Earlier Timeline Elements – From THIS top level page
Please note that this Key Research was produced by By Jean-Charles Brisard
A 1998 memo written by al-Qaida military chief Mohammed Atef reveals
that Osama bin Laden’s group had detailed knowledge of
negotiations that were taking place between Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban
and American government and business leaders over plans for a U.S. oil and
gas pipeline across that Central Asian country.
The e-mail memo was found in 1998 on a computer seized by the FBI during
its investigation into the 1998 African embassy bombings, which were
sponsored by al-Qaida. Atef’s memo was discovered by FBI counter-terrorism
expert John O’Neill, who left the bureau in 2001, complaining that U.S. oil
interests were hindering his investigation into al-Qaida. O’Neill, who
became security chief at the World Trade Center, died in the Sept. 11 attack.
Atef’s memo shines new light on what al-Qaida knew about U.S. efforts to
normalize relations with the Taliban in exchange for the fundamentalist
government’s supporting the construction of an oil and gas pipeline across
Afghanistan. As documented in the book I coauthored with Guillaume Dasquie,
“Bin Laden: The Forbidden Truth,” the Clinton and Bush administrations
negotiated with the Taliban, both to get the repressive regime to widen its
government as well as look favorably on U.S. companies’ attempts to
construct an oil pipeline. The Bush White House stepped up negotiations
with the Taliban in 2001. When those talks stalled in July, a Bush
administration representative threatened the Taliban with military
reprisals if the government did not go along with American demands.
The seven-page memo was signed “Abu Hafs,” which is the military name of
Atef, who was the military chief of al-Qaida and is believed to have been
killed in November 2001 during U.S. operations in Afghanistan. It shows
al-Qaida’s keen interest in the U.S.-Taliban negotiations and raises new
questions as to whether the U.S. military threat to the Taliban in July
2001 could have prompted al-Qaida’s Sept. 11 attack.
Atef’s memo is not about the pipeline alone, though it mentions the project
several times. It is an analysis of the political situation facing the
Taliban. It documents the movement’s rise, its leadership, the geopolitical
importance of Afghanistan, the Taliban’s relationship with Pakistan, as
well as the movement’s relationship with the Arab mujahedin. The document’s
intended readership is unclear. But it reveals that the pipeline was seen
as a strategic offering toward the West, in order to make the Taliban
government acceptable to the United States and Pakistan, as well as to
reduce military and investigative pressure on the country to rein in or
even extradite bin Laden.
Atef explains that the United States wants “to take control of any region
which has huge quantities of oil reserves,” and “the American government is
keen on laying the oil and gas pipelines from Turkmenistan through
Afghanistan to Pakistan.” Atef concludes that al-Qaida’s “duty toward the
movement [Taliban] is to stand behind it, support it materially and
morally, especially because its regional and international enemies are
working night and day to put an end to it and make it fail.”
It seems clear the military chief didn’t expect the pipeline negotiations
to bear fruit. Referring to Pakistanis as “nonbelievers,” and noting that
the pipeline “will be under American control … and it also goes through
the territories of Pakistan which are allied to America,” Atef implies that
the Taliban has no intention of ultimately cooperating with the project,
but is trying to string along the Americans and Pakistanis to win some
breathing room for its unpopular government.
The Atef memo is the latest piece of evidence documenting a murky chapter
in recent American history — the overtures of the last two American
administrations to the repressive Taliban regime. Several U.S. oil
companies, most notably Unocal, had been advocates of diplomatic overtures
to the Taliban, in order to facilitate the building of a pipeline from the
Caspian Sea region to Pakistan and the Persian Gulf through Afghanistan. In
1996, Unocal vice president Chris Taggart described the fall of Kabul to
the Taliban regime as a “very positive step” and urged the U.S. to extend
recognition to the new rulers in Kabul and thus “lead the way to
international lending agencies coming in.”
Just 10 days after the Taliban seized power in Kabul, Zalmay Khalilzad,
former National Security Council official and Unocal consultant who was
appointed special envoy to Afghanistan by President George W. Bush at the
end of 2001, argued in a Washington Post opinion article that the U.S.
should try to work with the mullahs and form a broad-based government that
included other factions. “The Taliban does not practice the anti-U.S. style
of fundamentalism practiced by Iran — it is closer to the Saudi model .”
Khalilzad contended, concluding that “we should use as a positive incentive
the benefits that will accrue to Afghanistan from the construction of oil
and gas pipelines across its territory … These projects will only go
forward if Afghanistan has a single authoritative government.”
Soon after, the State Department spokesman Glyn Davies told the New York
Times he had hope that “the new authorities in Kabul will move quickly to
restore order and security and to form a representative interim government
that can begin the process of reconciliation nationwide.” Davies also said
the United States “wanted to send diplomats to Afghanistan to meet with the
Taliban and held out the possibility of re-establishing full diplomatic
ties with the country,” according to the Times.
In November 1997 Unocal invited a Taliban delegation to Texas and, in early
December, the company opened a training center at the University of
Nebraska, to instruct 137 Afghans in pipeline construction technology. The
company also donated to the university’s Center for Afghanistan Studies.
Unocal CEO John Imle estimated that the company spent between $15 and $20
million on its Central Asia oil pipeline (CentGas) project — on
preliminary feasibility studies, humanitarian projects and other efforts to
lobby the Taliban (Unocal equipped the regime with satellite phones, for
instance.)
In February 1998, Unocal’s vice president for international relations, John
Maresca, told a House subcommittee hearing on U.S. interests in the Central
Asian Republics that an oil pipeline “would benefit Afghanistan, which
would receive revenues from transport tariffs, and would promote stability
and encourage trade and economic development.” Emphasizing that “the
proposed Central Asia Oil Pipeline (CentGas) cannot begin construction
until an internationally recognized Afghanistan government is in place,” he
urged the administration and the Congress “to give strong support to the
United Nations-led peace process in Afghanistan.”
Until the 1998 al-Qaida embassy bombings, the Clinton administration’s
approach toward the Taliban was much the same as Unocal’s: All parties
agreed that the political stabilization of Afghanistan was crucial to the
region, and was also a way to gain access to oil reserves of the Caspian
Sea region. Though bin Laden had been in the country since 1996, the U.S.
had not pressured the Taliban to hand him over.
The embassy bombings in August 1998 changed everything. The Clinton
administration denounced the regime and Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright turned up the heat on Taliban human rights abuses. The United
Nations imposed sanctions, freezing Afghanistan’s foreign assets and
limiting its citizens’ travel. The U.S. continued to talk to the Taliban,
but the emphasis was on extraditing bin Laden in exchange for international
recognition; the pipeline was off the table. Unocal, which had been close
to finalizing its pipeline deal before the embassy bombings, cancelled it.
When George W. Bush took office in 2001, his administration made new
overtures to the Taliban, and the pipeline deal gained renewed support, as
an incentive to get the Taliban to make political concessions and form a
broader government. U.S. representatives met with Afghanistan’s former King
Shah, to see if he might be included in a new government. And American
companies began exploring the failed 1998 pipeline project. A report by an
Afghan-born Enron manager in July 2001, for instance, illustrates that
company’s deep interest in some sort of pipeline deal. Enron had begun
funding the same sorts of humanitarian projects as Unocal had three years
earlier.
In March 2001, several Taliban officials, including Sayed Rahmattulah
Hashimi, Mullah Omar’s personal advisor, were invited to Washington by
their U.S. lobbyist, Leila Helms, the niece of former CIA Director Richard
Helms. The agenda included discussions of extraditing bin Laden as well as
facilitating American companies’ access to oil reserves in central Asia.
The delegation met with representatives of the Directorate of Central
Intelligence (DCI) and the Bureau of Intelligence and Research of the State
Department.
This visit provoked concern and criticism in Washington over how Hashimi
obtained a visa, a plane ticket, security clearance and access to American
institutions — including the State Department and the National Security
Council — despite travel restrictions on Taliban leadership imposed by
U.N. sanctions (the official answer was that Hashimi fell below the rank of
senior official covered by the sanctions.)
Four months later, American diplomats met with Taliban emissaries as well
as representatives from Pakistan, Iran and Russia for four days of talks in
Berlin in mid-July. Again, the message was that if the Taliban would
extradite bin Laden and form a broad-based national government, it could
win international recognition and reap extensive economic subsidies from
the construction of a pipeline. The meeting was one of several convened by
Francesco Vendrell, a Spanish diplomat who serves as the U.N.’s chief
representative on Afghanistan. The delegates at the July meeting included
Robert Oakley, former U.S. ambassador and Unocal lobbyist; Karl “Rick”
Inderfurth, former assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs;
Lee Coldren, head of the Office of Pakistan, Afghan and Bangladesh Affairs
in the State Department until 1997; Tom Simons, former U.S. ambassador to
Pakistan and the most recent official negotiator with the Taliban; Niaz
Naik, former Foreign Minister of Pakistan; Nikolai Kozyrev, a former
Russian special envoy to Afghanistan; and Saeed Rajai Khorassani, formerly
the Iranian representative to the U.N. The Taliban ambassador to Pakistan,
Abdul Salam Zaeef, attended several sessions with some of the delegates in
Berlin, according to Naif Naik, though officially the Taliban had not been
invited. Naik was expected to carry the U.S. message to the Taliban.
According to Naik, the point of the meeting was that “we would try to
convey to them that if they did certain things, then, gradually, they could
win the jackpot, get something in return from the international community.”
It might, Naik said, “be possible to persuade the Taliban that once a
broader-based government was in place and the oil pipeline under way, there
would be billions of dollars in commission, and the Taliban would have
their own resources.”
It was at the July meeting, according to Naik, that Tom Simons suggested
that Afghanistan could face an open-ended military operation from bases in
Uzbekistan and Tajikistan if it didn’t accede to U.S. demands. “Ambassador
Simons stated that if the Taliban wouldn’t agree with the plan, and if
Pakistan was unable to persuade them, the United States might use an overt
action against Afghanistan,” Naik says. The words used by Simons were “a
military operation,” according to Naik. Another participant reportedly said
the Taliban’s choice was clear: either accept a “carpet of gold” riches
from the pipeline or “a carpet of bombs,” meaning a military strike.
Lee Coldren, a member of the U.S. delegation, also confirmed to the British
newspaper the Guardian the American position at the Berlin meeting. “I
think there was some discussion of the fact that the United States was so
disgusted with the Taliban that they might be considering some military
action.”
In statements to newspapers, Simons has offered ambiguous explanations of
his statements at the July meeting. In September, he told the British
Guardian: “I’ve known Naik and considered him a friend for years. He’s an
honorable diplomat. I didn’t say anything like that and didn’t hear anyone
else say anything like that. We were clear that feeling in Washington was
strong, and that military action was one of the options down the road. But
details, I don’t know where they came from.”
Yet in a November interview with Le Monde, Simons seemed to confirm that
there had been some talk of U.S. military action. “It is true that the
Taliban was asked to deliver bin Laden and form a [broader] government,”
Simons told Le Monde. “We said in July that we were investigating the
attack against the USS Cole in Yemen, and that if there were solid evidence
of the implication of bin Laden, one had to expect a military answer. One
can always inflate such a declaration to see a global threat against the
Taliban. But the American declaration related only to the response to the
USS-Cole.
“As for the ‘carpet of gold and the carpet of bombs,’ we actually discussed
the need for a plan for rebuilding for Afghanistan, which would follow a
political agreement,” he said, adding that “It’s possible that a
mischievous American participant, after several drinks, may have thought it
smart to evoke gold carpets and carpet bombs. Even Americans can’t resist
the temptation to be mischievous.”
The last known meeting between U.S. and Taliban representatives took place
in August, five weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks, when U.S. Assistant
Secretary of State for Central Asian affairs Christina Rocca met with the
Taliban’s ambassador to Pakistan Abdul Salam Zaeef.
It would be unfair to suggest that the U.S. threat in July led to the
al-Qaida strike. But while Simons doesn’t admit that he personally
threatened the Taliban with reprisal, he confirms that only a few weeks
before Sept. 11, American diplomats warned of military action against
Afghanistan if its leaders did not meet U.S. economic and political
demands. It is worth asking whether, had this threat been widely known,
U.S. intelligence agencies might have analyzed the information they were
receiving about bin Laden’s plots against the U.S. differently.
Now the newly discovered Atef memo makes clear that in 1998, at least,
al-Qaida was well informed about negotiations between the Taliban and the
U.S. on the oil pipeline and other American concerns. The memo also shows
that those negotiations were the Taliban’s gambit to extend its power;
Mullah Omar’s government never had any intention of allowing U.S. firms to
construct an oil pipeline, or letting the U.S. dictate the members of its
ruling body. Given the inside knowledge al-Qaida had about U.S.-Taliban
negotiations, it’s reasonable to suspect bin Laden’s group also received
and understood the U.S. threat of military action delivered in late July as
a threat of war.
In the end, though, the U.S. got its way. Interim Afghan leader Hamid
Karzai decided on May 30 to revive the pipeline project with Pakistan and
Turkmenistan, signing an agreement under which the three governments agree
to implement a pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan through Afghanistan.
Would that U.S. intelligence agencies’ investigations into al-Qaida
activities in the months before Sept. 11 had such a productive ending.
1. 1991-1997 – Major U.S. oil companies including ExxonMobil, Texaco,
Unocal, BP Amoco, Shell and Enron directly invest billions in cash bribing
heads of state in Kazakhstan to secure equity rights in the huge oil
reserves in these regions. The oil companies further commit to future direct
investments in Kazakhstan of $35 billion. Not being willing to pay
exorbitant prices to Russia to use Russian pipelines the major oil companies
have no way to recoup their investments. [“The Price of Oil,” by Seymour
Hersh, The New Yorker, July 9, 2001 – The Asia Times, “The Roving Eye Part I
Jan. 26, 2002.]
2. December 4, 1997 – Representatives of the Taliban are invited guests
to the Texas headquarters of Unocal to negotiate their support for the
pipeline. Subsequent reports will indicate that the negotiations failed,
allegedly because the Taliban wanted too much money. [Source: The BBC, Dec.
4, 1997]
3. February 12, 1998 – Unocal Vice President John J. Maresca – later to
become a Special Ambassador to Afghanistan – testifies before the House that
until a single, unified, friendly government is in place in Afghanistan the
trans-Afghani pipeline needed to monetize the oil will not be built.
[Source: Testimony before the House International Relations Committee.]
4. 1998 – The CIA ignores warnings from Case Officer Robert Baer that
Saudi Arabia was harboring an al-Q’aeda cell led by two known terrorists. A
more detailed list of known terrorists is offered to Saudi intelligence in
August 2001 and refused. [Source: Financial Times 1/12/01; See No Evil by a
book by Robert Baer (release date Feb. 2002).
5. April, 1999 – Enron with a $3 billion investment to build an
electrical generating plant at Dabhol India loses access to plentiful LNG
supplies from Qatar to fuel the plant. Its only remaining option to make the
investment profitable is a trans-Afghani gas pipeline to be built by Unocal
from Turkmenistan that would terminate near the Indian border at the city of
Multan. [Source: The Albion Monitor, Feb. 28, 2002.]
6. 1998 and 2000 – Former President George H.W. Bush travels to Saudi
Arabia on behalf of the privately owned Carlyle Group, the 11th largest
defense contractor in the U.S. While there he meets privately with the Saudi
royal family and the bin Laden family. [Source: Wall Street Journal, Sept.
27, 2001. See also FTW, Vol. IV, No 7 – “The Best Enemies Money Can Buy,” –
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/
members/carlyle.html. ]
7. January, 2001 – The Bush Administration orders the FBI and
intelligence agencies to “back off” investigations involving the bin Laden
family, including two of Osama bin Laden’s relatives (Abdullah and Omar) who
were living in Falls Church, VA – right next to CIA headquarters. This
followed previous orders dating back to 1996, frustrating efforts to
investigate the bin Laden family. [Source: BBC Newsnight, Correspondent
Gregg Palast – Nov 7, 2001].
8. Feb 13, 2001 – UPI Terrorism Correspondent Richard Sale – while
covering a trial of bin Laden’s Al Q’aeda followers – reports that the
National Security Agency has broken bin Laden’s encrypted communications.
Even if this indicates that bin Laden changed systems in February it does
not mesh with the fact that the government insists that the attacks had been
planned for years.
9. May 2001 – Secretary of State Colin Powell gives $43 million in aid
to the Taliban regime, purportedly to assist hungry farmers who are starving
since the destruction of their opium crop in January on orders of the
Taliban regime. [Source: The Los Angeles Times, May 22, 2001].
10. May, 2001 – Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, a career
covert operative and former Navy Seal, travels to India on a publicized tour
while CIA Director George Tenet makes a quiet visit to Pakistan to meet with
Pakistani leader General Pervez Musharraf. Armitage has long and deep
Pakistani intelligence connections and he is the recipient of the highest
civil decoration awarded by Pakistan. It would be reasonable to assume that
while in Islamabad, Tenet, in what was described as “an unusually long
meeting,” also met with his Pakistani counterpart, Lt. General Mahmud Ahmad,
head of the ISI. [Source The Indian SAPRA news agency, May 22, 2001.]
11. June 2001 – German intelligence, the BND, warns the CIA and Israel
that Middle Eastern terrorists are “planning to hijack commercial aircraft
to use as weapons to attack important symbols of American and Israeli
culture.” [Source: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, September 14, 2001.]
12. July, 2001 – Three American officials: Tom Simmons (former U.S.
Ambassador to Pakistan), Karl Inderfurth (former Assistant Secretary of
State for South Asian affairs) and Lee Coldren (former State Department
expert on South Asia), meet with Pakistani and Russian intelligence officers
in Berlin and tell them that the U.S. is planning military strikes against
Afghanistan in October. A French book released in November, “Bin Laden – La
Verité Interdite,” discloses that Taliban representatives often sat in on
the meetings. British papers confirm that the Pakistani ISI relayed the
threats to the Taliban. [Source: The Guardian, September 22, 2001; the BBC,
September 18, 2001.The Inter Press Service, Nov 16, 2001]
13. Summer, 2001 – The National Security Council convenes a Dabhol
working group as revealed in a series of government e-mails obtained by The
Washington Post and the New York Daily News. [Source: The Albion Monitor,
Feb. 28, 2002]
14. Summer 2001 – According to a Sept. 26 story in Britain’s The
Guardian, correspondent David Leigh reported that, “U.S. department of
defense official, Dr. Jeffrey Starr, visited Tajikistan in January. The
Guardian’s Felicity Lawrence established that US Rangers were also training
special troops in Kyrgyzstan. There were unconfirmed reports that Tajik and
Uzbek special troops were training in Alaska and Montana.”
15. Summer 2001 (est.) – Pakistani ISI Chief General Ahmad (see above)
orders an aide to wire transfer $100,000 to Mohammed Atta, who was according
to the FBI, the lead terrorist in the suicide hijackings. Ahmad recently
resigned after the transfer was disclosed in India and confirmed by the FBI.
[Source: The Times of India, October 11, 2001.]
16. Summer 2001 – An Iranian man phones U.S. law enforcement to warn of
an imminent attack on the World Trade Center in the week of September 9th.
German police confirm the calls but state that the U.S. Secret Service would
not reveal any further information. [Source: German news agency “online.de”,
September 14, 2001, translation retrieved from online.ie in Ireland.]
17. June 26, 2001 – The magazine indiareacts.com states that “India and
Iran will ‘facilitate’ US and Russian plans for ‘limited military action’
against the Taliban.” The story indicates that the fighting will be done by
US and Russian troops with the help of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. [Source:
indiareacts.com, June 26, 2001.]
18. August 2001 – The FBI arrests an Islamic militant linked to bin
Laden in Boston. French intelligence sources confirm that the man is a key
member of bin Laden’s network and the FBI learns that he has been taking
flying lessons. At the time of his arrest the man is in possession of
technical information on Boeing aircraft and flight manuals. [Source:
Reuters, September 13.]
19. August 11 or 12 – US Navy Lt. Delmart “Mike” Vreeland, jailed in
Toronto on U.S. fraud charges and claiming to be an officer in U.S. Naval
intelligence, writes details of the pending WTC attacks and seals them in an
envelope which he gives to Canadian authorities. [Source: The Toronto Star,
Oct. 23, 2001; Toronto Superior Court Records]
20. Summer 2001 – Russian intelligence notifies the CIA that 25
terrorist pilots have been specifically training for suicide missions. This
is reported in the Russian press and news stories are translated for FTW by
a retired CIA officer.
21. July 4-14, 2001 – Osama bin Laden receives treatments for kidney
disease at the American hospital in Dubai and meets with a CIA official who
returns to CIA headquarters on July 15th. [Source: Le Figaro, October 31st,
2001.]
22. August 2001 – Russian President Vladimir Putin orders Russian
intelligence to warn the U.S. government “in the strongest possible terms”
of imminent attacks on airports and government buildings. [Source: MS-NBC
interview with Putin, September 15.]
23. August/September, 2001 – The Dow Jones Industrial Average drops
nearly 900 points in the three weeks prior to the attack. A major stock
market crash is imminent.
24. Sept. 3-10, 2001 – MS-NBC reports on September 16 that a caller to a
Cayman Islands radio talk show gave several warnings of an imminent attack
on the U.S. by bin Laden in the week prior to 9/11.
25. September 1-10, 2001 – In an exercise, Operation “Swift Sword”
planned for four years, 23, 000 British troops are steaming toward Oman.
Although the 9/11 attacks caused a hiccup in the deployment the massive
operation was implemented as planned. At the same time two U.S. carrier
battle groups arrive on station in the Gulf of Arabia just off the Pakistani
coast. Also at the same time, some 17,000 U.S. troops join more than 23,000
NATO troops in Egypt for Operation “Bright Star.” All of these forces are in
place before the first plane hits the World Trade Center. [Sources: The
Guardian, CNN, FOX, The Observer, International Law Professor Francis Boyle,
the University of Illinois.]
26. September 7, 2001 – Florida Governor Jeb Bush signs a two-year
emergency executive order (01-261) making new provisions for the Florida
National Guard to assist law enforcement and emergency-management personnel
in the event of large civil disturbances, disaster or acts of terrorism.
[Source: State of Florida web site listing of Governor’s Executive Orders.]
27. September 6-7, 2001 – 4,744 put options (a speculation that the
stock will go down) are purchased on United Air Lines stock as opposed to
only 396 call options (speculation that the stock will go up). This is a
dramatic and abnormal increase in sales of put options. Many of the UAL puts
are purchased through Deutschebank/AB Brown, a firm managed until 1998 by
the current Executive Director of the CIA, A.B. “Buzzy” Krongard. [Source:
The Herzliyya International Policy Institute for Counterterrorism,
http://www.ict.org.il/, September 21; The New York Times; The Wall Street
Journal.]
28. September 10, 2001 – 4,516 put options are purchased on American
Airlines as compared to 748 call options. [Source: ICT – above]
29. September 6-11, 2001 – No other airlines show any similar trading
patterns to those experienced by UAL and American. The put option purchases
on both airlines were 600% above normal. This at a time when Reuters
(September 10) issues a business report stating, “Airline stocks may be
poised to take off.”
30. September 6-10, 2001 – Highly abnormal levels of put options are
purchased in Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, AXA Re(insurance) which owns 25%
of American Airlines, and Munich Re. All of these companies are directly
impacted by the September 11 attacks. [Source: ICT, above; FTW, Vol. IV,
No.7, October 18, 2001, http://www.fromthewilderness.com/
members/oct152001.html. ]
31. It has been documented that the CIA, the Israeli Mossad and many
other intelligence agencies monitor stock trading in real time using highly
advanced programs reported to be descended from Promis software. This is to
alert national intelligence services of just such kinds of attacks. Promis
was reported, as recently as June, 2001 to be in Osama bin Laden’s
possession and, as a result of recent stories by FOX, both the FBI and the
Justice Department have confirmed its use for U.S. intelligence gathering
through at least this summer. This would confirm that CIA had additional
advance warning of imminent attacks. [Sources: The Washington Times, June
15, 2001; FOX News, October 16, 2001; FTW, October 26, 2001, –
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/
members/magic_carpet.html; FTW, Vol. IV, No.6, Sept. 18, 2001 –
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/
members/sept1801.html; FTW, Vol. 3, No 7, 9/30/00 –
www.fromthewilderness.com/
free/pandora/052401_promis.html.
32. September 11, 2001 – Gen Mahmud of the ISI (see above), friend of
Mohammed Atta, is visiting Washington on behalf of the Taliban. He is
meeting with the Chairmen of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees,
Porter Goss (R), FL and Bob Graham (D), Fl [Sources: MS-NBC, Oct. 7, The New
York Times, Feb. 17, 2002.]
33. September 11, 2002 – Employees of Odigo, Inc. in Israel, one of the
world’s largest instant messaging companies, with offices in New York,
receive threat warnings of an imminent attack on the WTC less than two hours
before the first plane hits the WTC. Law enforcement authorities have gone
silent about any investigation of this. The Odigo Research and Development
offices in Israel are located in the city of Herzliyya, a ritzy suburb of
Tel Aviv which is the same location as the Institute for Counter Terrorism
which breaks early details of insider trading on 9-11. [Source: CNN’s Daniel
Sieberg, 9/28/01; Newsbytes, Brian McWilliams, 9/27/01; Ha’aretz,
9/26/01.].
34. September 11, 2001, For 50 minutes, from 8:15 AM until 9:05 AM, with
it widely known within the FAA and the military that four planes have been
simultaneously hijacked and taken off course, no one notifies the President
of the United States. It is not until 9:30 that any Air Force planes are
scrambled to intercept, but by then it is too late. This means that the
National Command Authority waited for 75 minutes before scrambling aircraft,
even though it was known that four simultaneous hijackings had occurred – an
event that has never happened in history. [Sources: CNN, ABC, MS-NBC, The
Los Angeles Times, The New York Times.]
35. September 13, 2001 – China is admitted to the World Trade
Organization quickly, after 15 years of unsuccessful attempts. [Source: The
New York Times, Sept. 30, 2001.]
36. September 14, 2001 – Canadian jailers open the sealed envelope from
Mike Vreeland in Toronto and see that is describes attacks against the WTC
and Pentagon. The U.S. Navy subsequently states that Vreeland was discharged
as a seaman in 1986 for unsatisfactory performance and has never worked in
intelligence. [Source: The Toronto Star, Oct. 23, 2001; Toronto Superior
Court records]
37. September 15, 2001 – The New York Times reports that Mayo Shattuck
III has resigned, effective immediately, as head of the Alex (A.B) Brown
unit of Deutschebank.
38. September 29, 2001 – The San Francisco Chronicle reports that $2.5
million in put options on American Airlines and United Airlines are
unclaimed. This is likely the result of the suspension in trading on the
NYSE after the attacks which gave the Securities and Exchange Commission
time to be waiting when the owners showed up to redeem their put options.
39. October 10, 2001 – The Pakistani newspaper The Frontier Post reports
that U.S. Ambassador Wendy Chamberlain has paid a call on the Pakistani oil
minister. A previously abandoned Unocal pipeline from Turkmenistan, across
Afghanistan, to the Pakistani coast, for the purpose of selling oil and gas
to China, is now back on the table “in view of recent geopolitical
developments.”
40. October 11, 2001 – The Ashcroft Justice Department takes over all
terrorist prosecutions from the U.S. Attorneys office in New York which has
had a highly successful track record in prosecuting terrorist cases
connected to Osama bin Laden. [Source: The New York Times, Oct. 11, 2002.]
41. Mid October, 2001 – The Dow Jones Industrial Average, after having
suffered a precipitous drop has recovered most of its pre-attack losses.
Although still weak, and vulnerable to negative earnings reports, a crash
has been averted by a massive infusion of government spending on defense
programs, subsidies for “affected” industries and planned tax cuts for
corporations.
42. November 21, 2001 – The British paper The Independent runs a story
headlined, “Opium Farmers Rejoice at the Defeat of the Taliban.” The story
reports that massive opium planting is underway all over the country.
43. November 25, 2001 – The Observer runs a story headlined “Victorious
Warlords Set To Open the Opium Floodgates.” It states that farmers are being
encouraged by warlords allied with the victorious Americans are “being
encouraged to plant “as much opium as possible.”
44. December 4, 2001 – Convicted drug lord and opium kingpin Ayub Afridi
is recruited by the US government to help establish control in Afghanistan
by unifying various Pashtun warlords. The former opium smuggler who was one
of the CIA’s leading assets in the war against the Russians is released from
prison in order to do this. [Source: The Asia Times Online, 12/4/01].
45. December 25, 2001 – Newly appointed afghani Prime Minister Hamid
Karzai is revealed as being a former paid consultant for Unocal. [Source: Le
Monde.]
46. January 3, 2002 – President Bush appoints Zalamy Khalilzad as a
special envoy to Afghanistan. Khalilzad, a former employee of Unocal, also
wrote op-eds in the Washington Post in 1997 supporting the Taliban regime.
[Source: Pravda, 1/9/02]
47. January 4, 2002 – Florida drug trafficking explodes after 9-11. In a
surge of trafficking reminiscent of the 1980s the diversion of resources
away from drug enforcement has opened the floodgates for a new surge of
cocaine and heroin from South America. [The Christian Science Monitor,
January 4, 2002.
48. January 10, 2002 – In a call from a speaker phone in open court,
attorneys for “Mike” Vreeland call the Pentagon’s switchboard operator who
confirms that Vreeland is indeed a Naval Lieutenant on active duty. She
provides an office number and a direct dial phone extension to his office in
the Pentagon. [Source: Attorney Rocco Galati; court records Toronto Superior
Court.]
49. January 10, 2002 – Attorney General John Ashcroft recuses himself
from the Enron investigation because Enron had been a major campaign donor
in his 2000 Senate race. He fails to recuse himself from involvement in two
sitting Federal grand juries investigating bribery and corruption charges
against ExxonMobil and BP-Amoco who have massive oil interests in Central
Asia. Both were major Ashcroft donors in 2000. [Source: CNN, Jan. 10, 2002 –
FTW original investigation, The Elephant in the Living Room, Part I, Apr 4,
2002.]
50. February 9, 2002 – Pakistani leader General Musharraf and Afghan
leader Hamid Karzai announce their agreement to “cooperate in all spheres of
activity” including the proposed Central Asian pipeline. Pakistan will give
$10 million to Afghanistan to help pay Afghani government workers. [Source:
The Irish Times, 2/9/02]
51. Feb 18, 2002 – The Financial Times reports that the estimated opium
harvest in Afghanistan in the late Spring of 2002 will reach a world record
4500 metric tons.
