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Documenten archief 9/11 op Scribd
Op Scribd is een grote hoeveelheid documenten met relatie tot 9/11 verzameld.
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/world-news/insurance-firm-sues-saudi-arabia-for-funding-911attacks-16051682.htmlInsurance firm sues Saudi Arabia for 'funding 9/11 attacks'
A Lloyd's insurance syndicate has begun a landmark legal case against Saudi Arabia, accusing the kingdom of indirectly funding al-Qa'ida and demanding the repayment of £136m it paid out to victims of the 9/11 attacks.
The Brighton-based Lloyd's 3500 syndicate, which paid $215m compensation to companies and individuals involved, alleges that the oil-rich Middle Eastern superpower bears primary responsibility for the atrocity because al-Qa'ida was supported by banks and charities acting as "agents and alter egos" for the Saudi state.
The detailed case, which names a number of prominent Saudi charities and banks as well as a leading member of the al-Saud royal family, will cause embarrassment to the Saudi government, which has long denied claims that Osama bin Laden's organisation received official financial and practical support from his native country.
Outlined in a 156-page document filed in western Pennsylvania, where United Airlines flight 93 crashed on 9/11, the claim suggests that the nine defendants "knowingly" provided resources, including funding, to al-Qa'ida in the years before the attack and encouraged anti-Western sentiment which increased support for the terror group.
The legal claim states: "Absent the sponsorship of al-Qa'ida's material sponsors and supporters, including the defendants named therein, al-Qa'ida would not have possessed the capacity to conceive, plan and execute the 11 September attacks. The success of al-Qa'ida's agenda, including the 11 September attacks themselves, has been made possible by the lavish sponsorship al-Qa'ida has received from its material sponsors and supporters over more than a decade leading up to 11 September 2001."
The Lloyd's syndicate is known as a "run-off", meaning that it does not accept new premiums on the Lloyd's of London insurance market and instead deals with historic claims. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, its members settled a raft of multimillion-pound claims from affected businesses, including airlines, airports and security companies, as well as injured individuals and relatives of those killed.
Its complaint, which quotes heavily from US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks detailing investigations by the US authorities into al-Qa'ida, attempts to establish funding links between some Saudi charities, and the terror group, and implicate the Saudi government in that funding through its support of the charities.
The case singles out the activities of a charity, the Saudi Joint Relief Committee for Kosovo and Chechnya (SJRC), which was alleged by UN officials to have been used as a cover by several al-Qa'ida operatives, including two men who acted as directors of the charity. It is alleged that at the time the SJRC was under the control of Prince Naif bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud, half-brother of King Abdullah and the long-standing Saudi Interior minister. The claim states: "Between 1998 and 2000, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, through the SJRC, diverted more than $74m to al-Qa'ida members and loyalists affiliated with SJRC bureaus. Throughout this time, the Committee was under the supervision and control of Saudi Interior Minister Prince Naif bin Abdul Aziz."
The Saudi embassies in London and Washington did not respond to requests from The Independent for a response to the allegations in the claim. The 9/11 Commission, America's official report on the attacks, found that there was no evidence that the Saudi government or senior Saudi officials individually funded al-Qa'ida.
Diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks showed that American officials remained concerned that the Saudi authorities were not doing enough to stop money being passed to the terror group by Saudi citizens.
]]>TRANSCRIPT: On the morning of September 11, 2001, 19 men armed with boxcutters directed by a man on dialysis in a cave fortress halfway around the world using a satellite phone and a laptop directed the most sophisticated penetration of the most heavily-defended airspace in the world, overpowering the passengers and the military combat-trained pilots on 4 commercial aircraft before flying those planes wildly off course for over an hour without being molested by a single fighter interceptor.
These 19 hijackers, devout religious fundamentalists who liked to drink alcohol, snort cocaine, and live with pink-haired strippers, managed to knock down 3 buildings with 2 planes in New York, while in Washington a pilot who couldn’t handle a single engine Cessna was able to fly a 757 in an 8,000 foot descending 270 degree corskscrew turn to come exactly level with the ground, hitting the Pentagon in the budget analyst office where DoD staffers were working on the mystery of the 2.3 trillion dollars that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had announced “missing” from the Pentagon’s coffers in a press conference the day before, on September 10, 2001.
Luckily, the news anchors knew who did it within minutes, the pundits knew within hours, the Administration knew within the day, and the evidence literally fell into the FBI’s lap. But for some reason a bunch of crazy conspiracy theorists demanded an investigation into the greatest attack on American soil in history.
The investigation was delayed, underfunded, set up to fail, a conflict of interest and a cover up from start to finish. It was based on testimony extracted through torture, the records of which were destroyed. It failed to mention the existence of WTC7, Able Danger, Ptech, Sibel Edmonds, OBL and the CIA, and the drills of hijacked aircraft being flown into buildings that were being simulated at the precise same time that those events were actually happening. It was lied to by the Pentagon, the CIA, the Bush Administration and as for Bush and Cheney…well, no one knows what they told it because they testified in secret, off the record, not under oath and behind closed doors. It didn’t bother to look at who funded the attacks because that question is of “little practical significance“. Still, the 9/11 Commission did brilliantly, answering all of the questions the public had (except most of the victims’ family members’ questions) and pinned blame on all the people responsible (although no one so much as lost their job), determining the attacks were “a failure of imagination” because “I don’t think anyone could envision flying airplanes into buildings ” except the Pentagon and FEMA and NORAD and the NRO.
The DIA destroyed 2.5 TB of data on Able Danger, but that’s OK because it probably wasn’t important.
The SEC destroyed their records on the investigation into the insider trading before the attacks, but that’s OK because destroying the records of the largest investigation in SEC history is just part of routine record keeping.
NIST has classified the data that they used for their model of WTC7′s collapse, but that’s OK because knowing how they made their model of that collapse would “jeopardize public safety“.
The FBI has argued that all material related to their investigation of 9/11 should be kept secret from the public, but that’s OK because the FBI probably has nothing to hide.
This man never existed, nor is anything he had to say worthy of your attention, and if you say otherwise you are a paranoid conspiracy theorist and deserve to be shunned by all of humanity. Likewise him, him, him, and her. (and her and her and him).
Osama Bin Laden lived in a cave fortress in the hills of Afghanistan, but somehow got away. Then he was hiding out in Tora Bora but somehow got away. Then he lived in Abottabad for years, taunting the most comprehensive intelligence dragnet employing the most sophisticated technology in the history of the world for 10 years, releasing video after video with complete impunity (and getting younger and younger as he did so), before finally being found in a daring SEAL team raid which wasn’t recorded on video, in which he didn’t resist or use his wife as a human shield, and in which these crack special forces operatives panicked and killed this unarmed man, supposedly the best source of intelligence about those dastardly terrorists on the planet. Then they dumped his body in the ocean before telling anyone about it. Then a couple dozen of that team’s members died in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan.
This is the story of 9/11, brought to you by the media which told you the hard truths about JFK and incubator babies and mobile production facilities and the rescue of Jessica Lynch.
If you have any questions about this story…you are a batshit, paranoid, tinfoil, dog-abusing baby-hater and will be reviled by everyone. If you love your country and/or freedom, happiness, rainbows, rock and roll, puppy dogs, apple pie and your grandma, you will never ever express doubts about any part of this story to anyone. Ever.
This has been a public service announcement by: the Friends of the FBI, CIA, NSA, DIA, SEC, MSM, White House, NIST, and the 9/11 Commission. Because Ignorance is Strength.
Did 9/11 make us all go mad? Nine years, two wars, hundreds of thousands dead - and nothing learnt]]>By Robert Fisk
Saturday, 11 September 2010How fitting, in a weird, crazed way, that the apotheosis of that firestorm nine years ago should turn out to be a crackpot preacher threatening another firestorm with a Nazi-style book burning of the Koran.
Or a would-be mosque two blocks from "ground zero" – as if 9/11 was an onslaught on Jesus-worshipping Christians, rather than on the atheist West.
But why should we be surprised? Just look at all the other crackpots spawned in the aftermath of those international crimes against humanity: the half-crazed Ahmadinejad, the smarmy post-nuclear Gaddafi, Blair with his crazed right eye and George W Bush with his black prisons and torture and lunatic "war on terror". And that wretched man who lived – or lives still – in an Afghan cave and the hundreds of al-Qa'idas whom he created, and the one-eyed mullah – not to mention all the lunatic cops and intelligence agencies and CIA thugs who failed us all – utterly – on 9/11 because they were too idle or too stupid to identify 19 men who were going to attack the United States. And remember one thing: even if the Rev Terry Jones sticks with his decision to back down, another of our cranks will be ready to take his place.
Indeed, on this grim ninth anniversary – and heaven spare us next year from the 10th – 9/11 appears to have produced not peace or justice or democracy or human rights, but monsters. They have prowled Iraq – both the Western and the local variety – and slaughtered 100,000 souls, or 500,000, or a million; and who cares? They have killed tens of thousands in Afghanistan; and who cares? And as the sickness has spread across the Middle East and then the globe, they – the air force pilots and the insurgents, the Marines and the suicide bombers, the al-Qa'idas of the Maghreb and of the Khalij and of the Caliphate of Iraq and the special forces and the close air support boys and the throat-cutters – have torn the heads off women and children and the old and the sick and the young and healthy, from the Indus to the Mediterranean, from Bali to the London Tube; quite a memorial to the 2,966 innocents who were killed nine years ago. All in their name, it seems, has been our holocaust of fire and blood, enshrined now in the crazed pastor of Gainesville.
This is the loss, of course. But who's made the profit? Well, the arms dealers, naturally, and Boeing and Lockheed Martin and all the missile lads and the drone manufacturers and F-16 spare parts outfits and the ruthless mercenaries who stalk the Muslim lands on our behalf now that we have created 100,000 more enemies for each of the 19 murderers of 9/11. Torturers have had a good time, honing their sadism in America's black prisons – it was appropriate that the US torture centre in Poland should be revealed on this ninth anniversary – as have the men (and women, I fear) who perfect the shackles and water-drowning techniques with which we now fight our wars. And – let us not forget – every religious raver in the world, be they of the Bin Laden variety, the bearded groupies in the Taliban, the suicide executioners, the hook-in the arm preachers, or our very own pastor of Gainesville.
And God? Where does he fit in? An archive of quotations suggests that just about every monster created in or after 9/11 is a follower of this quixotic redeemer. Bin Laden prays to God – "to turn America into a shadow of itself", as he told me in 1997 – and Bush prayed to God and Blair prayed – and prays – to God, and all the Muslim killers and an awful lot of Western soldiers and Dr (honorary) Pastor Terry Jones and his 30 (or it may be 50, since all statistics are hard to come by in the "war on terror") pray to God. And poor old God, of course, has had to listen to these prayers as he always sits through them during our mad wars. Recall the words attributed to him by a poet of another generation: "God this, God that, and God the other thing. 'Good God,' said God, 'I've got my work cut out'." And that was just the First World War...
Just five years ago – on the fourth anniversary of the twin towers/Pentagon/Pennsylvania attacks – a schoolgirl asked me at a lecture in a Belfast church whether the Middle East would benefit from more religion. No – less religion! – I howled back. God is good for contemplation, not for war. But – and here we are driven on to the reefs and hidden rocks which our leaders wish us to ignore, forget and cast aside – this whole bloody mess involves the Middle East; it is about a Muslim people who have kept their faith while those Westerners who dominate them – militarily, economically, culturally, socially – have lost theirs. How can this be, Muslims ask? Indeed, it is a superb irony that the Rev Jones is a believer while the rest of us – by and large – are not. Hence our books and our documentaries never refer to Muslims vs Christians, but Muslims versus "The West".
And of course, the one taboo subject of which we must not speak – Israel's relationship with America, and America's unconditional support for Israel's theft of land from Muslim Arabs – also lies at the heart of this terrible crisis in our lives. In yesterday's edition of The Independent, there was a photograph of Afghan demonstrators chanting "death to America". But in the background, these same demonstrators were carrying a black banner with a message in Dari written upon it in white paint. What it actually said was: "The bloodsucking Zionist government regime and the Western leaders who are indifferent [to suffering] and have no conscience are again celebrating the new year by spilling the red blood of the Palestinians."
The message is as extreme as it is vicious – but it proves, yet again, that the war in which we are engaged is also about Israel and "Palestine". We may prefer to ignore this in "the West" – where Muslims supposedly "hate us for what we are" or "hate our democracy" (see: Bush, Blair and a host of other mendacious politicians) – but this great conflict lies at the heart of the "war on terror". That is why the equally vicious Benjamin Netanyahu reacted to the atrocities of 9/11 by claiming that the event would be good for Israel. Israel would now be able to claim that it, too, was fighting the "war on terror", that Arafat – this was the now-comatose Ariel Sharon's claim – is "our Bin Laden". And thus Israelis had the gall to claim that Sderot, under its cascade of tin-pot missiles from Hamas, was "our ground zero".
It was not. Israel's battle with the Palestinians is a ghastly caricature of our "war on terror", in which we are supposed to support the last colonial project on earth – and accept its thousands of victims – because the twin towers and the Pentagon and United Flight 93 were attacked by 19 Arab murderers nine years ago. There is a supreme irony in the fact that one direct result of 9/11 has been the stream of Western policemen and spooks who have travelled to Israel to improve their "anti-terrorist expertise" with the help of Israeli officers who may – according to the United Nations – be war criminals. It was no surprise to find that the heroes who gunned down poor old Jean Charles de Menezes on the London Tube in 2005 had been receiving "anti-terrorist" advice from the Israelis.
And yes, I know the arguments. We cannot compare the actions of evil terrorists with the courage of our young men and women, defending our lives – and sacrificing theirs – on the front lines of the 'war on terror". There can be no "equivalence". "They" kill innocents because "they" are evil. "We" kill innocents by mistake. But we know we are going to kill innocents – we willingly accept that we are going to kill innocents, that our actions are going to create mass graves of families, of the poor and the weak and the dispossessed.
This is why we created the obscene definition of "collateral damage". For if "collateral" means that these victims are innocent, then "collateral" also means that we are innocent of killing them. It was not our wish to kill them – even if we knew it was inevitable that we would. "Collateral" is our exoneration. This one word is the difference between "them" and "us", between our God-given right to kill and Bin Laden's God-given right to murder. The victims, hidden away as "collateral" corpses, don't count any more because they were slaughtered by us. Maybe it wasn't so painful. Maybe death by drone is a more gentle departure from this earth, evisceration by an AGM-114C Boeing-Lockheed air-to-ground missile less painful, than death by shards from a roadside bomb or a cruel suicider with an explosive belt.
That's why we know how many died on 9/11 – 2,966, although the figure may be higher – and why we don't "do body counts" on those whom we kill. Because they – "our" victims – must have no identities, no innocence, no personality, no cause or belief or feelings; and because we have killed far, far more human beings than Bin Laden and the Taliban and al-Qa'ida.
Anniversaries are newspaper and television events. And they can have an eerie habit of coalescing together to create an unhappy memorial framework. Thus do we commemorate the Battle of Britain – a chivalric episode in our history – and the Blitz, a progenitor of mass murder, to be sure, but a symbol of innocent courage – as we remember the start of a war that has torn our morality apart, turned our politicians into war criminals, our soldiers into killers and our ruthless enemies into heroes of the anti-Western cause. And while on this gloomy anniversary the Rev Jones wanted to burn a book called the Koran, Tony Blair tried to sell a book called A Journey. Jones said the Koran was "evil"; Britons have asked whether the Blair book should be classified as "crime". Certainly, 9/11 has moved into fantasy when the Rev Jones can command the attention of the Obamas and the Clintons and the Holy Father and the even more Holy United Nations. Whom the gods would destroy...
11 Sep 2001The World Trade Centre and the Pentagon are hit by aeroplanes hijacked by al-Qa’ida terrorists. George Bush says that America will stand with “all those who want peace and security in the world”.
7 Oct 2001
The US and Britain launch air strikes against Afghanistan.
13 Nov 2001
The Northern Alliance liberates Kabul from the rule of the Taliban.
11 Jan 2002
The first prisoners arrive at Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
9 Jan 2003
Top UN weapons inspector Hans Blix tells reporters that “we have now been in [Iraq] for some two months and? we haven't found any smoking guns”.
15 Feb 2003
Protests are held across the world against impending war in Iraq.
20 Mar 2003
US-led coalition launches invasion of Iraq.
9 Oct 2003
Toppling of statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad is taken as symbol of coalition triumph.
11 Mar 2004
A series of bombs explode within minutes of each other on four commuter trains in Madrid, killing 191 people and wounding a further 1,841.
29 Apr 2004
Photographs emerge showing the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by US soldiers at Abu Ghraib, inflaming anti-US feeling.
2 Oct 2004
Video footage appears of British hostage Kenneth Bigley being beheaded by Iraqi militants.
2 Nov 2004
Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh is murdered after making a film about violence against women in Islamic societies.
7 Jul 2005
Four suicide bombers kill 52 passengers and injure almost 800 others in a series of attacks on London’s transport network.
30 Sep 2005
A series of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohamed are published in a Danish newspaper. The pictures are reprinted elsewhere amid widespread outrage and violent protests in the Muslim world.
30 Dec 2006
Saddam Hussein is hanged in northern Baghdad for crimes against humanity.
21 Sep 2009
A leaked report by Gen Stanley McChrystal, commander of US forces, suggests that the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan could be lost within a year unless there are significant increases in troops.
29 Nov 2009
A ban on building minarets is voted in by the Swiss public, reflecting a hostile attitude to the country’s rising Muslim minority.
21 Jan 2010
43 per cent of Americans say they feel some negative prejudice towards Muslims, according to a poll by Gallup.
1 Sep 2010
At the end of a month in which 295 civilians were killed by violence, Barack Obama declares that the US combat mission in Iraq is at an end.
Documenten archief 9/11 op Scribd
Op Scribd is een grote hoeveelheid documenten met relatie tot 9/11 verzameld.
The Falling Man
]]>9/11 ‘Niets is toeval, alles heeft een reden’ De mensen geloven wat de mensen willen geloven]]>De Amerikaanse overheid had gehoopt dat het negen jaar na dato wel afgelopen zou zijn met die complottheorieën rond elf september, niets is minder waar.
Ze blijven maar rondzoemen: de complottheorieën rond 9/11. En dat steekt de Amerikaanse overheid dermate dat het er sinds vorig jaar op de overheidswebsite america.gov ruimschoots aandacht aan besteedt. Nee, het was geen Skud-raket, er is echt een vliegtuig in het Pentagon gevlogen. En nee, de Twin Towers zijn niet met explosieven opgeblazen.
Vroeger zouden complottheorieën worden genegeerd of de denkers voor gek versleten, maar de Amerikaanse overheid ziet in dat doodzwijgen of ridiculiseren niet genoeg is. Zo worden op america.gov de populairste complottheorieën uitgelegd en bestreden (zie kader).
Tot in detail
Het State Department heeft zelfs een heuse complottheorie-specialist in dienst. Vorig jaar hield deze Todd Leventhal nog een chatsessie met het publiek waarbij hij vragen beantwoordde als ‘Is er echt een vliegtuig in het Pentagon gevlogen?’ tot ‘Is lopen op de maan ook een complot?’ Vragen waarop hij tot in detail ingaat met verwijzingen naar bronnen.
Om het nog mooier te maken wordt op america.gov ook de bekendste 9/11 complotdocu onder de loep genomen in het artikel Loose Change Debunked. Zo wordt het wijdverbreide geloof dat het Pentagon nooit door een vliegtuig is geraakt, ontkracht met een trits feitelijke zaken. Met retorica van de bovenste plank. ‘Dat wordt zelfs door andere complotdenkers erkend’, is een van de argumenten.
Talloze onderzoeken wijzen uit dat zowel in Amerika als ver daar buiten breed wordt getwijfeld aan de officiële lezing van 9/11. In 2006 geloofde eenderde van de Amerikanen dat de overheid medeplichtig was aan de aanslagen, om zo oorlog in het Midden-Oosten te kunnen voeren. Dat percentage is de afgelopen jaren nauwelijks afgenomen.
Ook in Nederland is de groep mensen die in een alternatieve uitleg gelooft groot, zegt een 9/11-kenner. ‘Je weet dat overheden bewust liegen over oorlogen, en je hoeft maar met je nagel over de officiële verklaring te krassen en het bladdert los.’ Hij wil anoniem wil blijven, omdat zijn bedrijf voor de overheid werkt en op complotdenkers nogal snel het stempel ‘gek’ wordt geplakt.
Gek is niet een term die psycholoog dr. Jan Willem van Prooijen van de Vrije Universiteit in de mond neemt. Volgens Van Prooijen hebben complotdenkers gemeen dat het mensen zijn die slecht tegen onzekerheden kunnen. ‘Ze zien niet in hoeveel systematische fouten overheden kunnen maken. Niets is toeval, alles heeft een reden. Met het geloof in een complot herstellen ze controle.’
Minder vertrouwen
De Amerikaanse psycholoog Ted Goertzel concludeerde in 1994 na enquête-onderzoek dat mensen die in complottheorieën geloven minder vertrouwen hebben in hun toekomst, de overheid en de medemens. Vooral in trek bij mensen met extreme politieke of religieuze idealen en etnische minderheden. Opleidingsniveau doet er niet toe.
Eén ding is zeker, 9/11 heeft voorgoed een plaats verworven tussen de historische gebeurtenissen waaraan nog decennia getwijfeld wordt, zoals de moord op JFK. Zo kwamen de aanslagen de regering Bush wel erg goed uit, vinden de twijfelaars.
In 2000 schreef de neo-conservatieve denktank Project for a New American Century (van onder meer Dick Cheney en Paul Wolfowitz) een studie over hoe de VS haar wereldhegemonie kon versterken. Daarvoor waren in iedere geval grote investeringen in Defensie nodig: ‘Het proces van transformatie, ook al brengt het revolutionaire veranderingen, zal waarschijnlijk lang zal duren; tenzij er een rampzalige gebeurtenis plaatsvindt zoals een nieuwe Pearl Harbor.’
Overtuigender bewijs is er volgens de believers niet.
Een deze week vrijgegeven video-opname van een man die op 11 september 2001 schreeuwt om hulp vanuit een raam van World Trade Center 7 (WTC7), heeft op het internet en in Amerikaanse media het debat over wat er op die dag in New York precies is gebeurd weer aangezwengeld. Het instorten van WTC7 is in kringen van critici van de officiële verklaringen voor het instorten van WTC1, 2 en 7 altijd gezien als een 'smoking gun'. - Door Johan van de Beek
Terwijl de Twin Towers instortten nadat ze geraakt waren door vliegtuigen en hevige brandden hadden gewoed, stortte WTC7 (ook een gigantisch gebouw met 47 verdiepingen) in zonder te zijn geraakt door een vliegtuig. In dit gebouw was onder andere de dienst gevestigd die onder leiding van burgemeester Giuliani de rampenbestrijding moest coördineren. De media-aandacht voor de collaps van WTC7 was die dag veel minder dan die voor de andere aanslagen (WTC1, WTC2, Pentagon en Shanksville).
Volgens veel critici is WTC7 opzettelijk door gebruik van explosieven neergehaald in wat in vaktermen 'controlled demolition' wordt genoemd. Uitspraken na 9/11 gedaan door de eigenaar van de drie ingestorte gebouwen, Larry Silverstein, suggereren dat ook sterk. Silverstein zegt dat hij in overleg met de brandweer besloot 'to pull the building'. Hij ontkende later dat hij met 'pull' het opzettelijk neerhalen van het gebouw had bedoeld hoewel dat wel de vakterm er voor is. Het nieuwe filmpje, dat onder de Freedom of Information Act is vrijgekomen na juridische acties van het Internationale Centrum voor 9/11 Studies, lijkt de 'smoking gun' te onderbouwen.
In het fragment zien we Michael Hess uit een raam om hulp roepen op de achtste verdieping van WTC7. Hess, een gerenommeerde jurist, heeft altijd verklaard dat hij samen met Barry Jennings, adjunct-directer van de Rampenbestrijdingsdienst van New York, naar het rampencentrum op de 23-ste verdieping van WT7 was gegaan. Het enige wat ze daar aantroffen waren dampende koppen koffie. Iedereen was vertrokken. Toen Hess en Jennings het gebouw wilden verlaten, hoorden ze een gigantische explosie in de kelder of lobby van het gebouw en bleek de uitgang geblokkeerd.
Hess, een persoonlijke vriend van Giuliani, riep om hulp en werd samen Jennings ontzet door brandweermensen. Jennings verklaarde later tegenover de BBC dat er in de lobby lijken lagen. Hij overleed in augustus 2008, twee dagen voordat een overheidsrapport verscheen over het instorten van WT7. De verklaringen van Hess en Jennings over de explosies in WTC7 werden niet opgenomen in het officiële onderzoek naar de gebeurtenissen van die dag door de 9/11 Commission (2004). WTC7 was slechts een voetnoot in dat rapport.
De video bewijst volgens critici niet alleen dat Hess' verhaal klopt (dat hij om hulp moest roepen omdat hij niet meer uit het gebouw kon komen vanwege een explosie op de begane grond of dieper) maar ook dat er geen substantiële schade is te zien aan het gebouw dat desondanks later op de dag in zeven seconden door zijn hoeven zou zakken.
Video's van Michael Hess, Larry Silverstein en het instorten van WTC7
The Central Intelligence Agency withheld information about a secret counterterrorism program from Congress for eight years on direct orders from former Vice President Dick Cheney, the agency’s director, Leon E. Panetta, has told the Senate and House intelligence committees, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said Saturday.
The report that Mr. Cheney was behind the decision to conceal the still-unidentified program from Congress deepened the mystery surrounding it, suggesting that the Bush administration had put a high priority on the program and its secrecy.
Mr. Panetta, who ended the program when he first learned of its existence from subordinates on June 23, briefed the two intelligence committees about it in separate closed sessions the next day.
Efforts to reach Mr. Cheney through relatives and associates were unsuccessful.
The question of how completely the C.I.A. informed Congress about sensitive programs has been hotly disputed by Democrats and Republicans since May, when Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused the agency of failing to reveal in 2002 that it was waterboarding a terrorism suspect, a claim Mr. Panetta rejected.
The law requires the president to make sure the intelligence committees “are kept fully and currently informed of the intelligence activities of the United States, including any significant anticipated intelligence activity.” But the language of the statute, the amended National Security Act of 1947, leaves some leeway for judgment, saying such briefings should be done “to the extent consistent with due regard for the protection from unauthorized disclosure of classified information relating to sensitive intelligence sources and methods or other exceptionally sensitive matters.”
In addition, for covert action programs, a particularly secret category in which the role of the United States is hidden, the law says that briefings can be limited to the so-called Gang of Eight, consisting of the Republican and Democratic leaders of both houses of Congress and of their intelligence committees.
The disclosure about Mr. Cheney’s role in the unidentified C.I.A. program comes a day after an inspector general’s report underscored the central role of the former vice president’s office in restricting to a small circle of officials knowledge of the National Security Agency’s program of eavesdropping without warrants, a degree of secrecy that the report concluded had hurt the effectiveness of the counterterrorism surveillance effort.
An intelligence agency spokesman, Paul Gimigliano, declined on Saturday to comment on the report of Mr. Cheney’s role.
“It’s not agency practice to discuss what may or may not have been said in a classified briefing,” Mr. Gimigliano said. “When a C.I.A. unit brought this matter to Director Panetta’s attention, it was with the recommendation that it be shared appropriately with Congress. That was also his view, and he took swift, decisive action to put it into effect.”
Members of Congress have differed on the significance of the program, whose details remained secret and which even some Democrats have said was properly classified. Most of those interviewed, however, have said that it was an important activity that should have been disclosed to the intelligence committees.
Intelligence and Congressional officials have said the unidentified program did not involve the C.I.A. interrogation program and did not involve domestic intelligence activities. They have said the program was started by the counterterrorism center at the C.I.A. shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but never became fully operational, involving planning and some training that took place off and on from 2001 until this year.
In the tense months after Sept. 11, when Bush administration officials believed new Qaeda attacks could occur at any moment, intelligence officials brainstormed about radical countermeasures. It was in that atmosphere that the unidentified program was devised and deliberately concealed from Congress, officials said.
Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the top Republican on the House intelligence committee, said last week that he believed Congress would have approved of the program only in the angry and panicky days after 9/11, on 9/12, he said, but not later, after fears and tempers had begun to cool.
One intelligence official, who would speak about the classified program only on condition of anonymity, said there was no resistance inside the C.I.A. to Mr. Panetta’s decision to end the program last month.
“Because this program never went fully operational and hadn’t been briefed as Panetta thought it should have been, his decision to kill it was neither difficult nor controversial,” the official said. “That’s worth remembering amid all the drama.”
Bill Harlow, a spokesman for George J. Tenet, who was the C.I.A. director when the unidentified program began, declined to comment on Saturday, noting that the program remained classified.
In the eight years of his vice presidency, Mr. Cheney was the Bush administration’s most vehement defender of the secrecy of government activities, particularly in the intelligence arena. He went to the Supreme Court to keep secret the advisers to his task force on energy, and won.
A report released on Friday by the inspectors general of five agencies about the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program makes clear that Mr. Cheney’s legal adviser, David S. Addington, had to approve personally every government official who was told about the program. The report said “the exceptionally compartmented nature of the program” frustrated F.B.I. agents who were assigned to follow up on tips it had turned up.
Mr. Addington could not be reached for comment on Saturday.
Questions over the adequacy and the truthfulness of the C.I.A.’s briefings for Congress date to the creation of the intelligence oversight committees in the 1970s after disclosures of agency assassination and mind-control programs and other abuses. But complaints increased in the Bush years, when the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies took the major role in pursuing Al Qaeda.
The use of harsh interrogation methods, including waterboarding, for instance, was first described to a handful of lawmakers for the first time in September 2002. Ms. Pelosi and the C.I.A. have disagreed about what she was told, but in any case, the briefing occurred only after a terrorism suspect, Abu Zubaydah, had been waterboarded 83 times.
Democrats in Congress, who contend that the Bush administration improperly limited Congressional briefings on intelligence, are seeking to change the National Security Act to permit the full intelligence committees to be briefed on more matters. President Obama, however, has threatened to veto the intelligence authorization bill if the changes go too far, and the proposal is now being negotiated by the White House and the intelligence committees.
Representative Jan Schakowsky, a Democrat of Illinois on the House committee, wrote on Friday to the chairman, Representative Silvestre Reyes, a Democrat of Texas, to demand an investigation of the unidentified program and why Congress was not told of it. Aides said Mr. Reyes was reviewing the matter.
“There’s been a history of difficulty in getting the C.I.A. to tell us what they should,” said Representative Adam Smith, a Democrat of Washington. “We will absolutely be held accountable for anything the agency does.”
Mr. Hoekstra, the intelligence committee’s ranking Republican, said he would not judge the agency harshly in the case of the unidentified program, because it was not fully operational. But he said that in general, the agency had not been as forthcoming as the law required.
“We have to pull the information out of them to get what we need,” Mr. Hoekstra said.
]]>Former NBC News investigative producer Robert Windrem reports that the vice president’s office suggested waterboarding an Iraqi prisoner who was suspected of knowing about a relationship between al Qaeda and Saddam.Robert Windrem, who covered terrorism for NBC, reports exclusively in The Daily Beast that:
*Two U.S. intelligence officers confirm that Vice President Cheney’s office suggested waterboarding an Iraqi prisoner, a former intelligence official for Saddam Hussein, who was suspected to have knowledge of a Saddam-al Qaeda connection.*The former chief of the Iraq Survey Group, Charles Duelfer, in charge of interrogations, tells The Daily Beast that he considered the request reprehensible.
*Much of the information in the report of the 9/11 Commission was provided through more than 30 sessions of torture of detainees.
At the end of April 2003, not long after the fall of Baghdad, U.S. forces captured an Iraqi who Bush White House officials suspected might provide information of a relationship between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s regime. Muhammed Khudayr al-Dulaymi was the head of the M-14 section of Mukhabarat, one of Saddam’s secret police organizations. His responsibilities included chemical weapons and contacts with terrorist groups.
Two senior U.S. intelligence officials at the time tell The Daily Beast that the suggestion to waterboard an Iraqi prisoner came from the Office of Vice President Cheney.
“To those who wanted or suspected a relationship, he would have been a guy who would know, so [White House officials] had particular interest,” Charles Duelfer, head of the Iraqi Survey Group and the man in charge of interrogations of Iraqi officials, told me. So much so that the officials, according to Duelfer, inquired how the interrogation was proceeding.
In his new book, Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq, and in an interview with The Daily Beast, Duelfer says he heard from “some in Washington at very senior levels (not in the CIA),” who thought Khudayr’s interrogation had been “too gentle” and suggested another route, one that they believed has proven effective elsewhere. “They asked if enhanced measures, such as waterboarding, should be used,” Duelfer writes. “The executive authorities addressing those measures made clear that such techniques could legally be applied only to terrorism cases, and our debriefings were not as yet terrorism-related. The debriefings were just debriefings, even for this creature.”
Duelfer will not disclose who in Washington had proposed the use of waterboarding, saying only: “The language I can use is what has been cleared.” In fact, two senior U.S. intelligence officials at the time tell The Daily Beast that the suggestion to waterboard came from the Office of Vice President Cheney. Cheney, of course, has vehemently defended waterboarding and other harsh techniques, insisting they elicited valuable intelligence and saved lives. He has also asked that several memoranda be declassified to prove his case. (The Daily Beast placed a call to Cheney’s office and will post a response if we get one.)
Without admitting where the suggestion came from, Duelfer revealed that he considered it reprehensible and understood the rationale as political—and ultimately counterproductive to the overall mission of the Iraq Survey Group, which was assigned the mission of finding Saddam Hussein’s WMD after the invasion.
“Everyone knew there would be more smiles in Washington if WMD stocks were found,” Duelfer said in the interview. “My only obligation was to find the truth. It would be interesting if there was WMD in May 2003, but what was more interesting to me was looking at the entire regime through the slice of WMD.”
But, Duelfer says, Khudayr in fact repeatedly denied knowing the location of WMD or links between Saddam’s regime and al Qaeda and was not subjected to any enhanced interrogation. Duelfer says the idea that he would have known of such links was “ludicrous".
This proposed use of enhanced interrogation techniques, or torture, in Iraq was not the only time these methods were actually used to derive information for a purpose other than the stated one—to derive intelligence about imminent threats to the United States following the 9/11 attacks.
An extensive analysis I conducted as a reporter for NBC News of the 9/11 Commission’s Final Report and its monograph on terrorist travel showed that much of what was reported about the planning and execution of the terror attacks on New York and Washington was based on the CIA's interrogations of high-ranking al Qaeda operatives who had been subjected to "enhanced interrogation techniques."
More than one-quarter of all footnotes in the 9/11 Report refer to CIA interrogations of al Qaeda operatives subjected to the now-controversial interrogation techniques. In fact, information derived from the interrogations was central to the 9/11 Report’s most critical chapters, those on the planning and execution of the attacks.
The NBC analysis also showed—and agency and commission staffers concur—there was a separate, second round of interrogations in early 2004, specifically conducted to answer new questions from the 9/11 Commission after its lawyers had been left unsatisfied by the agency’s internal interrogation reports.
Human-rights advocates, including Karen Greenberg of New York University Law School’s Center for Law and Security and Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights, have said that, at the least, the 9/11 Commission should have been more suspect of the information derived under such pressure.
Commission executive director Philip Zelikow (later counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice) admitted, "We were not aware, but we guessed, that things like that were going on. We were wary…we tried to find different sources to enhance our credibility." (Zelikow testified before the Senate on Wednesday, May 13, that he had argued in a 2005 memo that some of the tactics used on suspected terrorists violated the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.)
A former senior U.S. intelligence official told me the Commission never expressed any concerns about techniques and even pushed for a second round of interrogations in early 2004, as the Commission was finishing up its work. The second round of interrogations sought by the Commission involved more than 30 separate interrogation sessions.
"Remember," the intelligence official said, "the Commission had access to the intelligence reports that came out of the interrogation. This didn't satisfy them. They demanded direct personal access to the detainees and the administration told them to go pound sand.”
"As a compromise, they were allowed to let us know what questions they would have liked to ask the detainees. At appropriate times in the interrogation cycle, agency questioners would go back and re-interview the detainees. Many of [those] questions were variants or follow-ups to stuff previously asked."
At least four operatives whose interrogation figured in the 9/11 Commission Report have claimed that they told interrogators critical information as a way to stop being "tortured." Those claims came during their hearings in the spring of 2007 at the U.S. military facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
For Duelfer, an experienced interrogator, the details now being laid out in CIA and White House memoranda and in congressional hearings cannot be justified. While admitting that the interrogators faced enormous pressure in 2002 and 2003, he said he had problems with the overall strategy.
“Interrogation is about two humans who are face to face, sweat to sweat. Is your hand going to hit them?” he notes. “That’s a relationship that becomes very deep. If you are going to reach someone at an intellectual or emotive level, it’s hard to see how you can do that and still be the person who accosts that person. I don’t know how to do that.”
Robert Windrem is a Senior Reserach Fellow at the NYU Center on Law and Security. For three decades, he worked as a producer for NBC News. During that time, he focused on issues of international security, strategic policy, intelligence and terrorism. He is the winner of more than 40 national journalism awards for his work in print, television, and online journalism, including a Columbia-duPont Award, mostly for his work on international security issues.
Op 3 maart 2009 is de commissie aan haar werkzaamheden begonnen. Deze onafhankelijke commissie doet onderzoek naar de voorbereiding en besluitvorming over de politieke steun van Nederland aan de inval in Irak in de periode zomer 2002 tot zomer 2003. Het onderzoek wordt verricht op verzoek van de minister-president, minister van Algemene Zaken en de ministers van Buitenlandse Zaken, Defensie, Binnenlandse Zaken en Koninkrijksrelaties.
Samenstelling commissie
De voorzitter is mr. W.J.M. Davids, oud-president van de Hoge Raad. Verder hebben zitting: prof. dr. M.G.W. (Monica) den Boer, prof. dr. C. (Cees) Fasseur, mr. T. (Tim) Koopmans, prof. dr. N.J. (Nico) Schrijver, prof. dr. M.J. (Marjan) Schwegman en mr. A.P. (Peter) van Walsum. Secretaris van de commissie is dr. J.J.G. (Koos) van der Bruggen.
Onderzoeksopdracht
In het algemeen richt het onderzoek zich op de voorbereiding en besluitvorming over de politieke steun van Nederland aan de inval in Irak.
Meer specifiek onderzoekt de commissie aspecten van volkenrechtelijke aard, aspecten van de inlichtingen- en informatievoorziening en aspecten van vermeende militaire betrokkenheid.
Werkzaamheden
De commissie zal eerst in detail de werkzaamheden en aanpak bepalen van het onderzoek. Tijdens het onderzoek krijgt de commissie toegang tot alle benodigde informatie. Het is de bedoeling het onderzoek omstreeks 1 november 2009 af te ronden en te presenteren aan de Regering en Staten-Generaal.
Aanpak en werkwijze
De commissie gaat zich eerst inlezen in alle stukken en informatie omtrent de politieke steun van Nederland aan de inval in Irak in de periode zomer 2002 tot zomer 2003. Vervolgens stelt de commissie een lijst samen van wie en waarover zij inlichtingen verlangt. Deze inlichtingen worden schriftelijk en/of door middel van gesprekken verkregen. De gesprekken zullen niet in openbaarheid plaatsvinden. De commissie werkt de gesprekken uit en verwerkt de verkregen inlichtingen. Na deze analyse bepaalt de commissie welke eventuele vervolgstappen nodig zijn om het onderzoek te kunnen afronden en omstreeks 1 november te kunnen presenteren.
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