A
TIMELINE SURROUNDING SEPTEMBER 11TH
- IF CIA AND THE GOVERNMENT WEREN’T
INVOLVED IN THE SEPTEMBER 11 ATTACKS WHAT
WERE THEY DOING?
Bin
Laden Met with the CIA in July and Walked
Away
by
Michael
C. Ruppert
[©
COPYRIGHT 2001, All Rights Reserved, Michael
C. Ruppert and From The Wilderness
Publications,
www.copvcia.com.
May be copied and distributed for non-profit
purposes only.]
[Expanded
and Revised April 18, 2002]
[Editor’s
Note: I don’t think we’ve ever been
happier to make a correction when we have
made an error. Until recently –
relying on an Oct. 31, 2001 article in
Britain’s The Guardian -- which stated,
“Carlyle's other holdings span an
improbable range, taking in the French
newspaper Le Figaro and the company which
bottles Dr Pepper,” we had believed that
Carlyle actually owned Le Figaro. The
Guardian story had been written in the
context of Carlyle’s overall role as a
buyer and seller of companies. We were
recently forwarded information from the
Guerilla News Network (www.guerrillanews.com) citing the French
publication Liberation as having reported
that Carlyle’s ownership of Le Figaro is
actually only 4.9%. The term “holdings”
can be interpreted in two ways and this new
information makes the Figaro story –
which has not been retracted - even
stronger.]
FTW,
November 2, 2001 –
1200 PST -- On October 31, the French daily
Le Figaro dropped a bombshell. While in a
Dubai hospital receiving treatment for a
chronic kidney infection last July, Osama
bin Laden met with a top CIA official -
presumably the Chief of Station. The
meeting, held in bin Laden’s private
suite, took place at the American hospital
in Dubai at a time when
he was a wanted fugitive for the bombings of
two U.S. embassies and this year’s attack
on the U.S.S. Cole. Bin Laden was eligible
for execution according to a 2000
intelligence finding issued by President
Bill Clinton before leaving office in
January. Yet on July 14th he was allowed to leave
Dubai on a private jet and there were no
Navy fighters waiting to force him down.
In
1985 Oliver North –
the only member of the Reagan-Bush years who
doesn’t appear to have a hand in the
current war - sent the Navy and commandos
after terrorists on the cruise ship Achille
Lauro. In his 1991 autobiography “Under
Fire,” while describing terrorist Abu
Abbas, North wrote, “I used to wonder: how
many dead Americans will it take before we
do something?” One could look at
the number of Americans Osama bin Laden is
alleged to have killed before September 11
and ask the same question.
It
gets worse, much worse. A more complete
timeline listing crucial events both before
and after the September 11th
suicide attacks, which have been blamed on
bin Laden, establishes CIA foreknowledge of
them and strongly suggests that there was
criminal complicity on the part of the U.S.
government in their execution. It also makes
clear that the events which have taken place
since September 11th
are based upon an agenda that has little to
do with the attacks.
One
wonders how these events could have been
ignored by the major media or treated as
isolated incidents. Failing that, how could
skilled news agencies avoid being outraged,
or at least even
just a little suspicious?
1. 1991-1997 –
Major U.S. oil companies including
ExxonMobil, Texaco, Unocal, BP Amoco, Shell
and Enron directly invest almost 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.copvcia.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 Counter terrorism,
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.copvcia.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.copvcia.com/members/magic_carpet.html;
FTW, Vol. IV, No.6, Sept. 18, 2001 -
http://www.copvcia.com/members/sept1801.html;
FTW, Vol. 3, No 7, 9/30/00 -
www.copvcia.com/stories/may_2001/052401_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, 2001 – 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.
Now,
let’s go back to the October 31 story by
Le Figaro –
the one that has Osama bin Laden meeting
with a CIA officer in Dubai this June. The
story says that, “Throughout his stay in
the hospital, Osama Bin Laden received
visits from many family members [There
goes the story that he’s a black sheep!]
and Saudi Arabian Emirate personalities of
status. During this time the local
representative of the CIA was seen by many
people taking the elevator and going to
bin Laden’s room. “Several
days later the CIA officer bragged to his
friends about having visited the Saudi
millionaire. From authoritative sources,
this CIA agent visited CIA headquarters on
July 15th,
the day after bin Laden’s departure for
Quetta… “According
to various Arab diplomatic sources and
French intelligence itself, precise
information was communicated to the CIA
concerning terrorist attacks aimed at
American interests in the world, including
its own territory.”… “Extremely
bothered, they [American intelligence
officers in a meeting with French
intelligence officers] requested from
their French peers exact details about the
Algerian activists [connected to bin Laden
through Dubai banking institutions],
without explaining the exact nature of their inquiry. When
asked the question, “What do you fear in
the coming days?’ the Americans
responded with incomprehensible
silence.”… “On
further investigation, the FBI discovered
certain plans that had been put together
between the CIA and its “Islamic
friends” over the years. The meeting in
Dubai is, so it would seem, consistent
with ‘a
certain American policy.’ ”Even
though Le Figaro reported that it had
confirmed with hospital staff that bin
Laden had been there as reported, stories
printed on November 1 contained quotes
from hospital staff that these reports
were untrue. On November 1, as reported by
the Ananova press agency, the CIA flatly
denied that any meeting between any CIA
personnel and Osama bin Laden at any time. Who
do you believe? WATCH
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