



http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/29/magazine/susan-lindauer-s-mission-to-baghdad.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

Susan Lindauer's Mission To BaghdadBy David SamuelsPublished: August 29, 2004




On the morning of March 11, 2004, Susan Lindauer woke to find five F.B.I. agents at her front door. After reading her her rights, the agents took Lindauer from her home in Takoma Park, Md., to the F.B.I. field office in Baltimore, where she was charged with having acted as an unregistered agent of Saddam Hussein's Iraqi government and otherwise having elevated the interests of a foreign country above her allegiance to the United States. ''The only visible sign of stress is that I'm chain-smoking,'' she said when I met with her recently. Forty-one and free on bail, she wore a red cotton shirt, shapeless khaki pants and battered white leather sneakers. With her casual manner, she could pass for an ordinary resident of Takoma Park, where ''War Is Not the Answer'' signs are available free at the local co-op.

Seated on the shady porch of her tumbledown cottage, overlooking a purple azalea bush, Lindauer was alternately pensive and bubbly as she talked about her encounter with the F.B.I. On her knees, she balanced a photo album, which contained photographs of her wild years in Alaska, where she grew up, and her time as an undergraduate at Smith College, where she majored in economics. She showed me pictures of her mother, Jackie, who died of cancer after Susan graduated from college, and her father, John, an academic economist who once ran on the Republican ticket for governor of Alaska. The youthful beauty of Susan's features in her early photographs has been transfigured over time into a middle-aged balance of beatitude and stubbornness. When she gets angry, a storm cloud passes over her face. When the storm cloud breaks, her expression becomes even and calm, like that of a child who has freshly emerged from a bath.




Having grown up in a household in which public policy was frequently the stuff of dinner-table conversation and impassioned family arguments, Lindauer wanted to help change the world. The way she chose to do so, however, was not by signing petitions or marching in demonstrations, but by engaging in the kinds of clandestine encounters that you read about in spy novels -- meeting foreign diplomats, passing along secret messages and engaging in other activities that would eventually lead to her arrest. ''I'm what they call a useful idiot,'' she said with a laugh. According to the federal charges filed against her by the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, Lindauer repeatedly violated U.S. law beginning in 1999 by meeting with Iraqi diplomats at the Iraqi Mission to the United Nations in New York and with agents of Saddam Hussein's Iraqi Intelligence Service (I.I.S.). She was also indicted for accepting money from the Iraqis and traveling to Baghdad, where she met with Iraqi intelligence agents, in violation of federal law. ''From on or about Feb. 23, 2002, through on or about March 7, 2002,'' the indictment charged, ''Susan Lindauer, aka 'Symbol Susan,' met with several I.I.S. officers in Iraq, including at the Al-Rashid Hotel in Baghdad, and received cash payments of approximately $5,000.00.'' The press was quick to identify Lindauer as an Iraqi spy.

''I'm an antiwar activist, and I'm innocent,'' Lindauer told WBAL-TV as she was led to a car outside the F.B.I. field office in Baltimore. ''I did more to stop terrorism in this country than anybody else.'' In a moment of crisis, it seemed, having just been fingerprinted and charged with betraying her country, Lindauer was acting the way a person might act in a dream, blurting out the constituent parts of her fractured reality into a waiting microphone.

The substance of the government's case against Susan Lindauer is contained in the indictment. Both the F.B.I. and the U.S. attorney's office declined to comment on the case, and no date has been set for the trial. While Lindauer was not accused of espionage, as initial reports of her arrest suggested, the government did charge her with a serious crime, even if the charge itself may seem like a technicality. By failing to register herself formally as a lobbyist and by supposedly following instructions from Iraqi diplomats and intelligence agents at the United Nations, the government charged, Lindauer had been acting as ''an unregistered agent of a foreign government,'' a violation of federal law that is punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Lindauer acknowledges that the meetings detailed in the federal indictment took place, but denies acting as an agent of Iraq or any other country.

On paper, at least, there is little to distinguish Lindauer from hundreds of other bright young people who come to Washington in the hope of making a difference. She graduated from Smith in 1985 and then went to the London School of Economics, where she earned a master's degree and developed an interest in the Arab world. In 1990, she went to Washington, where she briefly worked as a journalist and then as a press secretary for liberal Democrats in the House and Senate, including Ron Wyden and Carol Moseley Braun. None of her jobs lasted more than a year. Her most recent job on Capitol Hill, as a press secretary for Representative Zoe Lofgren of California, ended in May 2002.

Writing press releases often seemed less important to Lindauer than her own one-woman campaign to advance the cause of nonviolence in the Muslim world. Lindauer's highly individual brand of politics combined passions that were commonly identified with opposite poles of the political spectrum during the 90's. While she opposed sanctions on Libya and Iraq, she was also eager to awaken the West to the gathering threat posed by Middle Eastern terrorist organizations. In pursuit of her ideals, she says, she began traveling to New York as often as twice a week, meeting with diplomats from Muslim countries, including Yemen and Malaysia, as well as representatives of Libya and Iraq. Her aim, as she explained it, was to function as a handholder and cheerleader, an unofficial go-between who could help break the cycle of isolation, paranoia and suffering created by sanctions.

''U.S. intelligence knew what I was doing,'' she said when I asked her about the precise nature of her contacts with the Libyans and the Iraqis. ''You see, the thing is, it's very hard to have these relationships, and so, when you have them, there are people who are very interested in the fact that you have them, who also want something from them, too.''

To demonstrate her commitment to nonviolence, Lindauer also shared with me portions of the evidentiary material contained on a stack of compact disks turned over to her by the government. The evidence against her, which includes wiretapped conversations with friends, neighbors, foreign diplomats and fellow activists, is currently in the hands of her new court-appointed attorney, who was not representing Lindauer at the time I spoke to her. Among the documents Lindauer showed me was a transcript of a telephone conversation with Muthanna al-Hanooti, the president of Focus on American and Arab Interests and Relations, a nonprofit organization in Southfield, Mich., dated July 30, 2003, two days before the Arab-American activist made one of his frequent trips to Iraq. During the call, Lindauer praised al-Hanooti for being a ''man who believes in peace'' and exhorted him to ''stay with God -- just stay with God.'' As the conversation continued, al-Hanooti seemed to hover between impatience and boredom. ''Other people are doing bad things, and they may try to use you as cover for bad things,'' Lindauer said. ''So don't let them.''

''It's a very delicate balance, as you know,'' al-Hanooti replied. ''But, ah, we'll do our best, you know. We'll do our best.''

That transcript, and others she gave me, support Lindauer's contention that she is opposed to violence. There were also other conversations the F.B.I. recorded that seem to suggest that Lindauer had other motivations for pursuing the work she did. ''He does not know about my visions -- he will never know about my visions, O.K.?'' she said, speaking to an undercover F.B.I. agent about another acquaintance. ''You're probably the only person you're going to meet other than my closest friend at the Iraqi Embassy who knows these things, O.K.? So don't ever talk about it with anyone.''

Susan Lindauer said she started making visits to the Libyan Mission to the United Nations in 1995 and started meeting with Iraqis at the United Nations in 1996. The F.B.I. first began tapping Lindauer's phone and intercepting her e-mail in July 2002, she said. A year and a half earlier, Lindauer contacted Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff, with letters containing what purported to be secret diplomatic communiqués from the government of Iraq to the incoming Bush administration. Lindauer reached out to Card, she explained, because he is a distant cousin on her father's side of the family. She said she believed that the fate of the world depended on the sensitive communications she dropped on the doorstep of his house in suburban Virginia.

One of Lindauer's earliest notes was left at Card's home on Dec. 23, 2000, a decade after sanctions were imposed on Iraq and a month before George W. Bush took office. Along with some of the transcripts of her wiretapped conversations, Lindauer gave me this letter to support her contention that she was working as a ''back channel'' between the governments of Iraq and the United States. The letter was addressed to Vice President-elect Cheney, and in it Lindauer presented the fruits of what she described as a private Nov. 26, 2000, meeting with Saeed Hasan, then the Iraqi ambassador to the United Nations.

''Ambassador Hasan has asked me to communicate to you that Iraq most vigorously wishes to restore healthy, peaceful relations with the United States, including economic and cultural ties,'' Lindauer wrote. ''At our meeting, Ambassador Hasan demonstrated a pragmatic understanding that the United States requires the reinstatement of weapons monitoring in order to lift the sanctions.'' Ambassador Hasan, she said, had ''also emphasized that Iraq is ready to guarantee critical advantages for U.S. corporations at all levels.''

It is possible that Lindauer's account is delusional. It is also possible that Lindauer's account is accurate. Iraq certainly tried to use other back channels to try to reach U.S. officials, including a Lebanese-American businessman, Imad Hage, who conveyed messages to Richard Perle in the run-up to the war. For her part, Lindauer says that she was unaware that her activities required her to register as a lobbyist -- a formality that, to her mind, seemed quite absurd. ''Everything that I did that was quote 'lobbying,''' she said, ''I was giving to the chief of staff of the White House.''

The winding path that led Lindauer to the door of the Iraqi Mission to the United Nations began in November 1993 at a diner in Virginia, where she met a friend of her father's, a woman who worked as the chief of staff for a Republican member of Congress. Worried that Lindauer was lonely, her father's friend brought another lonely guest, Paul Hoven, a gentle Army veteran who had piloted attack helicopters in combat in Vietnam. He was interested in spies and spying.

'''You guys say you're peace activists,''' Lindauer recalled Hoven telling her that night. '''You say you're liberal do-gooders. What exactly are you doing? You do nothing. You're not active. You're passive.' And that conversation was probably one of the most important dinner conversations of my life.''

It was Hoven who gave Lindauer the nickname Snowflake, which was quick to catch on among an informal circle of Capitol Hill staff members and intelligence-community enthusiasts who gathered every Thursday night at a Hunan restaurant across the street from the Heritage Foundation. ''I'm the one who named her Snowflake, because she's from Alaska and she's nuts,'' Hoven told me. In addition to feeling sorry for Lindauer, he was taken with her unusual mind. ''She seems to have the ability to take unrelated facts and string them together, to the point where you're left with, Gee, it probably happened that way.'' For her part, Lindauer says that she enjoyed leading a double life, working for liberals during the day and hanging out with conservatives interested in counterterrorism at night.

Not long after their first dinner, Hoven introduced Lindauer to his friend Dr. Richard Fuisz, a globe-trotting Virginia-based businessman whom Lindauer described to me as ''my contact in the C.I.A.''

Lindauer's first meeting with Fuisz plunged her into a thicket of conflicting theories about the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. The government blamed Libya for the bombing, and Libya later agreed to pay $2.7 billion to the families of the victims. There were others in the Washington intelligence community who said they believed that the real culprit was the terrorist Ahmed Jabril, who was based in Syria. Lindauer says that Fuisz told her at that first meeting that he knew who was responsible for the bombing. ''Dr. Fuisz has said that he can confirm absolutely that no Libyan national was involved in planning or executing the bombing of Pan Am 103,'' she later wrote in an account of their initial meeting. ''If the government would let me,'' she quoted Fuisz as saying, ''I could identify the men behind this attack today. I was investigating on the ground, and I know.''

Several months after she first met with Fuisz, Lindauer met with Libyan diplomats in New York in order to share with them the story she claims she got from Fuisz. She says she hoped her story would clear Libya of responsibility for the attack.

Lindauer's decision to drive to New York and visit the Libyans, she says, was also motivated in part by her deep personal faith in God, ''the all-powerful, all-encompassing spirit'' that she had known since she was a child. After adolescent years of drug use and casual sex, she says, she found God again during the weekends she spent at the Victory Bible Camp in Alaska. The God she found there was not partial to any religious philosophy.

''God is not a man,'' Lindauer explained. ''God is this supreme, magnificent force, intelligent, gorgeous beyond any description. If you've seen Alaska, you've seen the face of God.''

Tucked away behind a mixed-use town house development, Kosmos Pharma, Richard Fuisz's place of business, is part of a Pynchonesque landscape in Northern Virginia where anonymous front offices and brass nameplates give few clues as to the actual nature of the businesses within. When I showed up at his office, Fuisz graciously invited me inside to talk.

A dark-haired, handsome man with a soigné charm, Fuisz, 64, who went to Georgetown Medical School and did postgraduate work in medicine at Harvard, was trained as a psychiatrist and has more than 200 patents listed under his name. According to its Web site, Kosmos Pharma specializes in making oral-drug-delivery systems. He has also run a modeling agency for Russian women and worked briefly in the White House under Lyndon Johnson. During the 70's and 80's, he says, he did business around the world -- in the Middle East, the Eastern bloc, the Soviet Union.

Citing unnamed sources, The Sunday Herald, a Scottish newspaper, reported in 2000 that Fuisz had been the C.I.A.'s most important agent in Damascus during the 80's. ''This is not an issue I can confirm or deny,'' Fuisz told The Herald. ''I am not allowed to speak about these issues. In fact, I can't even explain why I can't speak about these issues.''

Fuisz confirmed that he saw Lindauer about once a week on avearage between 1994 and 2001 and that she would drop by to talk to him about her personal life as well as about her contacts with the Libyans and the Iraqis. He agreed to talk to me about Lindauer after requesting that his son, Joe, a lawyer, be present for our conversation.

''Susan, to me, is one of those people who drift into your life,'' Fuisz said, after offering me a seat on his couch. ''She would drift into the office fairly often, or call. Usually those weren't just social calls. Those were calls about what she was doing, or trying to do,'' Fuisz explained. ''In the early years, her activism generally took an approach which was Arabist, but Arabist from the standpoint of trying to lift sanctions, so that children would do better, and trying to get medicines into countries -- principally I'm talking about Iraq and Libya.''

After Sept. 11, 2001, Lindauer was no longer a welcome visitor to his office. ''Susan, in her discussions, went from benign, in my opinion, to malignant,'' he said. ''These discussions changed and now involved a very strong seditious bent.''

Fuisz did not comment on the specifics of the conversations that Lindauer claimed to have had with Middle Eastern diplomats or whether he passed on the specifics of those conversations to anyone else. But he, like others who have known Lindauer over the years, had clearly thought long and hard about the perplexing geometry of her mind.

''I'd put it this way,'' Fuisz explained, cupping his palms like a collector presenting a rare species for inspection. ''She's daft enough that we could be sitting here, like we are now, and she might see a parrot fly in the window, flap its wings and land right here on the table,'' he said. ''But she's also smart enough not to necessarily say anything about it.''

When I asked whether, in his opinion, Lindauer could have been recruited by an intelligence service, he paused for a long time before he responded. ''I would say that's a hard question to answer. If you're looking at it from the standpoint of an intelligent intelligence agency, absolutely not. She'd be the worst person you could ever recruit. If you're looking at it from the standpoint of my knowledge of Mideast intelligence services, are they dumb enough to recruit her, the answer is yes.''

To understand Lindauer's unlikely walk-on role in the history of the Iraq war, it is necessary to reverse your normal angle of vision and to imagine how she might have looked through the eyes of the diplomats and intelligence operatives who staffed the Iraqi Mission to the United Nations under Saddam Hussein. While Lindauer may have struck Ambassador Hasan and other Iraqi diplomats as strange, she had solid credentials to recommend her. An aide to congressmen and senators who held a graduate degree from the London School of Economics, she was also the cousin of the White House chief of staff.

Lindauer's letters on behalf of the Iraqis, which she sent to Bush financial backers, including Ken Lay, urging them to support the lifting of sanctions, were written in clear, confident prose. But there were also other letters whose odd details suggested that the Iraqis might have been more discerning in their choice of secret emissary.

''I am deeply proud of my expertise on international conflict resolution, and my regrettably extraordinary gift for counterterrorism,'' Lindauer wrote in a letter addressed to President-elect Bush on Dec. 22, 2000. ''I have identified a dozen bombings before they happened with a high degree of accuracy and a number of assassination attempts on world leaders.''

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Lindauer became a frequent visitor to the Iraqi Mission in New York. During a Sept. 18, 2001, trip to the mission, she had what she described in a letter to Card, the White House chief of staff, as a ''short, tense'' conversation with Hasan's successor, Ambassador Mohammad Al-Douri, in the embassy foyer. ''There's starting to be talk in Washington about Iraq's possible involvement in this attack,'' Lindauer told Card she said to Al-Douri.

''It is not possible,'' Al-Douri is said to have replied. ''It is the Mossad who says this.'' The ambassador, she wrote, sounded ''abrupt and confident and stern.'' When Lindauer warned him not to do anything that would jeopardize the lifting of sanctions, the ambassador seemed surprised.

''Of course!'' she recalled him as saying. ''We are ready for talks at any time.''

In that same letter, she described coming back to New York to ''receive a communication from Baghdad addressed to me'' -- a message saying that the panic-stricken Iraqis were willing to ''meet any American official in a covert or incovert manner to discuss the common issues.''

In October 2001, according to the federal indictment, she met with officers of Iraqi intelligence in New York. On Dec. 2, Lindauer wrote to Card again, to convey further news: The Iraqis were willing to permit the return of weapons inspectors and offered other concessions. ''These are not intended to limit the universe of possibilities, Andy,'' she wrote.

The picture that emerges from Lindauer's letters is of Iraqi diplomats trying to feel their way through a fog. It is hard to judge what any of her messages from the Iraqi Foreign Ministry might mean, however, since they could be read only through the haze of Lindauer's naïve and self-aggrandizing personality. In February 2002, soon after President Bush delivered his State of the Union address naming Iraq part of an ''axis of evil,'' the Iraqis invited Lindauer to Baghdad.

''It was beautiful,'' she said of Al Rashid Hotel, where she stayed between her meetings with Iraqi officials. ''I had a suite, so it was very nice.''

She wouldn't tell me who she met with or why, but she did describe what it felt like to be inside the room in which the meetings took place. ''When I first got there, I had the sense that -- I don't know how to put this, this is a very weird thing, it's like your imagination-working-kind-of-thing,'' she explained. ''I was in a room, and there were these mirrors, and I had this sense of Saddam Hussein being on the opposite side of the mirror looking in at me. Now I'm not saying that Saddam Hussein actually was there, but I had this very strong sense of presence, which was unlike anything I'd ever felt before, that was scrutinizing me up and down, ripping me apart. It was palpable.''

After Lindauer's visit to Baghdad, there were no more secret messages from Iraq for Andrew Card.

John Lindauer, Susan's younger brother, is used to his sister's unlikely stories -- about dating Arab arms dealers and late-night attempts on her life and her contacts with the C.I.A. A Harvard graduate, and now a successful commercial and music-video director in Los Angeles, he says he thinks that a strain of playacting and deception runs in his family. One of his most powerful childhood memories, he told me, is of watching his father, then 38, grow a mustache and dye his hair gray before being interviewed for the job of chancellor of the University of Alaska at Anchorage. ''Weaving a story to make contact with you, and making you want to be interested in that person, is not a cry for help,'' he said. ''It's just a way of reaching out to say: Remember me. I'm with you. Be interested in me.''

One conversation John had with his sister in the summer of 2001 stuck in his mind for a different reason. ''So she goes, 'Listen, the gulf war isn't over,''' he told me over dinner at a sushi place on the Sunset Strip. '''There are plans in effect right now. They will be raining down on us from the skies.''' His sister told him that Lower Manhattan would be destroyed. ''And I was like, Yeah, whatever,'' he continued. When he woke up six weeks later to the news that two planes had crashed into the twin towers, and watched as ash settled on the window ledge of his sublet in Brooklyn, he had a dislocating sense of having his reality replaced by Susan's strange world -- an experience he would have again when he learned that his sister had been arrested by the F.B.I.

Parke Godfrey, a close friend of Lindauer's for the last 15 years, is a professor of computer science at York University in Ontario. He says that Lindauer warned him not to take a job at N.Y.U. the summer before the Sept. 11 attacks. That Lindauer's outlandish predictions actually came true, Godfrey suggests, further encouraged the exalted sense of personal mission that brought her to Washington in the first place.

''Susan is perfectly capable, in certain ways, to live a reasonable life, to take care of herself, to get around, and at any localized time, sitting at dinner, she's completely coherent,'' he said, skirting the blunt layman's question of whether his friend is playing with all her marbles. ''It's in these longer-term views of memory, in what she remembers, in how she's pieced the world together, that she functions unlike the way anyone else does,'' Godfrey concluded. ''It's not the same mental model that you and I use.''

''There is now a jihad,'' Susan Lindauer told me, rocking peacefully back and forth in her chair overlooking her untamed garden. ''Tragically, stupidly, we started it. We launched the first attack, which was unrighteous, and vicious and sadistic, and we are going to pay for this mistake. I think the Islamic world now is going to burn.''

Sipping lemonade on her front porch in Takoma Park, I found myself sharing her paranoid landscape, observing a beige car pass by her house four times in the space of two hours, as the birds twittered in the trees and Lindauer's girlish voice detailed ''the horrific abuses, the sexual torture'' being visited on innocent Iraqis by coalition troops. That is why, she explained, in June 2003 she met with an F.B.I. agent posing as a Libyan intelligence officer who, according to the indictment, purported to be ''seeking to support resistance groups in postwar Iraq.'' Lindauer said that in those meetings she was seeking financial backing for a lawsuit against the United States and British governments for crimes she claimed they committed during the occupation of Iraq. She continued to exchange e-mail with the undercover agent until she was arrested.

On my way back home to New York from Washington, I found a cellphone message from Ken Lisaius, a White House spokesman. While Andrew Card declined to speak to me directly about his cousin's letters, Lisaius said, Card did have a statement that might answer at least some of my remaining questions about Lindauer's case.

''This was a very sad and personal incident involving a distant relative of Andy Card,'' Lisaius said in the carefully calibrated cadence that is meant to assure worried citizens that the world remains a more or less rational place, no matter how weird the circumstances. ''He in turn reported various attempts by her to contact him to appropriate officials, and he has cooperated fully with appropriate officials on this matter.''