The Man Who Conned the Pentagon.
In December 2003, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge warned of .near-term attacks that could either rival or exceed what we experienced on September 11.. He claimed the information came from .credible sources.. But a new report in the latest issue of Playboy by investigative journalist Aram Roston shows that the source was a man who convinced the military and the Bush administration that the TV network Al Jazeera was transmitting secret messages to al-Qaeda sleepers. [includes rush transcript]
AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to a story that reveals the real source behind the Bush administration.s decision to raise the terror alert level to .orange. six years ago. It was December 2003. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge warned of, quote, .near-term attacks that could either rival or exceed what we experienced on September 11.. He claimed the information came from .credible sources..
But a new report in the latest issue of Playboy magazine by investigative journalist Aram Roston shows that the source was a man who convinced the Bush White House, the CIA, the Navy, Special Forces Command, the Air Force, and the Senate Intelligence Committee that the TV network Al Jazeera was transmitting secret messages to al-Qaeda sleepers. Dennis Montgomery operated a small software company out of Nevada. He said he could predict terrorist attacks by decrypting secret bar codes hidden in Al Jazeera.s broadcast. The Bush administration relied on Montgomery for years to determine when to increase the terror threat level.
Well, I recently interviewed journalist Aram Roston, author of The Man Who Pushed America to War: The Extraordinary Life, Adventures, and Obsessions of Ahmad Chalabi. His article is called .The Man Who Conned the Pentagon.. I began by asking him just to explain the story.
ARAM ROSTON: It was one of the most bizarre intelligence operations I.ve ever heard of. A man who was not necessarily a scientist, but he was a self-proclaimed scientist and a self-proclaimed inventor, he claimed he had found these secret messages. He basically.he claimed he decoded al-Qaeda.s secret communications to sleeper terrorists around the world. And he was doing this in this warehouse in Nevada on his computer.
People in the administration took him seriously, and people in the intelligence services took him seriously. Not everybody. Some people thought this was complete nonsense, because it was. But enough people took him seriously that it had immense effects on people across the world and in America.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, first of all, let.s go to that moment when the terror alert was raised. It was almost exactly six years ago, right? December 21st, 2003, raised to orange. Why?
ARAM ROSTON: This fellow, Dennis Montgomery.
AMY GOODMAN: And who is he?
ARAM ROSTON: He is a self-proclaimed scientist. He doesn.t have much of a scientific education. He had a two-year degree in medical technology, and he was an inventor and a self-proclaimed computer programmer. I don.t know how many.how much skills he has as a software programmer. But he said that in Al Jazeera he was finding these hidden numbers shaped as bar codes.
AMY GOODMAN: Who was he telling this to?
ARAM ROSTON: He had access to the intelligence services, to a division within the CIA called Science and Technology. And he had that through political contacts that his financier had.
AMY GOODMAN: And his financier was?
ARAM ROSTON: His financier was a former aide of the former right-hand man to Michael Milken, the disgraced junk bond king, of all things.
AMY GOODMAN: From many years ago.
ARAM ROSTON: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: He went to prison.
ARAM ROSTON: Michael Milken went to prison. Now, the fellow who was financing Dennis Montgomery, Warren Trepp, he never went to prison. The SEC went after him, but never successfully.
AMY GOODMAN: And how did he get these contracts? And what exactly did he say? I mean, explain what you.re saying, because, I mean, this is not just the crazy fantasizing of one guy. You have Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, talking about, you know, Al Jazeera being a terrorist network.
ARAM ROSTON: That.s very true. So people were.people saw Al Jazeera in this light, this negative light. The administration did already, perhaps. But what he was saying is it had no.it didn.t matter what the content was. He was saying in the electronic feed from Al Jazeera, there was little secret bits of information injected in it technologically, just little technologic.little bits and so forth. Perhaps the pixels were rearranged. And he was able to decode it all. He was able to decode it all and translate it into numbers.
Those numbers, he said, were latitudes and longitudes. In other words, it was a stream of video, and he was finding these latitudes and longitudes, times, flight numbers. And he would just churn that out. As he would call it, .This is my output.. This is the Al Jazeera output. And he had figured out a way that somehow Al Jazeera was al-Qaeda.s method of transmitting this data secretly. What it would have required, of course, is all these terrorists around the world to have some sort of decoding equipment that could have unscrambled it, which was, I think.
AMY GOODMAN: And these longitudes and latitudes were supposedly of attacks?
ARAM ROSTON: Yeah. Sometimes it wasn.t even a latitude and longitude; sometimes it was just a latitude, just one number. And he was like, .It.s somewhere around here.. And he would just work and say, .It.s here.. And then, you know, you.d have scares like Tappahannock, Virginia was one place, a little town of Virginia, or, you know, somewhere in Seattle or Galveston, Texas, near the fuel tanks. And they would react.
AMY GOODMAN: And they would cancel planes, for example, around the holidays, like the French airlines.
ARAM ROSTON: Yeah, that was.
AMY GOODMAN: Air France.
ARAM ROSTON: Exactly. That was one particular period, when they took him.for some reason, he was taken very seriously. It was during that orange alert. And he was the source for all those numbers that were.those flights that were.he was the reason those flights were canceled.
Nobody.most people in the administration didn.t even know where it was coming from. Only a tiny group knew of Dennis Montgomery, a very tiny group, perhaps a handful of people at the CIA. A slightly bigger group knew about this crazy Al Jazeera bit. They knew the substance of what he was saying. That part got to the Bush White House. It got to Homeland Security. And it made its way to the administration.
And by the way, it.s all still classified. Even though they all know it.s false, it.s still classified.
AMY GOODMAN: And how much money did he get?
ARAM ROSTON: No one knows for sure. It looks like his companies, over the years, have received $30, $40 million, $30 to $40 million.
AMY GOODMAN: From the US government?
ARAM ROSTON: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: His company called eTreppid?
ARAM ROSTON: The first company was eTreppid. More recently, he operated through a couple of others. His first financier, as I mentioned, was this man Warren Trepp, Michael Milken.s former aide. The next financier was a woman named Edra Blixseth, a billionaire, and she ended up funding him, as well. And they had a company called Blxware, offering the same product to the US government, the same mysterious technology.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, you interviewed the former Homeland Security adviser Frances Townsend. Explain what she said.
ARAM ROSTON: I reached her. She said it was classified. She was very.she was not willing to talk much about it in detail, but she confirmed this was.she knew about it. She remembered it distinctly. She heard the meetings, the daily meetings, to address the threats that came from this secret Al Jazeera decoding. And she said it had been eventually deemed uncredible.
Her point, by the way, if I could, was that they had to take it seriously at the time. After all, they say, the CIA was telling it to them. You know, so they would have been.you know, they would have been irresponsible had they not in some way acted on it.
AMY GOODMAN: So when did they figure out there was something wrong?
ARAM ROSTON: Some people knew immediately there was something wrong. I mean, most sensible people in the government, anybody who heard it, knew it was not the case. I quote some people in the article, former CIA officials. They were livid. They were just.there was almost a battle in these meetings, where people who had street experience, field experience, as officers were just livid. They knew this was impossible and stupid. But other people insisted they had to act on it, and it was.they were protecting their source.
AMY GOODMAN: One CIA guy said, .Give me the algorithms. I want to see. I want to reproduce what this guy is finding..
ARAM ROSTON: That was the issue. He wouldn.t ever give.and since then, he still hasn.t.he wouldn.t give.explain to anybody how he was doing this mysterious decoding.
AMY GOODMAN: So, go from what the CIA was paying to.the US government.to French intelligence and where they came into this.
ARAM ROSTON: Well, the reason they came in is because, if you.ll remember, they were canceling British flights, they were canceling Mexican flights, and they were canceling French flights, among others. The French were impacted, Air France flights. Air France.I think it was Flight 68 and Flight 70, they were canceled repeatedly. Eventually the agency had to tell the French. I mean, it was, of course, bizarre to keep on canceling some services.I mean, some plane flights and never say why, just saying this is chatter, it.s great intelligence. So, finally they had to say it.
And, of course, as I understand it, I think there was a little bit of embarrassment as people were relaying the information. But they eventually worked out a system. And I don.t have the details. They protect this type of information very carefully. They.re liaison relationships, they say. Eventually, they tried to recreate it. They commissioned the best firm they could find to see if there was anything to it. And they produced a very detailed report, apparently, that said there was no way this was possible.
AMY GOODMAN: And even as he.d get thrown out of one agency, he.d go to another.
ARAM ROSTON: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: As if there was no communication between US government agencies, giving him millions of dollars.
ARAM ROSTON: That.s what.s intriguing. It really is. And he was selling, if I could, not just this technology, but other technology. He had systems he was selling to the Air Force and US Special Operations Command, where he claimed Predator video was coming.he could run it through his computer and immediately recognize a face, of, say, Zarqawi or somebody else, or immediately recognize everybody who was carrying an AK-47, and his computer software could do that in real time, which, you know, couldn.t happen. And then he also claimed his software could detect submarines under the water, if they were given a big picture of the ocean. Things like this.
AMY GOODMAN: And you even interview someone who says, .He called me on his cell phone and said, .Hit this button to create a box around a video of a weapon as soon as I tell you to...
ARAM ROSTON: Yeah, former employees.then they told this to the FBI, and they told it to me, too. They sort of describe this very elaborate charade where he would have these visitors from the federal government. He would try to show them how his software.
AMY GOODMAN: He would do demonstrations.
ARAM ROSTON: He would do demonstrations. .Here.s how my software will detect a bazooka.. It would be like a toy fake bazooka. And, you know, the idea was .My software can detect anything you want it to detect.. But they said, you know, in fact, what was happening was when this bazooka showed up on the screen, they were hitting a button, and that would create a little circle around the bazooka. And he was claiming that his computer was recognizing the bazooka, which would be obviously valuable technology if that was the case.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, Aram Roston, you say that Montgomery got a contract with the Pentagon as late as January of this year, of 2009.
ARAM ROSTON: Yes, January 2009. There.s.it.s indisputable that he got a contract for $3 million. The contract I have, the copy I have, is heavily redacted, but it.s clear the Al Jazeera stuff was part of it. This Al Jazeera, you know, encryption method and that technology was part of this. They were paid. His company was paid $2.5 million, it appears, on that contract by the US government.
AMY GOODMAN: This year.
ARAM ROSTON: This year.
AMY GOODMAN: On Al Jazeera.
ARAM ROSTON: This whole Al Jazeera technology. They were.his company was paid, and he was paid. He received money, too. And it had to do.it.s unclear exactly what it was for, but it seemed to have to do with that Al Jazeera stuff that has been.it.s been knocked down. And it.s obviously preposterous, and it has been.it was knocked down six years ago by the CIA.
AMY GOODMAN: Aram Roston is an investigative journalist. His latest piece for Playboy magazine is called .The Man Who Conned the Pentagon..
It is remarkable that the embedded media is following orders and
keeping it quiet (NPR and The Guardian being notable exceptions):
http://news.google.com/news?q="Dennis%20Montgomery"+jazeera
The ORANGE ALERT/CIA-mass-manipulation angle of the story
a bit too revealing? May lead people to ask questions WHAT ELSE
was manipulated? The hijackers themselves?
For example the in-flight phone-calls (in fact the ONLY basis
for the box-cutter myths)
Ted Olson's Report of Phone Calls
from Barbara Olson on 9/11:
Three Official Denials 1
by David Ray Griffin
David Ray Griffin
Late in the day on 9/11, CNN put out a story that began: .Barbara Olson, a conservative commentator and attorney, alerted her husband, Solicitor General Ted Olson, that the plane she was on was being hijacked Tuesday morning, Ted Olson told CNN.. According to this story, Olson reported that his wife had .called him twice on a cell phone from American Airlines Flight 77,. saying that .all passengers and flight personnel, including the pilots, were herded to the back of the plane by armed hijackers. The only weapons she mentioned were knives and cardboard cutters..2
Ted Olson.s report was very important. It provided the only evidence that American 77, which was said to have struck the Pentagon, had still been aloft after it had disappeared from FAA radar around 9:00 AM (there had been reports, after this disappearance, that an airliner had crashed on the Ohio-Kentucky border). Also, Barbara Olson had been a very well-known commentator on CNN. The report that she died in a plane that had been hijacked by Arab Muslims was an important factor in getting the nation.s support for the Bush administration.s .war on terror.. Ted Olson.s report was important in still another way, being the sole source of the widely accepted idea that the hijackers had box cutters.3
However, although Ted Olson.s report of phone calls from his wife has been a central pillar of the official account of 9/11, this report has been completely undermined.
Olson.s Self-Contradictions
Olson began this process of undermining by means of self-contradictions. He first told CNN, as we have seen, that his wife had .called him twice on a cell phone.. But he contradicted this claim on September 14, telling Hannity and Colmes that she had reached him by calling the Department of Justice collect. Therefore, she must have been using the .airplane phone,. he surmised, because .she somehow didn.t have access to her credit cards..4 However, this version of Olson.s story, besides contradicting his first version, was even self-contradictory, because a credit card is needed to activate a passenger-seat phone.
Later that same day, moreover, Olson told Larry King Live that the second call from his wife suddenly went dead because .the signals from cell phones coming from airplanes don.t work that well..5 After that return to his first version, he finally settled on the second version, saying that his wife had called collect and hence must have used .the phone in the passengers. seats. because she did not have her purse.6
By finally settling on this story, Olson avoided a technological pitfall. Given the cell phone system employed in 2001, high-altitude cell phone calls from airliners were impossible, or at least virtually so (Olson.s statement that .the signals from cell phones coming from airplanes don.t work that well. was a considerable understatement.) The technology to enable cell phone calls from high-altitude airline flights was not created until 2004.7
American Airlines Contradicts Olson.s Second Version
However, Olson.s second story, besides being self-contradictory, was contradicted by American Airlines.
A 9/11 researcher, knowing that AA Flight 77 was a Boeing 757, noticed that AA.s website indicated that its 757s do not have passenger-seat phones. After he wrote to ask if that had been the case on September 11, 2001, an AA customer service representative replied: .That is correct; we do not have phones on our Boeing 757. The passengers on flight 77 used their own personal cellular phones to make out calls during the terrorist attack..8
In response to this revelation, defenders of the official story might reply that Ted Olson was evidently right the first time: she had used her cell phone. However, besides the fact that this scenario is rendered unlikely by the cell phone technology employed in 2001, it has also been contradicted by the FBI.
Olson.s Story Contradicted by the FBI
The most serious official contradiction of Ted Olson.s story came in 2006 at the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker. The evidence presented to this trial by the FBI included a report on phone calls from all four 9/11 flights. In its report on American Flight 77, the FBI report attributed only one call to Barbara Olson and it was an .unconnected call,. which (of course) lasted .0 seconds..9 According to the FBI, therefore, Ted Olson did not receive a single call from his wife using either a cell phone or an onboard phone.
Back on 9/11, the FBI itself had interviewed Olson. A report of that interview indicates that Olson told the FBI agents that his wife had called him twice from Flight 77.10 And yet the FBI.s report on calls from Flight 77, presented in 2006, indicated that no such calls occurred.
This was an amazing development: The FBI is part of the Department of Justice, and yet its report undermined the well-publicized claim of the DOJ.s former solicitor general that he had received two calls from his wife on 9/11.
Olson.s Story Also Rejected by Pentagon Historians
Ted Olson.s story has also been quietly rejected by the historians who wrote Pentagon 9/11, a treatment of the Pentagon attack put out by the Department of Defense.11
According to Olson, his wife had said that .all passengers and flight personnel, including the pilots, were herded to the back of the plane by armed hijackers..12 This is an inherently implausible scenario. We are supposed to believe that 60-some people, including the two pilots, were held at bay by three or four men (one or two of the hijackers would have been in the cockpit) with knives and boxcutters. This scenario becomes even more absurd when we realize that the alleged hijackers were all small, unathletic men (the 9/11 Commission pointed out that even .[t]he so-called muscle hijackers actually were not physically imposing, as the majority of them were between 5.5. and 5.7. in height and slender in build.13), and that the pilot, Charles .Chic. Burlingame, was a weightlifter and a boxer, who was described as .really tough. by one of his erstwhile opponents.14 Also, the idea that Burlingame would have turned over the plane to hijackers was rejected by his brother, who said: .I don't know what happened in that cockpit, but I'm sure that they would have had to incapacitate him or kill him because he would have done anything to prevent the kind of tragedy that befell that airplane..15
The Pentagon historians, in any case, did not accept the Olson story, according to which Burlingame and his co-pilot did give up their plane and were in the back with the passengers and other crew members. They instead wrote that .the attackers either incapacitated or murdered the two pilots..16
Conclusion
This rejection of Ted Olson.s story by American Airlines, the Pentagon, and especially the FBI is a development of utmost importance. Without the alleged calls from Barbara Olson, there is no evidence that Flight 77 returned to Washington. Also, if Ted Olson.s claim was false, then there are only two possibilities: Either he lied or he was duped by someone using voice-morphing technology to pretend to be his wife.17 In either case, the official story about the calls from Barbara Olson was based on deception. And if that part of the official account of 9/11 was based on deception, should we not suspect that other parts were as well?
The fact that Ted Olson.s report has been contradicted by other defenders of the official story about 9/11 provides grounds for demanding a new investigation of 9/11. This internal contradiction is, moreover, only one of 25 such contradictions discussed in my most recent book, 9/11 Contradictions: An Open Letter to Congress and the Press.
Footnotes
1 This essay is based on Chapter 8 (.Did Ted Olson Receive Calls from Barbara Olson?.) of David Ray Griffin, 9/11 Contradictions: An Open Letter to Congress and the Press (Northampton: Olive Branch, 2008).
2 Tim O.Brien, .Wife of Solicitor General Alerted Him of Hijacking from Plane,. CNN, September 11, 2001 (http://archives.cnn.com/2001/US/09/11/pentagon.olson).
3 This was pointed out in The 9/11 Commission Report, 8.
4 Hannity & Colmes, Fox News, September 14, 2001 (http://s3.amazonaws.com/911timeline/2001/foxnews091401.html).
5 .America.s New War: Recovering from Tragedy,. Larry King Live, CNN, September 14, 2001 (http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0109/14/lkl.00.html).
6 In his .Barbara K. Olson Memorial Lecture,. delivered November 16, 2001
(http://www.fed-soc.org/resources/id.63/default.asp),
Olson said that she .somehow managed . . . to use a telephone in the airplane to call.. He laid out this version of his story more fully in an interview reported in Toby Harnden, .She Asked Me How to Stop the Plane,. Daily Telegraph, March 5, 2002 (http://s3.amazonaws.com/911timeline/2002/telegraph030502.html).
7 I discussed the technical difficulties of making cell phone calls from airliners in 2001 in Debunking 9/11 Debunking: An Answer to Popular Mechanics and Other Defenders of the Official Conspiracy Theory (Northampton: Olive Branch, 2007), 87-88, 292-97.
8 See the submission of 17 February 2006 by .the Paradroid. on the Politik Forum (http://forum.politik.de/forum/archive/index.php/t-133356-p-24.html). It is quoted in David Ray Griffin, 9/11 Contradictions: An Open Letter to Congress and the Press (Northampton: Olive Branch, 2008), 75.
9 United States v. Zacarias Moussaoui, Exhibit Number P200054 (http://www.vaed.uscourts.gov/notablecases/moussaoui/exhibits/prosecution/flights/P200054.html). These documents can be more easily viewed in .Detailed Account of Phone Calls from September 11th Flights.
(http://911research.wtc7.net/planes/evidence/calldetail.html).
10 FBI, .Interview with Theodore Olsen [sic],. .9/11 Commission, FBI Source Documents, Chronological, September 11,. 2001Intelfiles.com, March 14, 2008,
(http://intelfiles.egoplex.com:80/2008/03/911-commission-fbi-source-documents.html).
11 Alfred Goldberg et al., Pentagon 9/11 (Washington DC: Office of the Secretary of Defense, 2007).
12 O.Brien, .Wife of Solicitor General Alerted Him of Hijacking from Plane..
13 9/11 Commission Staff Statement 16
(http://www.9-11commission.gov/staff_statements/staff_statement_16.pdf).
14 Shoestring, .The Flight 77 Murder Mystery: Who Really Killed Charles Burlingame?. Shoestring911, February 2, 2008 (http://shoestring911.blogspot.com/2008/02/flight-77-murder-mystery-who-really.html).
15 .In Memoriam: Charles .Chic. Burlingame, 1949-2001,. USS Saratoga Museum foundation (available at http://911research.wtc7.net/cache/planes/analysis/chic_remembered.html).
16 Alfred Goldberg et al., Pentagon 9/11 (Washington DC: Office of the Secretary of Defense, 2007), 12.
17 Of these two possibilities, the idea that Ted Olson was duped should be seriously entertained only if there are records proving that the Department of Justice received two collect calls, ostensibly from Barbara Olson, that morning. Evidently no such records have been produced.
The most amazing story is the missing trillions and the subsequent
death of the financial controllers (and presumably ALL RECORDS)
inside the Pentagon:
http://www.google.com/search?q=rumsfeld%20"2.3%20trillion"
Rumsfeld annouced on 10 sep 2001 (one day before 9/11)
that the pentagon can't track 2.3 trillion..
Lost records inside WTC7:
7 World Trade Center housed SEC files relating to numerous Wall Street investigations, as well as other federal investigative files. All the files for approximately 3,000 to 4,000 SEC cases were destroyed. While some were backed up in other places, others were not, especially those classified as confidential.[50] Files relating Citigroup to the WorldCom scandal were lost.[51] The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission estimates over 10,000 cases will be affected.[52] The Secret Service had its largest field office, with more than 200 employees, in WTC 7 and also lost investigative files. Says one agent: .All the evidence that we stored at 7 World Trade, in all our cases, went down with the building..[53]
The collapse of 7 World Trade Center is remarkable because it was the first known instance of a tall building collapsing primarily as a result of uncontrolled fires.[54]
World Trade Center controlled demolition conspiracy theories say that the building collapses on September 11, including that of building seven, were the result of controlled demolition
*see wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_World_Trade_Center
== MEDIA CIA CONTROLLED PERCEPTION MANAGEMENT ==
If you want any more proof that OPERATION MOCKINGBIRD and
the "GIANT WURLITZER" are still functioning well,
check out the GREAT OMISSIONS .. NEW YORK TIMES
(the newspaper of record) doesn't
http://news.google.com/news?q="Dennis%20Montgomery"+jazeera
==========================
December 21st, 2009 3:08 PM
The Man Who Conned The Pentagon
By Aram Roston / Playboy
The weeks before Christmas brought no hint of terror. But by the afternoon of December 21, 2003, police stood guard in heavy assault gear on the streets of Manhattan. Fighter jets patrolled the skies. When a gift box was left on Fifth Avenue, it was labeled a suspicious package and 5,000 people in the Metropolitan Museum of Art were herded into the cold.
It was Code Orange. Americans first heard of it at a Sunday press conference in Washington, D.C. Weekend assignment editors sent their crews up Nebraska Avenue to the new Homeland Security offices, where DHS secretary Tom Ridge announced the terror alert. .There.s continued discussion,. he told reporters, .these are from credible sources.about near-term attacks that could either rival or exceed what we experienced on September 11.. The New York Times reported that intelligence sources warned .about some unspecified but spectacular attack..
The financial markets trembled. By Tuesday the panic had ratcheted up as the Associated Press reported threats to .power plants, dams and even oil facilities in Alaska.. The feds forced the cancellation of dozens of French, British and Mexican commercial .flights of interest. and pushed foreign governments to put armed air marshals on certain flights. Air France flight 68 was canceled, as was Air France flight 70. By Christmas the headline in the Los Angeles Times was "Six Flights Canceled as Signs of Terror Plot Point to L.A." Journalists speculated over the basis for these terror alerts. .Credible sources,. Ridge said. .Intelligence chatter,. said CNN.
But there were no real intercepts, no new informants, no increase in chatter. And the suspicious package turned out to contain a stuffed snowman. This was, instead, the beginning of a bizarre scam. Behind that terror alert, and a string of contracts and intrigue that continues to this date, there is one unlikely character.
The man.s name is Dennis Montgomery, a self-proclaimed scientist who said he could predict terrorist attacks. Operating with a small software development company, he apparently convinced the Bush White House, the CIA, the Air Force and other agencies that Al Jazeera.the Qatari-owned TV network.was unwittingly transmitting target data to Al Qaeda sleepers.
An unusual team arrived in Reno, Nevada in 2003 from the Central Intelligence Agency. They drove up Trademark Drive, well south of the casinos, past new desert warehouses. Then they turned into an almost empty parking lot, where a sign read "eTreppid Technologies." It was an attractively designed building of stone tile and mirrored windows that had once been a sprinklerhead factory.
ETreppid Technologies was a four-year-old firm trying to find its way. Some of its employees had been hired to design video games. One game under construction was Roadhouse, based on the 1989 movie in which Patrick Swayze plays a bouncer in a dive bar. Other programmers worked on streaming video for security cameras.
When the liaison team stepped into eTreppid.s office, the CIA man in charge introduced himself as Sid but didn.t give his last name. He was tall and in his 50s, with a well-ironed shirt, a paunch and a mildly robotic politeness. .We called him Sid Vicious,. one eTreppid technician explained, .because he was anything but..
Sid.s team set up on the first floor in an unused office and had special cipher locks installed. Workers carted in a heavy-duty paper shredder that could transform classified documents to dust in seconds. They set up impenetrable safes with combination locks protected by privacy screens so bystanders couldn.t steal the code.
The CIA team was there to work with Dennis Montgomery, at the time eTreppid.s chief technology officer and part owner. Then 50 years old, with a full head of gray hair, the street-smart Montgomery stood at about five feet eight inches. Other eTreppid workers, hearing the buzz about the spooks in town, peered through their blinds and watched as Montgomery worked at his desk at the north end of the building. He wore his usual jeans and Tommy Bahama shirt.
He could be seen handing off reams of paper to Sid and the CIA. .They would sit in the room and review these numbers or whatever the heck Dennis was printing out,. one former eTreppid employee, Sloan Venables, told me. .We called them Sid.s guys, and no one knew what the hell they did..
Montgomery called the work he was doing noise filtering. He was churning out reams of data he called output. It consisted of latitudes and longitudes and flight numbers. After it went to Sid, it went to Washington, D.C. Then it found its way to the CIA.s seventh floor, to Director George Tenet. Eventually it ended up in the White House. Montgomery.s output was to have an extraordinary effect. Ridge.s announcement, the canceled flights and the holiday disruptions were all the results of Montgomery.s mysterious doings.
He is an unusual man. In court papers filed in Los Angeles, a former lawyer for Montgomery calls the software designer a .habitual liar engaged in fraud.. Last June Montgomery was charged in Las Vegas with bouncing nine checks (totaling $1 million) in September 2008 and was arrested on a felony warrant in Rancho Mirage, California. That million is only a portion of what he lost to five casinos in Nevada and California in just one year. That.s according to his federal bankruptcy filing, where he reported personal debts of $12 million. The FBI has investigated him, and some of his own co-workers say he staged phony demonstrations of military technology for the U.S. government.
Montgomery has no formal scientific education, but over the past six years he seems to have convinced top people in the national security establishment that he had developed secret tools to save the world from terror and had decoded Al Qaeda transmissions. But the communications Montgomery said he was decrypting apparently didn.t exist.
Since 1996 the Al Jazeera news network had been operating in the nation of Qatar, a U.S. ally in the war on terror. Montgomery claimed he had found something sinister disguised in Al Jazeera.s broadcast signal that had nothing to do with what was being said on the air: Hidden in the signal were secret bar codes that told terrorists the terms of their next mission, laying out the latitudes and longitudes of targets, sometimes even flight numbers and dates. And he was the only man who had the technology to decrypt this code.
As strange as his technology appeared to be, it was nevertheless an attractive concept. Montgomery was as persuasive as some within the intelligence community were receptive. Al Jazeera was an inspired target since its pan-Arabic mission had been viewed with suspicion by those who saw an anti-American bias in the network.s coverage. In 2004 Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld accused Al Jazeera of .vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable. reporting. Will Stebbins, Al Jazeera.s Washington bureau chief, told The Washington Post, .There was clearly an attempt to delegitimize Al Jazeera that came during a period of a lot of national hysteria and paranoia about the Arabic world.. (.It is unfortunate,. an Al Jazeera spokesperson told Playboy when asked for comment, .that a select few people continue to drag up these completely false conspiracy theories about Al Jazeera, which were generated by the previous U.S. administration..) Over the years Montgomery.s intelligence found its way to the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security, Special Forces Command, the Navy, the Air Force, the Senate Intelligence Committee and even to Vice President Dick Cheney.s office.
Back in 2003, just before the terror alert caused by Montgomery.s technology, eTreppid held a Christmas party in a ballroom at the Atlantis Casino in Reno. Employees gathered at round tables to dine and drink. Even a CIA man showed up, a lanky fellow wearing a button-down shirt with an oxford collar. By the end of the night, employees noticed Montgomery and eTreppid chief executive Warren Trepp talking closely. A photo snapped by an employee shows Montgomery with his jacket off and a Christmas ribbon wrapped around his head like a turban with a rose tucked into it. He was hugging Trepp, who sobbed into his shoulder. The festivities were a rare break for Montgomery, who had been busy churning out terrorist target coordinates for the CIA.On Sunday, January 4, 2004 a British Airways flight out of Heathrow was delayed for hours for security reasons, and FBI agents demanded that hotels in Vegas turn over their guest lists. It was also the day a top CIA official flew to the eTreppid office in Reno. There, on eTreppid letterhead, the CIA official promised the company.s name would not be revealed and that the government would not .unilaterally use or otherwise take. Montgomery.s Al Jazeera technology.
Back in Washington, few insiders in government knew where the intelligence was coming from. Aside from Tenet and a select few, no one was told about eTreppid.s Al Jazeera finds. Even veteran intelligence operatives within the CIA could only wonder. .These guys were trying to hide it like it was some little treasure,. one former counterterrorist official told me.
The reason the whole thing worked was because Montgomery.s CIA contact was with the agency.s Directorate of Science and Technology. That.s the whiz-bang branch of the intelligence service, where employees make and break codes, design disguises and figure out the latest gadgets. S&T was eventually ordered by CIA brass to reveal its source to small groups from other parts of the agency. And when some experienced officers heard about it, they couldn.t believe it. One former counterterrorism official remembers the briefing: .They found encoded location data for previous and future threat locations on these Al Jazeera tapes,. he says. .It got so emotional. We were fucking livid. I was told to shut up. I was saying, .This is crazy. This is embarrassing.. They claimed they were breaking the code, getting latitude and longitude, and Al Qaeda operatives were decoding it. They were coming up with airports and everything, and we were just saying, .You know, this is horseshit!.?. Another former officer, who has decades of experience, says, .We were told that, like magic, these guys were able to exploit this Al Jazeera stuff and come up with bar codes, and these bar codes translated to numbers and letters that gave them target locations. I thought it was total bullshit..
The federal government was acting on the Al Jazeera claims without even understanding how Montgomery found his coordinates. .I said, .Give us the algorithms that allowed you to come up with this stuff.. They wouldn.t even do that,. says the first officer. .And I was screaming, .You gave these people fucking money?..
Despite such skepticism, the information found its way to the top of the U.S. government. Frances Townsend, a Homeland Security advisor to President George W. Bush, chaired daily meetings to address the crisis. She now admits that the bar codes sounded far-fetched. And, she says, even though it all proved to be false, they had no choice but to pursue the claim. .It didn.t seem beyond the realm of possibility,. she says. .We were relying on technical people to tell us whether or not it was feasible. I don.t regret having acted on it.. The feds, after all, had a responsibility to look into the technology. .There were lots of meetings going on during the time of this threat,. says Townsend. .What were we going to do and how would we screen people? If we weren.t comfortable we wouldn.t let a flight take off.. Eventually, though Montgomery continued to crank out his figures, cooler heads prevailed. The threat was ultimately deemed .not credible,. as Townsend puts it.
A former CIA official went through the scenario with me and explained why sanity finally won out. First, Montgomery never explained how he was finding and interpreting the bar codes. How could one scientist find the codes when no one else could? More implausibly, the scheme required Al Jazeera.s complicity. At the very least, a technician at the network would have to inject the codes into video broadcasts, and every terrorist operative would need some sort of decoding device. What would be the advantage of this method of transmission?
A branch of the French intelligence services helped convince the Americans that the bar codes were fake. The CIA and the French commissioned a technology company to locate or re-create codes in the Al Jazeera transmission. They found definitively that what Montgomery claimed was there was not. Quietly, as far as the CIA was concerned, the case was closed. The agency turned the matter over to the counterintelligence side to see where it had gone wrong.
Born in Mena, Arkansas, Dennis Montgomery graduated in 1971 from Grossmont College near San Diego with a two-year associate.s degree in medical technology. He worked a few years as a hospital medical technician. And then, it appears, he shifted gears. He says he designed technology to analyze blood gas and became a consultant to some of the biggest companies in America. He maintains he invented and secured copyrights for various technologies related to .pattern recognition,. .anomaly detection. and .data compression.. Montgomery had attained some success with his media-compression software.
By the late 1990s Montgomery was in Reno, where he had a meeting at the El dorado Hotel Casino downtown with a financier named Warren Trepp. Trepp had been head trader at Drexel Burnham Lambert in the 1980s, when it was led by junk-bond fraudster Michael Milken. During that time Trepp was a big spender, riding around in his white Rolls-Royce Corniche. He sat at Milken.s right hand and eventually earned $25 million a year. In a 1997 SEC decision, an administrative law judge described Trepp.s .violations. as .egregious, recurring and intentional.. But the case against Trepp was dismissed, and by the time he met Montgomery, he was legally in the clear.
Montgomery convinced Trepp he had invented a remarkable technology. He could compress data, he said, a whole movie to just a fraction of the space it took up on a drive. He impressed his patron with his demonstration, using software to highlight images from the 1939 film Gunga Din. It was enough for them to launch their operation. Montgomery contributed his technological breakthrough, and Trepp invested $1.3 million to start. Montgomery soon hired Sloan Venables, a video-game designer, as one of his first employees. Venables had helped design the Ted Nugent Wild Hunting Adventure video game. From the beginning, Venables realized things were odd and doubted Montgomery knew much about software programming. One day at a Chinese restaurant at the same Eldorado Hotel Casino, Montgomery told him about the time he.d been abducted by a UFO. .He told me about his encounter with aliens,. Venables says. .He went to his uncle.s or grandfather.s or great uncle.s barn in the middle of the night, and a spaceship descended on him. They wanted him to go with them, and he was abducted. Then he came back with extra knowledge.. Venables started laughing at the story, he says.
Montgomery was prone to temper tantrums, according to Venables. Once he hurled a steak at a waitress. As volatile as he was at times, Venables says, he was at other times warm and confiding. When Venables threatened to quit after Montgomery threw a can of grape soda at him, Montgomery took Venables.s dying mother to dinner. Every Friday he would take all his employees skeet and trapshooting at a desert range.
Venables brought in a childhood friend to work at eTreppid. Jim Bauder, who was in his 20s, was soon working on the video games eTreppid was trying to design. Bauder and Venables say Montgomery ran the place, and they saw little of Trepp but were aware of his background. They also say they saw Milken at eTreppid. .I saw him come in once, and he had this entourage of five or six people with him,. says Bauder. .They came walking down the hallway, and he looked at me and smiled, introduced himself and then went on down the hall..
ETreppid landed its first big contract from General Electric in 2002 for use of its video compression technology in gaming surveillance. The company eventually got a contract with the Air Force dealing with aspects of video shot by unmanned Predator drones. Montgomery claimed his software could automatically recognize weapons and faces. In 2004 the U.S. Special Operations Command gave eTreppid a $30 million no-bid contract for .compression. and .automatic target recognition.. Venables and Bauder acknowledge they can.t be certain that no .anomaly detection. or .pattern recognition. software existed, but they doubt it did. In fact, eTreppid workers later told the FBI they thought Montgomery had developed little if any original software.
Montgomery and eTreppid did, over time, receive five patents for various inventions and theoretical methods related to video and data. These included a .method and apparatus for storing digital video content provided from a plurality of cameras. and a .method and apparatus for detecting and reacting to occurrence of an event.. But Montgomery said these patents had nothing to do with his government work, and they never seemed to lead to business or profit.
FBI reports indicate Montgomery rigged tests to make government officials think his software could detect weapons in video streams. Apparently it was all part of Montgomery.s claim to have developed .automatic target recognition. software. Imagine how useful it would be if a computer could pick out AK-47s in enemy hands. That.s how eTreppid got at least one contract. One former employee told agents he helped fake as many as 40 demonstrations.
Bauder says he helped once, unwittingly. He told his story to the FBI, and he told it to me. In his demonstrations Montgomery often used a plastic toy bazooka that he said a computer could recognize as a weapon. He would do the demonstration in scrubland behind eTreppid.s offices. .Some military guys were walking around the office,. says Bauder. Montgomery suddenly came to him, he says, .and takes me back to his office. He closes the door and closes the blinds and was like, .Need you to do something for me. Don.t worry; we are just doing a demo. It.s all good..?. Bauder was concerned about the secrecy. .I was like, .But what.s with the doors and blinds?.?. Montgomery looked up at Bauder and told him it was okay. They would communicate via an open cell phone line. He told Bauder to listen to the phone. ..When you hear the tone, I want you to hit the space bar on the keyboard... Bauder, in other words, would be secretly communicating with Montgomery while the military guys watched the supposed software demo on another computer.
Montgomery ran off to do his demonstration outside. Bauder watched the computer screen, seeing what the camera saw. Montgomery held the toy bazooka in one hand while his other hand was hidden. When Bauder heard the tone, he says, .I hit the space bar. A little square encircled his image through the camera on the screen. He was running around with the fake plastic bazooka.. Bauder figured Montgomery had rigged the computer screen so it seemed as if the square was tracking the bazooka. In reality, the square was brought up on the screen when Bauder hit the space bar.
ETreppid needed security clearances to get classified contracts. In 2004 Venables was selected as the firm.s facilities security officer. He flew to Baltimore for Department of Defense training. It was an arduous process, with the Defense Security Service probing everyone.s background.
Montgomery received an .interim secret. clearance in May 2003, according to records later released in a federal case. In February 2004 he got a top-secret clearance from the Defense Industrial Security Clearance Office. At eTreppid, Montgomery appears to have taken a curious approach to secrecy. Venables and Bauder say Montgomery had his own way of classifying items at the company. .He had rolls of 'classified' stickers,. Bauder says, .and he would just put them on random garbage..
The CIA was an eTreppid customer, as was SOCOM and the Air Force. Soon the Navy started coming by. Montgomery said he had another .filter. to identify underwater submarines by scanning a giant satellite photo of the ocean. Although Montgomery claimed he was using his software, Bauder and Venables say he appeared to be doing it by eye.
The pattern recognition, anomaly detection and compression work were nice, but it was the Al Jazeera stuff.the .noise filtering..that had cash potential. Even though the CIA had abandoned Montgomery in 2004 after determining the bar codes didn.t exist, he and eTreppid continued to try to sell it.
Trepp later told a judge in a federal lawsuit that he.d asked the government for $100 million. Montgomery has also cited that figure in sworn declarations.though he also claimed Trepp wanted $500 million for the .decoding technology.. He would tell his lawyers and investors that the money was .appropriated. as part of the .black budget.. ETreppid did have powerful friends and lobbyists on Capitol Hill. It had strong connections on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The local congressional representative, Republican Jim Gibbons.soon to be governor of Nevada.was on the committee. But by late 2005 things were falling apart between Montgomery and Trepp. There were indications Montgomery was losing big at the blackjack tables. According to an FBI investigation, he borrowed $275,000 from Trepp .to pay down casino and other debts.. Trepp told FBI agents he.d made him sign a note that he.d pay it back.Trepp had loaned him more than $1.3 million over the years.
One eTreppid employee told the FBI that she notified Trepp about the faked bazooka tests. Evidently Trepp hadn.t known. She informed Trepp she didn.t think Montgomery had written .any significant software. for the company. Trepp heard from others that Montgomery didn.t have the technical skills he claimed to have. For his part, Montgomery was grumbling. Trepp had not adequately shared the tens of millions in government funds he had made. .Warren is screwing me out of the money,. Montgomery said to Venables. In January 2006 Montgomery left eTreppid. He asked Bauder to help load his big Chevy twin-cab truck on a Saturday. When he left, according to eTreppid, the company.s software had been deleted and the source code wiped out. Even the surveillance videotapes were blank. If eTreppid was a store, its inventory was gone. It couldn.t do government contracts, video games or compression.
Trepp believed he had backup. After all, Montgomery had assured him he.d give him daily backups of his material. So Trepp went to his outside safe where he kept whatever Montgomery had given him. He gave the material to his security officer, Sloan Venables. Venables says the entire backup for the multimillion-dollar eTreppid operation consisted of three CDs and two hard drives. Venables looked at the disks and drives and turned back to Trepp. ..In seven years, that.s all? Three CDs and two hard drives?. I said, .Don.t you think that.s weird?..
Venables ran the supposed backup files through his computer. .There was nothing on them,. he says. .There were a couple of zip files, and the hard drives had some source codes for an interface.. It wasn.t anything that could run as a program
Trepp called the FBI. Not only was the company software gone and its tapes erased, but, he told them, classified tapes were missing. In January 2006 the U.S. government suspended Montgomery.s security clearance. (Montgomery, however, later stated he was unaware his clearance had been suspended.)
Montgomery.s phone rang on February 16. The voice on the other end was someone he trusted: Paul Haraldsen, an agent of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. For years Haraldsen had reassured him the government was still interested in the Al Jazeera intercepts. .Hey, Dennis.Paul, how are you?. What Montgomery didn.t know was that Haraldsen was working with the FBI on the investigation and was recording the call. Montgomery railed against Trepp and bragged about his bizarre intelligence work. .I did something very good for this country,. he said. Montgomery boasted that even if the CIA didn.t believe in him, the work he did was .100 percent accurate.more accurate than people will ever know.. (The agency.s name is blacked out in the court transcript, but it is clear what he means.) Haraldsen apparently tried to lure him in. Money might be available, he said. .You know, we had money loaded in a pipeline,. Haraldsen said to Montgomery. He could go back to his bosses in Washington and let them know whether to spend it or not.
.Paul,. Montgomery said, .why does it have to stop because [Trepp] is a prick?. The government money could flow even if it went to him rather than to eTreppid. Haraldsen tried to egg him on with promises he.d tell Washington to buy more of the Al Jazeera information. .Where do I go from here?. Haraldsen asked. .What do I tell the people back in D.C.? Do I tell them to forget about the money and put it away?. .Absolutely not,. Montgomery said.
Montgomery and Trepp were soon in a no-holds-barred federal lawsuit. Each sued the other. Trepp obviously believed Montgomery.s technology was real because he pursued the lawsuit with a vengeance. Montgomery, on the other hand, accused Trepp of trying to steal his inventions. Montgomery claimed he needed to bring the U.S. intelligence establishment into the case. He went so far as to name the Department of Defense as a defendant.
Eventually Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte weighed in. What secrets.what embarrassments.could be exposed if Montgomery and Trepp were to depose intelligence and military officials? Negroponte issued a declaration that warned of .serious, and in some cases exceptionally grave, damage to the national security of the United States.. He invoked the state secrets privilege. The judge in the case issued a protective order; the secrets of eTreppid.s government business would remain untold.
Trepp had deep pockets and a collection of associates who could bankroll him, but Montgomery had a new patron, someone with tremendous financial resources and connections in Washington, D.C. Her name was Edra Blixseth, wife of billionaire developer Tim Blixseth. The Blixseths had made their reputations as founders of the exclusive Yellowstone Club in Montana, a resort for the fabulously wealthy. Membership cost a quarter of a million dollars, but once there, vacationers like Bill Gates or Dan Quayle could enjoy .private powder. in the company of other elites.
The Blixseths lived in a $200 million estate called Porcupine Creek in Rancho Mirage, California. It had a private golf course and a 30,000-square-foot mansion set among manicured gardens. This is where Montgomery pursued the next stage of his career as a software programmer.
A document in Superior Court in California.now unsealed.reveals how Montgomery explained his inventions and intelligence work for the U.S. government to Blixseth, her lawyers and her partners. He would pull out his laptop, demonstrate his software and brag how he was .decoding Al Jazeera broadcasts and using it for other .top secret. programs.. He found a new lawyer for his case against Trepp. He told him he had been .intercepting Al Qaeda .target coordinates. for proposed terrorist attacks sent to its field operatives via digital Al Jazeera satellite TV network transmissions.. Montgomery also told his lawyer the Department of Defense .paid approximately $30 million in contracts and appropriated another $100 million in their .black budget...
In July 2006 Montgomery and Blixseth pitched their technology to an aide to Vice President Cheney. .I met for several hours with Samantha Ravich, deputy assistant to the vice president in charge of national security,. Montgomery asserted in a sworn statement. His word may be suspect, but there is corroborating evidence. Ravich listened to Montgomery and Blixseth, but she was.even in Montgomery.s recollection.unimpressed by his claims.
Still, Montgomery hailed his meeting as a victory. He claimed he provided Cheney.s office with new output data on terror that would validate his work. He said the data, which had been encrypted in Al Jazeera, were the keys that allowed investigators to crack the liquid-bomb plot in London. On August 9, 2006 British police rounded up two dozen suspects and announced they.d halted a plan to bomb several transcontinental flights at once. Montgomery swore his warning was .used in the disruption of that threat.. In another declaration he said he .provided the output from [his] decoding programs, without compensation, to our government in order to stop terrorist attacks and save American lives..
Montgomery was now making $100,000 a month as a software programmer. He worked for companies with different names, but they all received funding from Edra Blixseth. Montgomery had a home in a serene gated community in Rancho Mirage not far from Blixseth.s estate. He drove a $70,000 Porsche Cayenne GTS, and his home was near the gambling tables at the Agua Caliente Casino, where he lost $422,000 in one day.
Blxware, the company through which Blixseth was doing business, had lofty connections. With the aid of Nevada senator Harry Reid.s office, Montgomery.s technology found its way to the Senate Intelligence Committee staff. This is no routine achievement: The committee staff, operating in a special office of the Dirksen Senate building, constitutes an elite sector in Washington. Normal lobbyists cannot walk in to see staffers because their offices are protected, with special access and guards. When intel staffers talk, the intelligence community listens because they hold the reins.they control oversight.
Montgomery claimed he was reading secret messages about three Americans who had been grabbed in the Sunni triangle. Signals were coming out .related to the recent hostage-taking of our three soldiers,. Montgomery told the staffers. He warned them that something was up. The staffers didn.t know what to make of it.
In 2007 things were looking up for Montgomery. He finally got some interest, this time from an agency he couldn.t name in public. Reading between the lines, one can presume it was the National Security Agency. But then Montgomery had a strange reaction. He had just .purged. the software, he said, and it would take time to redo it. He wanted $4 million from the U.S. government to get started.
The FBI investigation of Montgomery went nowhere. First, his new lawyer challenged the FBI searches, and the judge found in his favor. Then Montgomery went on the offensive, accusing his accuser. He went public with allegations that Trepp had committed bribery by paying off Nevada congressman Jim Gibbons. NBC News did an exclusive interview with Montgomery at Blixseth.s house. He was dressed in a suit and tie and said he saw the bribe take place. He claimed Trepp had given Gibbons .casino chips and cash. worth about $100,000. Montgomery backed this up with e-mails he said he.d taken off the eTreppid server. Trepp and Gibbons found themselves under a grand jury.s scrutiny. They, not Montgomery, were targeted. But Montgomery.s allegations fell apart after a forensic expert for eTreppid alleged in court papers that one crucial e-mail had been doctored. The Department of Justice later dropped the case, and Gibbons was cleared.
By 2008 things seemed to have resolved themselves in the epic litigation between Montgomery and his old moneyman Warren Trepp. There was a glitch at first: Montgomery was supposed to produce a key CD with the breakthrough software he claimed he.d invented, the very heart of this case. But he couldn.t find the disk, he said, and he claimed he couldn.t re-create the lost and precious secret. He lashed out at the FBI in a court document. It was the agents who had ruined everything anyway, he said. The FBI had .damaged and in some cases destroyed. his property.
That backfired, but the parties all seemed to come to a temporary agreement. By the fall, Montgomery settled his long-standing suit with Warren Trepp. Terms weren.t released at the time, but Trepp let Montgomery and his new financier, Edra Blixseth, keep the .software.. Court records indicate Montgomery and Blixseth would now owe $26.5 million to Trepp.
One can only assume it hit Montgomery hard: Four days after the settlement he spent his day at Caesars Palace on the Las Vegas Strip. He was a blackjack player by preference, according to all accounts, and so he presumably sat at the high roller.s blackjack tables on September 27. He was, in the parlance of the gambling hall, a .whale.. He took out his checkbook and tore out check after check, making them out to Caesars Palace Hotel and Casino, and buying cash and chips. The first check was for $10,000, then $100,000 and on and on. That.s blackjack for you. In fact, Montgomery bought a cool million dollars. worth from the casino that day. Caesars won.t comment on individual players, but prosecutors say Montgomery.s checks later bounced. (In October 2009 Montgomery came up with $250,000 in restitution, which kept him from being prosecuted.)
But Montgomery and the U.S. government were apparently still working together. The CIA had discredited the embarrassing Al Jazeera technology, but it was all still secret, still classified. Few people even in the government knew about the old scandal. Montgomery and his patron somehow found a new federal buyer willing to hand over taxpayer funds. In this case it was $3 million for .research, development, test and evaluation.. It was written in the dense language of federal procurement law and revived all the terms Montgomery had bandied about. The contract was so heavily redacted that even the name of the Air Force office is blacked out. I read through a version of the document, and at the end I found the nondisclosure agreement. .This agreement is entered into between the United States Air Force and Dennis Montgomery.. He signed it January 29, 2009.
Montgomery did not cooperate with this story, but I managed to reach the Air Force program manager, Joseph Liberatore. .How do I want to say this?. he said. .We were testing some of the software. We were just looking at it to see if there was anything there. If there is anything there we wanted to make sure there was due diligence and it was looked at by the U.S. government..
I asked the Air Force how this could have happened. The chief of the Air Force press desk, Andrew Bourland, said Blxware represented its software as .innovative and transformational.. But the results of the evaluation were .inconclusive. and discussions were over. The first taxpayer transfer to Edra Blixseth.s company was a $2 million payment on February 5, 2009. That same month, Blxware paid Dennis Montgomery $600,000.
In June, four months after collecting all that money, Montgomery and his wife declared personal bankruptcy. One of his assets, he claimed, was the $10 million value of his .copyrights..all that software. His bankruptcy lawyer tells me the technology Montgomery claimed to have invented is an asset in the bankruptcy proceedings. .It.ll be between the government authorities and Dennis,. he says.
So in the end, was there ever any software designed by Montgomery? Sloan Venables and Jim Bauder say they doubt it. They shrug and laugh. .I never saw it,. says Venables. But if it.s all bogus, why is it still classified? And if Montgomery.s claims have any truth, why can.t anyone else find what he found? Did that $100 million appropriation ever exist? And who will Dennis Montgomery reach out to with his next scheme?
===========================
THE PENTAGON ATTACK PAPERS
Seven Hours in September:
The Clock that Broke the Lie
Appendix to
THE TERROR CONSPIRACY
by Jim Marrs
Publication date, Sept. 6, 2006
by Barbara Honegger, M.S.
Barbara Honegger, M.S. is Senior Military Affairs Journalist at the Naval Postgraduate School (1995-present), the Navy.s advanced science, technology and national security affairs university. This research, as all of Honegger.s research and publications on September 11, are solely in her capacity as a concerned private citizen and do not imply official endorsement. Honegger served as Special Assistant to the Assistant to the President and White House Policy Analyst (1981-83); was the pioneering Irangate author and whistleblower on the October Surprise (October Surprise, Tudor, 1989; and Iran-Contra expose documentary film "Cover-Up"); and was called as a researcher/witness at both the October 23, 2004, and August 27, 2005, Los Angeles Citizens 9/11 Grand Jury hearings held at Patriotic Hall in Los Angeles, Calif. Much of the information and analysis contained in this evidence summary was presented at the L.A. Citizens Grand Jury hearings and at the 9/11 Emergency Truth Convergence conference held at American University in Washington, D.C. in July, 2005.
The San Francisco Chronicle commemorated the 100th anniversary of The Great Earthuake of 1906 with a series of front-page articles headed by a single icon - a charred clock frozen at 5:12 am, the exact moment "The Big One" hit.[1] A century after that devastating event, the stopped clock serves as both the ultimate evidence and the symbol that "captures it all."
Again, almost 100 years later, clocks frozen in time at the Pentagon on the morning of September 11, 2001 both "capture it all" and are the ultimate evidence that shatters the "Official Lie" of what happened that terrible morning.
The Pentagon was first attacked at 9:32 am, much earlier than the 9/11 Commission and official cover story claim. (In this summary of evidence, the more precise time of 9:31:40 am is "rounded up" for ease of reference.)
The Pentagon and mainstream media first reported 9:43 as the time of alleged Flight 77 impact (some reports, presumably taken from official sources, were as late as 9:48 and 9:47). Over time, the time given by officials for the claimed outside impact on the building has been moved earlier and earlier, down to 9:37 (as of the time of this writing), but has never come close to the actual time of the first violent event at the Pentagon - 9:32.
Clearly, if the official story that Flight 77 hit the Pentagon at 9:37 were true, Flight 77 could not have been the source of massive damage to the west side of the building a minimum of five minutes earlier at 9:32.
Converging Lines of Proof of a 9:32 Violent Event at the Pentagon on September 11, well before the Official Story says anything hit the building:
Multiple standard-issue, battery-operated wall clocks on the walls of the area of the Pentagon attacked on 9/11 -including one in the heliport just outside the west face- were stopped between 9:31 and 9:32.1/2 by a violent event, almost certainly a bomb or bombs inside the building and/or in a truck or construction trailer parked right outside the west face. The first Associated Press report, in fact, stated that the Pentagon had been damaged by a "booby trapped truck." The Navy posted the stopped heliport clock on an official website and another of the stopped clocks is in the 9/11 display at the Smithsonian Institution.[2] These are just some of the west section Pentagon clocks that stopped between 9:31 and 9:32.1/2 on September 11.
April Gallop, an Army employee with a Top Secret clearance, was at her desk in the Army administrative offices in the west section of the Pentagon on 9/11, the area of the building most heavily destroyed, when what she said sounded and felt "like a bomb" went off. "Being in the Army with the training I had, I know what a bomb sounds and acts like, especially the aftermath, and it sounded and acted like a bomb. There was no plane or plane parts inside the building, and no smell of jet fuel." Ms. Gallop still has the watch she was wearing that morning, which stopped shortly after 9:30.
The FAA.s [Federal Aviation Administration] timeline document "Executive Summary-Chronology of a Multiple Hijacking Crisis--September 11, 2001" reads: "0932: ATC (Air Traffic Control) AEA reports aircraft crashes into west side of Pentagon."[3] The time is the critical fact here, not the claimed cause.
Denmark.s soon-to-be Foreign Minister Per Stig Moller was in a building in Washington, D.C. on 9/11 from which he looked out, heard an explosion and saw the smoke first rise from the Pentagon. He immediately looked at his watch, which read 9:32 am. He gave radio interviews in Denmark the next morning in which he stated that the Pentagon had been attacked at 9:32.[4]
On August 27, 2002, then White House Counsel and now Attorney General Alberto Gonzales gave the Secretary of the Navy lecture at the Naval Postgraduate School in which Gonzales explicitly and clearly states that "The Pentagon was attacked at 9:32". A tape of this segment of his talk was played at the 9/11 Emergency Truth Convergence at American University in Washington, D.C. in July 2005, and is on the public record.
The Pentagon was attacked by bomb(s) at or around 9:32 am, possibly followed by an impact from an airborne object significantly smaller than Flight 77, a Boeing 757.
We have already seen that Army employee April Gallop, whose watch was stopped by the violent event at the Pentagon shortly after 9:30, says that her military training and experience led her to immediately determine the source of the initial explosion was a bomb.
I have interviewed an Army auditor from Ft. Monmouth, New Jersey, who was on temporary duty assignment at the Pentagon before, on and after 9/11. He was in the Army financial management spaces only minutes before the Pentagon explosion on the morning of 9/11. He had just returned to his temporary office on the ground floor of the adjacent south side of the Pentagon by the cafeteria when he heard an explosion and felt the building shake. Immediately afterwards, he said, hundreds of panicked Pentagon personnel ran by him down the corridor just outside his office and out the South Entrance, yelling "Bombs!" and "A bomb went off!" The witness has requested that his name not be used in this summary, but is willing to testify to a grand jury or independent official investigation.
This Army financial management/audit area is part of, or contiguous to, the Army personnel offices, which was one of two main west section offices heavily destroyed in the Pentagon attack, the other being the Naval Command Center. The day before 9/11, September 10, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld held a press conference at which he acknowledged that the Pentagon was "missing" -could not account for and needed to "find"- $2.3 Trillion dollars (other reports said $2.6 Trillion). Were the auditors who could "follow the money," and the computers whose data could help them do it, intentionally targeted? It is worth noting that the Pentagon.s top financial officer at the time, Dov Zakheim, who also acknowledged the "missing" trillions, had a company that specializes in aircraft remote-control technology. As remnants found in the Pentagon wreckage have been identified as the front-hub assembly of the front compressor of a JT8D turbojet engine used in the A-3 Sky Warrior jet fighter,[5] and as Air Force A-3 Sky Warriors -normally piloted planes- were secretly retrofitted to be remote-controlled drones and fitted with missiles in a highly compartmented operation at an airport near Ft. Collins-Loveland Municipal Airport in Colorado in the months before 9/11,[6] the question further arises as to whether Pentagon auditors and their computerized data were intentionally targeted on 9/11.
The Ft. Monmouth Army auditor and his two colleagues were also eyewitnesses to multiple teams of bomb-sniffing dogs and their K-9 handlers in camouflage uniform at the Pentagon metro station just outside the Pentagon at approximately 7:30 am on 9/11. He said that K-9 bomb squads had not been at the Pentagon metro stop before 9/11, or since, but only that day. Since K-9 dog squads don.t usually search for airliners, but bombs, a bomb attack was clearly anticipated. Ms. Gallop said she also saw the bomb sniffing K-9 teams that morning, from the top of the Pentagon metro stop looking down.
Survivor eyewitnesses from inside the west section of the Pentagon reported that the blast caused its windows first to expand outwards, and then inwards.[7]
Multiple witnesses said they smelled cordite after the initial explosion at the Pentagon, an explosive which has a distinct and very different smell from that of burning jet fuel.[8] And as we have already noted, Ms. Gallop said there was no smell of jet fuel inside the most damaged section of the building shortly after the first violent event that stopped her watch there shortly after 9:30.
Even Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld told Sam Donaldson in an ABC News interview shortly after 9/11 that he first thought a bomb had gone off in the building. Donaldson: "What did you think it was?" Rumsfeld: "A bomb? I had no idea..."
It is important to note that bomb explosion(s) at 9:32 am on the ground floor of the west section of the Pentagon are not inconsistent with there having also been a later, or even near-simultaneous, impact by some airborne object -- a piloted plane, unmanned drone, or missile -- into the same or nearby section of the building, which may have been the cause of the collapse of the west wall section approximately 20 minutes after the initial violent event. Indeed, if a heat-seeking missile hit the building after the bomb(s) went off, the heat from the explosion(s) would become the target for the missile. Recall that the A-3 Sky Warrior planes were retrofitted shortly before 9/11, not only enabling them to be remotely controlled but also fitted with missiles. The round-shaped exit hole in the inner wall of the "C" Ring is evidence that a missile or a piloted or pilot-less remote-controlled plane significantly smaller than Flight 77 also struck the building subsequent to bombs going off and penetrated the inside of the third ring, as bomb detonations would not have resulted in such a near-symmetrical round-shaped opening.
I have interviewed the then Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations on 9/11, Robert Andrews -the top civilian official in charge of special operations under Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld- a former Green Beret whose office was on the second floor of the south section of the Pentagon, adjacent to the west section. While drawing the path that he took that morning on a sketch of the Pentagon, he revealed the following:
Immediately after the second World Trade Center attack of 9:03 am, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld left his office on the Potomac side of the Pentagon and went (merely) across the hall on the same floor to his Executive Support Center (ESC), which is set up for teleconferencing. There, he joined the teleconference of top government officials run by Richard Clarke out of the White House Situation Room media room. Clarke, in his book Against All Enemies, confirms that Rumsfeld was among the first officials on this teleconference shortly after the second WTC tower was hit. Clarke.s account and Andrews. confirmation of it are completely at odds with the official cover story and the 9/11 Commission, which claim that no one could locate Secretary Rumsfeld until approximately 10:30 am when he walked into the National Military Command Center (NMCC). The fact that Rumsfeld, the military.s top civilian official, was on Clarke.s teleconference with the top official of the FAA, Director Jane Garvey, also puts the complete lie to the official cover story that Air Force interceptors weren.t scrambled in time because the military and FAA "couldn.t talk each other" on 9/11. The top-most officials of the Pentagon and FAA were talking to one another constantly on Clarke.s teleconference from as early as 9:15. This taped Clarke teleconference is the "Butterfield tape" of 9/11. [During the 1970s Watergate scandal, secretly-made tapes of President Nixon.s Oval Office conversations revealed by Alexander Butterfield were the "smoking guns" which forced Nixon to resign or face certain impeachment and trial in the Senate.]
Immediately after the second WTC tower was struck at 9:03 am, Andrews and his aide left his office and ran as fast as they could down to the Secretary of Defense.s West section basement Counterterrorism Center (CTC), beneath the ground-level location of the violent event in the building that morning, arriving at approximately 9:10. While he and his aide were in this west side basement CTC, a violent event caused the ceiling tiles to fall off the ceiling and smoke to pour into the room. Andrews immediately looked at his watch, which read approximately 9:35 am but which was set fast to ensure timely arrival at meetings, so the actual time was closer to 9:32. He and his aide then immediately evacuated the CTC with the goal of joining Rumsfeld in his Executive Support Center (ESC) across the hall from Rumsfeld.s main office. He said that Rumsfeld was already on the White House teleconference when they arrived. En route to Rumsfeld.s ESC, Andrews said when he and his aide entered the corridor on the inside ring of the west section, "we had to walk over dead bodies" to get to the inner courtyard. (Note: This is two rings further in towards the center from the inner most hole made by whatever allegedly impacted the Pentagon that morning.)
Once in the inner courtyard, Andrews and his aide ran as fast as they could to Rumsfeld.s Executive Support Center, where he joined Rumsfeld as his special operations/counterterrorism adviser during Clarke.s White House teleconference. Andrews also said that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld spoke with President Bush while in the Pentagon Executive Support Center. Whether this was via the teleconference or by phone or other means was not stated. The fact that Rumsfeld personally communicated with Bush on 9/11 while Rumsfeld was in his Pentagon ESC was published on an official DoD web site.[9]
WTC janitor William "Willy" Rodriguez, the last non-emergency response person to leave the WTC alive on 9/11, has testified that he was in the first basement level of the WTC when an immense explosion went off below him in the yet-deeper subbasement level(s) of the building a few seconds before the plane hit the tower high above.[10] As Robert Andrews revealed that the west side basement level of the Pentagon was damaged at approximately 9:32 am and as we know that the cause of the 9:32 Pentagon attack was not an impact event but explosives, there are thus eye- and ear witness reports of bombs going off in both the Pentagon and the WTC underground level(s) before both buildings were hit by anything from the outside.
As no "outside" terrorist, al Qaeda or otherwise, could have had access to either the Pentagon or the sustained advance access needed to pre-place explosives inside the WTC, only domestic insiders could have pre-placed the explosives in both the Pentagon and the WTC. Further, because the WTC1 deep-basement explosions(s) experienced by Willy Rodriguez happened before the tower was hit by a plane; as any incoming plane not controlled by the same party that triggered the sub-basement detonation(s) could have veered off from the building at the last second, ruining the plane-impact-as-cover-story for the later building collapse; and as the sub-basement explosions were necessary for the actual later collapse of the buildings by controlled demolition, the same domestic-US insiders had to have controlled both the sub-basement detonations and the incoming plane(s). Thus, even if al Qaeda hijackers were on the incoming planes, they were not in final control of the impact of the planes into the buildings, which had to have been guaranteed by domestic/US insider controllers to ensure the sub-basement bombs didn.t go off prematurely and destroy the plane-impact cover story. This fact is critical, as it takes jurisdiction for the mass murders at the WTC away from the Bush Administration.s FBI, which oversees crimes committed in the air, and places it squarely with the State of New York, as murder is a State crime and multiple/mass murders are the sum of individual State crimes. Because the controllers of the timing of the basement level explosives had to have also been the controllers of the final approach of the planes, and the former was clearly on the ground and not in the air, a Manhattan grand jury can suddenly pull jurisdiction for the Bush-Cheney Reichstag Fire out of their hands.
Because the real modus operandi at the Pentagon and WTC are so similar, it is logical to deduce that the same domestic-US terrorists were responsible for pre-placing and detonating the bombs - both inside the WTC and inside the Pentagon. That is, a single group of US-domestic conspirators -not al Qaeda or any other outside terrorists- must have planned both the WTC and Pentagon attacks and controlled both the approaching planes and the inside-the-building explosions in real time on 9/11.
In addition to the already legion evidence that Flight 77 did not hit the Pentagon -- i.e. the small hole in the west side of the Pentagon being not nearly large enough for the plane.s fuselage, let alone wing width; no damage to the lawn where Flight 77 allegedly struck and skidded before hitting the building; wrecked plane parts at the site identified as being from an A-3 Sky Warrior, a far smaller plane than that of Flight 77, a Boeing 757; Pentagon requests to TV media on the morning of 9/11 not to take up-close images, etc. -- there is also official evidence that Flight 77 did not hit the building:
In the Air Force.s own account of the events of 9/11, Air War Over America, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) general who finally ordered interceptor jets scrambled on 9/11, although too late, Gen. Larry Arnold, revealed that he ordered one of his jets to fly down low over the Pentagon shortly after the attack there that morning, and that this pilot reported back that there was no evidence that a plane had hit the building. This fighter jet -not Flight 77- is almost certainly the plane seen on the Dulles airport Air Traffic Controller.s screen making a steep, high-speed 270-degree descent before disappearing from the radar. [When a plane flies low enough to go undetected, it is said to be "under the radar."] Military pilots -like the one sent by Gen. Arnold on 9/11 to report on the Pentagon.s damage- are trained to fly 500 feet above ground in order to evade radar detection. In fact, when the Air Traffic Controller responsible for the plane and her colleagues watched the extremely difficult 270-degree maneuver on her screen, they were certain that the plane whose blip they were watching perform this extremely difficult feat was a US military aircraft, and said so at the time. It almost certainly was.
Thus, the likely reason the Pentagon has refused to lower the current official time for "Flight 77" impact, 9:37, to 9:32 am -the actual time of the first explosions there- is that they decided to pretend the blip represented by Arnold.s surveillance jet approaching just before 9:37 was "Flight 77." As the official cover story claims that the alleged 9:37 impact was the only Pentagon attack that morning, yet by the time Arnold.s surveillance jet arrived on the scene the violent event had already happened, the Pentagon cannot acknowledge the earlier 9:32 time without revealing an attack on the building prior to the alleged impact.
It is significant that the The 9/11 Commission Report ignores the testimony of Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta to its own commission and did this only for the testimony of Secretary Mineta. The clear reason for this blatant and targeted censorship is that Mineta.s eyewitness testimony is extremely dangerous to the official cover story. The portion of Mineta.s testimony that is particularly dangerous is his claim that Vice President Cheney, in charge in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC) beneath the White House since before Mineta arrived in the PEOC at 9:20, insisted to an incredulous "young man" that "the orders (given earlier by Cheney to this same individual) still stand" when the man told Cheney that the presumed plane they had been tracking as a blip on a screen was 50, then 30, and finally just 10 miles from Washington - orders which could only have been not to shoot down the plane. Otherwise there would have been no reason for the agent to ask Cheney if they "still" stood, despite the plane.s being almost upon the capital where Cheney himself was. This is critical because of the timing that can be inferred from Mineta.s testimony: As Mineta arrived at the PEOC at 9:20 am, and as Mineta estimated the "still stand?" interaction between Cheney and the agent happened 5 to 6 minutes after that, or about 9:25, it can be inferred based on the officially given speed of the plane represented by the blip of 540 mph that whatever that fast- approaching blip represented, it arrived in the vicinity of the Pentagon at approximately 9:32 - nowhere close to the original official cover story time of 9:43, or even the six-minute-earlier time the Pentagon finally settled on for an alleged impact time of 9:37.
All of this also happened at 9:32:
* After an inexplicable delay during which they knew that both WTC towers were under attack, the Secret Service suddenly acts as if the attacks are "real," rushing President Bush out of the library at the Florida school where he had been reading to children.
* The firefighters are suddenly ordered out of WTC 1.
* The New York Stock Exchange is ordered closed.
* The takeover of Flight 93 begins with the stabbing of a flight attendant and one of the alleged hijackers announcing that there is a bomb on board, picked up by flight controllers.
Other relevant interviews:
I interviewed the famous "lone taxi driver" whose cab is the only car visible still parked on I-395 above the Pentagon lawn looking down at the west face after the other cars have left the freeway. This taxi can be seen in overhead photos taken on the morning of 9/11 and viewable on the Internet. The driver said his was the last car allowed onto that section of I-395 before police put up a barricade and that he decided not to immediately leave the scene like the others "because I realized this was history and I wanted to see for myself." He stated that he saw no evidence of a plane having impacted the building nor any visible plane pieces on the lawn at the time he arrived, which was after the first violent event in the building, as black smoke was streaming up and to the right from inside-the-building fires. The taxi cab driver drew a diagram of what he saw that morning while overlooking the Pentagon.s west face from I-395.
I interviewed a Navy public affairs officer assigned to the Naval Command Center, one of the two major Pentagon west section areas destroyed on 9/11, the other being the Army Financial Management/Audit area as mentioned earlier. This officer was not in the building that morning but was quickly assigned as the deputy public affairs officer at the underground "back-up Pentagon" location in Pennsylvania close to the Maryland border, Site R. This eyewitness Navy officer inside Site R said Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and later Vice President Cheney were flown to the Site R underground bunker in response to Richard Clarke.s officially declaring "Continuity of Government/Continuity of Operations" (COG/COOP) on the morning of 9/11. This is confirmed in Clarke.s book, Against All Enemies, in which he reports that Rumsfeld chose Wolfowitz to be the designated COG/COOP official at Site R in his stead. Perhaps significantly, Site R and Camp David are not far from the crash site of Flight 93. Details about Site R, on and after 9/11, are also in James Bamford.s book, A Pretext for War.
On February 4, 2004, I interviewed Air Force General Ralph Eberhart, Commander of NORAD on 9/11. To my knowledge, Gen. Eberhart has granted no other interview since the events of September 11. Before asking questions, I gave Gen. Eberhart copies of all the mainstream press articles published as of that date on the subject of the confusion of his NORAD Northeast Sector (NEADS) personnel who were running NORAD.s "Vigilant Guardian/Vigilant Warrior" emergency response war game exercises that morning. As of the date of the interview, therefore, the then head of NORAD was made aware of the initial confusion by his own NEADS "game" players on 9/11 between incoming exercise reports and incoming reports of the actual hijacks.
I first asked Gen. Eberhart if there was any connection between NORAD.s "Vigilant Guardian/Vigilant Warrior" exercise being run on 9/11 and the plane-crashing-into-tower emergency response exercise simultaneously being held at National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) headquarters outside Washington, D.C.[12/first cite] He replied, "No." I was surprised at this, as a large portion of NRO personnel are from his own agency, the Air Force. I asked for reconfirmation, to which he again said, "No." Laying the ground for the next question, I mentioned that NEADS. "game" director Lt. Col. Dawne Deskins had said that she was confused as to whether initial reports of the hijacked planes on the morning of 9/11 were "real world" or "part of the game." This, I said, showed that the NORAD exercises that morning had to have been on a hijack scenario at least similar to the actual attacks, as otherwise there would have been no grounds for confusion. After considering this for a moment, Gen. Eberhart refused to answer any further questions and abruptly ended the interview.
In addition to the already well known and officially acknowledged evidence of Bush Administration foreknowledge of the broad outlines of the September 11 attacks -advance warnings from the intelligence agencies of as many as 11 foreign countries and the content of the now-famous August 6, 2001 presidential daily brief (whose 10-page attachment still has not been made public), etc.- there is strong evidence that Bush administration insiders had near perfect -if not complete- advance knowledge of both the details and the date of the September 11 attack:
(Note: That Bush Administration insiders had advance knowledge of the date and details of an "outside" attack is not inconsistent with these insiders having facilitated and even orchestrated the attacks. That is, the plot behind the attacks of September 11 is similar to that of the Reichstag fire, through which Hitler rapidly consolidated power. Like the Nazi-facilitated Reichstag fire, there was a real though highly-unlikely-to-succeed "outside" plot about which Administration insiders gained advance intelligence. They then secretly protected and enabled this plot to ensure that it not only succeeded, but succeeded spectacularly as the psychological operation needed to justify the entire subsequent Bush-Cheney global and domestic agenda.)
1) Shortly after September 11, Newsweek reported that before 9/11, the Bush Administration initiated a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court surveillance/tap of "up to 20" suspected al Qaeda-linked terrorists then in the US, but that then FISA Court Chief Justice Royce Lamberth subsequently ordered the then-already-ongoing surveillance stopped. This can only mean one thing - that the Bush Justice Dept./FBI/NSA initiated the tap before asking the FISA Court for a warrant for it, as with the now-famous post-9/11 NSA taps initiated by the Bush administration without first applying for FISA warrants.
As "up to 20" is a clever way of saying "19" without making the link to 9/11 explicit, the Bush Administration Justice Dept/FBI/NSA almost certainly initiated surveillance of all 19, or close to all 19, of the soon-to-be alleged 9/11 hijackers before 9/11. Though Judge Lamberth ordered the surveillance ended once the administration filed the formal warrant application, there is evidence that the Bush administration ignored his order to cease the tap and continued the surveillance of the alleged 9/11 hijackers up to and including the day of 9/11.
Zacarias Moussaoui -the only person indicted by the Bush Administration for anything even related to 9/11- has stated in court filings that both he "and my (al Qaeda) brothers" then in the US were surveilled by the Bush administration before 9/11 and that the Bush administration knows he can prove it. How could this be the case? If Moussaoui was one of the "up to 20" al Qaeda-linked terrorist suspects they surveilled before 9/11 without an advance FISA warrant as reported by Newsweek, then Moussaoui was also one of the "up to 20" whose taps Judge Lamberth ordered stopped. Moussaoui, after all, was originally named as the "20th hijacker" of the 9/11 plot. Amazingly, the FISA Act requires that, if the FISA Court rejects a surveillance initiated before a warrant has been applied for, as in this case, the court has to inform the "target" of the surveillance and give him the government.s stated reason for the tap in the surveillance application. Moussaoui says that he can "prove" the Bush administration/FBI initiated surveillance on him before 9/11 because, it can be deduced, the FISA Court itself told him so after Lamberth ordered his --and those of the other "up to 20"-- surveillance ended.
If this is the case, it opens the very real possibility that the FISA Court likewise informed most or all 19 of the "up to 20"alleged 9/11 hijackers before 9/11 that they were being surveilled by the Bush Administration - and the reason for such surveillance. This also throws new light on the claims by the Pentagon.s then-secret data mining task force, "Able Danger," to have tracked lead 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta and at least four of the other 19 hijackers beginning in January, 2000, when Atta actually did enter the country according to Daniel Hopsicker in his book, Welcome to Terrorland. The FBI falsely claimed, and still falsely claims, that Atta did not enter the US until the summer of 2000, six months later. The likely reason for this intentional lie about when Atta first entered the country is what Atta is known to have done while inside the US between January and the Summer of 2000. Hopsicker reveals that, among other activities, Atta visited Portland, Maine, in March, 2000, and perhaps even earlier. An abiding "mystery" of the official cover story is why Atta drove to Portland, Maine on September 10, the day before 9/11, and then flew from Portland to Boston early on the morning of September 11. The answer to this "mystery," which the FBI clearly already knows, is the link between what Atta was doing in Portland before the administration admits he was even in the country, as well as what he was doing there the day before 9/11 and early on the morning of 9/11. This may all have something to do with the fact that the CIA reportedly runs secret flights out of an airport in Portland, Maine, and that "rendition" detainees have said they were flown out of the country on special jets after first stopping at Portland.s International Jet Port.[12]
2) The FBI.s top bin Laden/al Qaeda hunter until shortly before 9/11, John O.Neill, "happened" to be at the same hotel in the same town near Tarragona, Spain in mid-July 2001 just before lead hijacker Mohamed Atta and 9/11 plot "coordinator" Ramzi Binalshibh. Some Bush administration officials now also believe that 9/11 "mastermind" Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) met there for what the 9/11 Commission calls "the Final 9/11 Planning Meeting." This cannot be -and is not- a coincidence. O.Neill, who was in close contact with German intelligence -recall that Atta led the "German cell" for the 9/11 attacks- and Spanish intelligence, had clearly been alerted to the upcoming meeting and was at the hotel to surveil/tap/bug the room where the meeting was about to be held. O.Neill and his agency, the Bush administration.s FBI, thus knew every detail, or nearly every detail, of the planned 9/11 plot at least two months in advance.
Perhaps just as significantly, European media reported that bin Laden was in an American hospital in Dubai incapacitated for surgery during precisely this same mid-July, 2001, period of the Spanish "final 9/11 Planning Meeting." Reportedly, bin Laden was visited in the hospital by the area.s then CIA station chief. The question naturally arises as to whether bin Laden was telephoned by Atta, Binalshibh, and perhaps also KSM, or visa versa, while the latter were at the "Final 9/11 Planning Meeting" in the hotel that O.Neill had pre-bugged. If so, then O.Neill, the FBI, and the highest levels of the Bush Administration -including O.Neill.s then boss, Attorney General Ashcroft, who suddenly stopped flying commercial aircraft about this time- knew not only every detail of the 9/11 plot as of that date, but almost certainly recorded all the key "outside" conspirators plotting their "final plans" including possibly bin Laden himself, on tape - clearly another "Butterfield" tape to be demanded by subpoena.
As noted above, on 9/11 itself the US military was conducting NORAD/Air Force emergency response exercises on scenarios involving multiple hijacks, and the NRO was conducting an emergency response exercise on the scenario of a plane crashing into one of the towers at its headquarters just outside Washington, D.C.[11] - many NRO personnel being from the Air Force and CIA. It is next to impossible for this to have been the case unless the exercises, also referred to as war games, were intentionally scripted to mirror what had been learned from the above-mentioned detailed advance intelligence. That is, the purpose of the war games held on 9/11 was to practice how to defend against the very attacks that John O.Neill.s Tarragona meeting surveillance, the Pentagon.s "Able Danger" data-mining tracking, and the FBI.s FISA-warrant-less surveillance of the "up to 20" ("19"?) suspected al Qaeda terrorists had already revealed. You don.t practice something in a multi-million-dollar set of exercises that you "can.t imagine." The date for the actual attacks -September 11- was then chosen to coincide with the Pentagon.s exercises, which in turn mirrored the real attack plans (see below).
Perhaps the most burning data point to prove Bush administration complicity in 9/11 is the fact that lead hijacker Mohamed Atta took to the mid-July "final 9/11 planning meeting" in Spain the information that "the date has been set" (i.e. set by someone else other than Atta), and that he, Atta, didn.t yet know it, but would "know it" in five to six weeks, or by late August, 2001.[13] Atta was clearly waiting to learn the date of "his own" attack. This last piece of the puzzle fell into place during the first phase of Zacarias Moussaoui.s sentencing trial, in the 58-page transcript of 9/11"mastermind" Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.s interrogation "testimony" read into the trial record by the Bush administration prosecution. In this KSM transcript, it is revealed that bin Laden and KSM "allowed Atta to choose" both the final targets for the attacks and the attack date."[14] From this, therefore, we know that neither bin Laden nor "mastermind" KSM nor "coordinator" Binalshibh set the September 11 attack date. However, from what Atta said to Binalshibh -and probably also KSM and even possibly bin Laden by phone link- at the "Final Planning Meeting" in Spain, we also know that neither did Atta. Atta was waiting to learn the date of his "own" attack five to six weeks after the mid-July "final 9/11 planning meeting," and that date did not come from any of his al Qaeda superiors. It must be the case then, despite KSM.s claim that he "let" Atta choose the date, that none of the top "outside" terrorist conspirators set the date for the September 11 attacks, including Atta.
The key and central fact of the entire 9/11 plot is that the attack date Atta was "waiting for" was the date of the Bush administration.s planned war games, which, in a vicious circle, were scripted to mirror the content of Atta.s attack plan gleaned via advance intelligence obtained from O.Neill.s surveillance of the "final planning meeting" near Tarragona, the Pentagon.s "Able Danger" tracking of Atta, and the FBI.s warrantless surveillance of Atta and other of the about-to-be alleged hijackers. Atta was thus the sole individual to whom the date the Bush administration finally chose for its war games - 9/11- was leaked as soon as it was selected and he bought his one-way ticket as soon as he learned it, in late August, 2001, just as he had predicted at the "final planning meeting." The No. 1 Bush administration conspirator, therefore, is whoever gave the administration.s own war game scenario details and date -9/11- to Mohamed Atta.
Lt. Gen. Mahmoud Ahmed, then head of Pakistan.s military intelligence agency ISI, is a prime suspect for the middleman who laundered this No. 1 Bush administration conspirator.s insider war game information to Atta. On the morning of 9/11 he was having breakfast with future CIA Director Porter J. Goss and Senator Bob Graham, who co-chaired the joint House/Senate "investigation" of the 9/11 attacks, and had met with CIA Director George Tenet and with top officials at the Pentagon, about to conduct the war games, in the few days leading up to 9/11. He is most likely the person who was told the date and details of the Pentagon.s emergency response exercises and communicated them, directly or via an intermediary, to Atta, as Ahmed also approved wiring $100,000 to Atta shortly before 9/11. Atta then confirmed 9/11 as the date for the war games -which was the date of the attacks- in his now-famous NSA-intercepted call with KSM of September 10, in which he related "The Match is about to begin. Zero hour is tomorrow." "Match" is a way of saying "exercise" or "war game." This critical September 10 intercept, by the way, was almost certainly made without an advance FISA warrant, putting the lie to now CIA Director and then NSA Director Gen. Michael Hayden.s patently false claim that the "first" warrantless taps were initiated in defensive response to 9/11, and thus came after the attacks.
Another abiding "mystery" of September 11 is why Gen. Eberhart, the commander of NORAD on 9/11, claimed to the 9/11 Commission that on the morning of 9/11 NORAD was conducting, among others, a preplanned "Soviet-era" emergency response exercise[15] in which US fighter jets were to defend against Russian nuclear bombers. After all, the Soviet Union had ceased to exist ten years before. He didn.t say "Russian," he said "Soviet." This is very strange until one discovers that, despite repeated official and media claims that September 11 was "completely unique" and that the skies over America had "never before" been cleared of all commercial and private civilian aircraft, NORAD had conducted another emergency response exercise 40 years earlier, which completely cleared the skies over the mainland US. This was on October 14, 1961, in a war game called "Sky Shield II," which was based on a scenario of how to defend against an air attack by Soviet bombers on New York City.[16] The main difference between the 1961 exercise and September 11 is that the clearing of the skies was announced in advance to the public in "Sky Shield." This original Soviet-era exercise, which included 1,800 US and 15 Canadian military planes and was billed as "the greatest exercise ever conducted by Western air-defense forces," is mentioned in the Air Force.s own account of the events of September 11, Air War Over America. In fact, Gen. Larry Arnold, NORAD.s commander for the continental US on 9/11 directly under Eberhart who finally ordered interceptor jets scrambled to belatedly meet the hijack threat, made a point of including the eerily similar 1961 Air Force war game in the book. Not only did both the 1961 and September 11 NORAD "Soviet-era" war game scenarios include attacks on New York City; in the 1961 exercise, US military planes played the role of Soviet attack bombers. That is, the US military pre-scripted both the defense and the "attack" by its own planes pretending to be Soviet aircraft. If Gen. Eberhart.s testimony to the 9/11 Commission is correct, NORAD may have been conducting a "Soviet-era" exercise much like the one in 1961, on 9/11.
In this light, it is significant that mainstream press stories contain intriguing reports that point to the possibility that there were two American Airlines "Flight 11s," leaving from two different gates at Boston Logan airport within a few minutes of one another on 9/11, as well as emerging evidence of other of the hijacked 9/11 flight numbers possibly being "twinned,"[17] or duplicated. The question thus naturally arises, were these "twin" planes US military planes "playing" hijacked airliner "attackers," similar to the 1961 scenario except substituting commandeered airliners for Soviet bombers? And could the 9/11 exercise have included a "trigger" event to clear the skies over the mainland US so that a realistic test of US air defenses could be conducted without interference from the thousands of civilian aircraft normally in the air?
Key quotes from New York Times articles during the 1961 NORAD exercise are eerily similar to stories appearing on 9/11 [text in parentheses and italics added]: "It is not so much the fear of collisions with military aircraft that has caused civilian planes to be ordered out of the skies, as it is the knowledge that inadequate [civilian FAA] electronic flight controls will be available during the exercise to guide them. Strategic Air Command (SAC) bombers, playing the role of the marauding forces, will seek to foul communications and radar. They will drop tinsel-like pieces of metal called "chaff" overhead [like the myriad small pieces of metal scrap found on the Pentagon lawn and Shanksville, Pennsylvania "crash" site on 9/11?]...that will throw radarscopes [including the FAA.s] into a confusion of false signals."; "All the bomber missions were laid out ahead of time and fed into the NORAD computer"; "An automated shorthand running display of the entire battle was provided at NORAD combat center and in similar centers at Strategic Air Command headquarters [where President Bush was taken on 9/11] and in the Pentagon [which was attacked on 9/11]"; "A fight plan for every aircraft [private, commercial and military] is fed into the computer.s memory beforehand. When a plane shows on the radarscope, a console operator picks up an aluminum electronic gun, points it at the blip, and squeezes the trigger. That brings the flight to the computer.s attention. If the flight [plan] is filed in its memory, the computer automatically replies, .Yes, I am aware of that [plane].. It does this by marking the flight with an F for Friendly. While the computer compares the flight with its memorized data, it marks the flight P for Pending. Finally, it may mark it H for Hostile. .We have two minutes to identify a flight [as Friendly] before we scramble [interceptor jets]...to make a visual identification of an uncertain aircraft or to attack it..; .We do not train [in exercises like the 1961 .Sky Shield II, or on 9/11] with Hostile symbology [showing on screens]; therefore, the Strategic Air Command.s bombers playing the role of the attacking [Soviet Russian] force [on October 14, 1961] were marked K, for Faker.."; and "There are seventeen units of Army Air Defense Artillery with ground-to-air anti-aircraft missiles near New York [in 1961; how many more were there on 9/11, 40 years later, when none were used?]" The 1961 war game was directed by then NORAD commander Air Force Gen. Laurence Sherman Kuter from his combat operations center at NORAD.s Colorado Springs headquarters, which in the mid-1960s moved to Cheyenne Mountain, Gen. Eberhart.s command center on 9/11. It may also be significant that the Air Force.s war games simulation center is at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, which Gen. Kuter had earlier commanded and where lead 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta received training.
The Pentagon.s "Able Danger" data miners claim that "Department of Defense lawyers".almost certainly from the National Security Agency, then headed by Gen. Hayden, an officer in the Air Force, the same service that planned the 9/11 war games- blocked planned meetings with the FBI at which they wanted to tell the FBI that they had "tracked" Atta and other of the 9/11 hijackers prior to 9/11 and ask the FBI to initiate additional surveillance on them. The fact that the FBI did initiate exactly such a surveillance of the "up to 20 Al Qaeda linked terrorist suspects" before 9/11 is strong evidence that, despite its current claims to the contrary, the Pentagon.s "Able Danger" team did communicate what they learned from tracking Atta and the others to the FBI before 9/11, and that the FBI then initiated FISA-warrant-less surveillances of Atta and others subsequently ordered stopped by then Chief FISA Court Judge Lamberth - all prior to 9/11. The fact that initially-suspected "20th 9/11 hijacker" Moussaoui officially filed claims that he "and my brothers" were surveilled before 9/11 is further evidence that the FBI continued to watch all or most of the 9/11 hijackers right up until the attacks, despite Lamberth.s order to cease and desist. FBI Headquarters supervisors David Frasca and his deputy Maltbie refused 70 --seventy-- urgent requests by Moussaoui.s FBI interrogator for either a FISA Court warrant or an "ordinary" criminal warrant to get into Moussaoui.s computer and surveil anyone mentioned therein. Doing so would have clearly stopped the plot, as Moussaoui now claims to have personally known 17 -almost all- of the alleged 19 hijackers.[18]
In addition to all the evidence that plane-impacts-plus-fire was the carefully planned cover story for the cause of collapse of WTC 1, 2 and 7, as well as the west façade of the Pentagon, both of which were initially hit by inside-the-buildings bombs, not planes, the other overwhelming line of evidence for 9/11 being an "Inside Job" is the anthrax attacks.
Any evidence linking 9/11 to the anthrax letters --dated September 11 but sent in mid-October and only to Democratic leaders in Congress, no Republicans-- is direct evidence of an inside job because that particular type of anthrax is known to have been of the highly controlled "Ames strain" developed by the US Army at Ft. Detrick, Maryland, and at the University of Iowa in Ames, Iowa. It was also high-spore-count, military-grade weaponized anthrax refined according to a trade secret reportedly held by William Patrick, former Ft. Detrick bioweapons expert, mentor of Steven Hatfill, the only "person of interest" stalked by the FBI as a suspect in the still "unsolved" anthrax case, and the close friend and colleague of Bush Administration bio-counterterrorism expert Jerry Hauer, a signer of the PNAC manifesto calling for "a new Pearl Harbor."
On September 11, this same Jerry Hauer personally delivered anti-anthrax Cipro to Vice President Cheney.s staff at the White House. Why? The conservative legal watchdog group Judicial Watch has filed a suit against Vice President Cheney and other Bush Administration officials demanding to know why Cipro was delivered to the executive mansion --and only to the executive mansion-- on the day of the attacks. So far the response has been deafening silence. On September 10, the day before 9/11, FEMA and other emergency response personnel arrived in New York City for a counter-bioterrorism exercise called "Tripod II" claimed by the Bush administration to have been scheduled to begin September 12. There is reason to believe that the bio-agent this drill was to practice defending against was anthrax, as Jerry Hauer was also a major planner of the New York City exercise. And there is also a strong possibility the true start date for the exercise was September 11, as many "exercise" personnel were already in place in New York City on September 10. As the Air Force.s war game scenario had just "come to life" in real attacks on 9/11, were Hauer and Cheney worried that the same thing might be about to happen with their counter-bioterrorism "exercise" Tripod II? Is this why the anti-anthrax drug Cipro was distributed to the White House, "just in case"? If so, it would be strong evidence that Tripod II was on the scenario of defending New York City against an anthrax attack. Was the "vector," or delivery vehicle, for that emergency response exercise scenario anthrax attack to have been by air via hijacked plane(s)?
Notably, in their book on bioterrorism, Germs, Judith Miller and William Broad claim, apparently from inside sources, that Ramzi Yousef.s plans for the first World Trade Center attack in 1993 included explosively pushing large quantities of cyanide out into New York City. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the "mastermind" of 9/11, is Ramzi Yousef.s uncle. Finally, former New York City mayor Rudolf Giuliani testified to the 9/11 Commission that when WTC7, the location of his emergency operations center, collapsed on 9/11, he moved those operations to the command and control center set up on Pier 92 for the "Tripod II" bio-terrorism exercise and that it worked even better than the original. Giuliani told the 9/11 Commission, "The reason Pier 92 was selected as a command center was because on the next day, on September 12, Pier 92 was going to have a drill. It had hundreds of people there - from FEMA, from the Federal Government, from the State [Dept.], from the [New York] State Emergency Management Office- and they were getting ready for a drill for biochemical attack. So that was going be the place they were going to have the drill. The equipment was already there, so we were able to establish a command center there that was two and a half to three times bigger than the command center that we had lost at 7 World Trade Center. And it was from there that the rest of the (9/11 and subsequent) search and rescue effort was completed."
Conclusion
The US military, not al Qaeda, had the access to plant explosives inside its own most heavily defended world headquarters, the Pentagon. The US military, not al Qaeda, had the access to plant the explosives Willy Rodriguez heard and felt go off deep in the sub-basement of the World Trade Center. The US military, not al Qaeda, had the sustained access weeks before 9/11 to also plant controlled demolition charges throughout the superstructures of WTC 1 and WTC2, and in WTC7, which brought down all three buildings on 9/11. The US military, not al Qaeda, had access to the sulfur-enhanced military-grade thermite (thermate) detected in the sub-basement levels of the WTC needed to melt the steel found molten there weeks later. The US military, not al Qaeda, would have chosen the least populated and most reinforced section of the Pentagon -its newly upgraded west wedge- to strike, minimizing casualties. Real terrorists would have maximized them. A US military plane, not one piloted by al Qaeda, performed the highly skilled, high-speed 270-degree dive towards the Pentagon that Air Traffic Controllers on 9/11 were sure was a military plane as they watched it on their screens. Only a military aircraft, not a civilian plane flown by al Qaeda, would have given off the "Friendly" signal needed to disable the Pentagon.s anti-aircraft missile batteries as it approached the building. Only the US military, not al Qaeda, had the ability to break all of its Standard Operating Procedures to paralyze its own emergency response system. Only the US military, not al Qaeda, had access to the weaponized, military-grade US Army "Ames strain. anthrax contained in letters mailed only to Democratic Congressional leaders. It is absurd to believe that al Qaeda would target only Democrats, especially as the US leadership at the time of 9/11 was Republican. When he received the anthrax letter dated September 11, then Senate Democratic leader Thomas Daschle was calling for a Congressional investigation of 9/11 and had already been warned off from "looking too closely at" 9/11 by both President Bush and Vice President Cheney. When he received his anthrax letter, another Democratic leader, Senator Patrick Leahy, was leading the Congressional resistance to the PATRIOT Act, the assault on Americans. privacy and civil liberties justified by "al Qaeda.s" attack, clearly drafted by the Bush Administration before 9/11 and "in the can" awaiting its "trigger event."
And who in the US military chain of command and US civilian leadership are among the prime suspects for these acts of High Treason? First and foremost are the signers of the pre-9/11 Project for a New American Century (PNAC) manifesto calling for "a new Pearl Harbor" to catalyze its global domination agenda, including Vice President Dick Cheney; Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld; then Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz; Richard Perle, then head of Secretary Rumsfeld.s Defense Policy Board; Jerry Hauer, the federal government.s top bio-terrorism expert who took anti-anthrax Cipro to the White House on 9/11; Gary Bauer, the right-wing .family values. zealot who .happened. to be one of the .witnesses. who immediately claimed publicly to have seen .Flight 77 hit the Pentagon., proven by the evidence to be a physical impossibility; and then National Security Council Middle East adviser Zalmay Khalizad, soon to be the first US Ambassador to Afghanistan after 9/11 and now US Ambassador to Iraq -- the very two countries whose invasions are rationalized as retaliation for the 9/11 attacks. During the Cold War, Khalizad was a liaison to then CIA "bag man" Osama bin Laden in the CIA.s covert war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, the crucible from which al Qaeda emerged.
Another key suspect is Air Force General William Hayden, now Director of the CIA and then head of the National Security Agency (NSA), which tapped the calls of lead hijacker Mohamed Atta and 9/11 "mastermind" Khalid Sheikh Mohammed the day before 9/11, and surely on many other occasions before 9/11 as well - all almost certainly without FISA warrants as required by law. These pre-9/11 warrant-less NSA taps put the lie to President Bush.s claim that he initiated the program of warrant-less NSA taps of al Qaeda suspects because of -and thus only after- 9/11. Yet another key suspect is Army Lieutenant General William "Jerry" Boykin, the radical Christian fundamentalist Special Operations commando recently proposed to head the Army.s Special Operations Command. Yet another is the Pentagon.s POP2 office, reportedly to plan and script "false flag" operations - attacks orchestrated by the US military but made to appear perpetrated by an outside enemy to justify US military "retaliation." Yet another suspect is Defense Intelligence Agency Iran expert Lawrence "Larry" Franklin, who was "loaned" to Perle and Wolfowitz.s neocon associate Douglas Feith and arrested for passing national security secrets to Israeli operatives at the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Franklin also was and is an officer in the Air Force reserves, which directed NORAD.s "Vigilant Guardian/Vigilant Warrior" war game exercises on 9/11.
Scrutiny should also be leveled at the scriptwriters for the NORAD and NRO emergency response exercises planned for and held on 9/11, especially members of their lead "White Teams," which set the content and then oversee both "Red Team attackers" and "Blue Team defenders" on the actual day of an exercise, in this case on 9/11 itself. And every one of the as-yet-to-be-identified "top Pentagon officials" who the day before 9/11, according to Newsweek, suddenly cancelled their already-booked flights for September 11.[19] Also National Military Command Center (NMCC) commander Brig. Gen. Montague Winfield, who on that same day, September 10, asked his deputy, Navy Capt. Charles Leidig to take over for him the next morning between 8:30 and 10:30 - precisely the time window of the "game" whose details and date had been given to Atta. Further investigation should be directed at the (government) "agency" the 9/11 Commission revealed, without identifying it by name, took out the vast majority of the put options on American Airlines, United Airlines, Boeing and Morgan Stanley Dean Witter in the few days before 9/11. Also, Michael Chertoff, US Attorney for the District of New Jersey during the first 1993 attack on the World Trade Center who, as a private attorney, represented Egyptian-born US resident Magdy Elamir, under investigation for illegally diverting millions of dollars and whose brother, Mohammed Elamir, funded arms smugglers linked to al Qaeda.[20] Significantly, Mohamed Atta.s name in his country of birth, Egypt, was also Mohamed Elamir. In other words, the very man President Bush put in charge of the entire 9/11 "investigation" and who is now Director of Homeland Security --the top official charged with defending the US mainland from an attack by al Qaeda-- may have been directly involved with Al Qaeda and even with Mohamed Atta himself. And FBI headquarters supervisor David Frasca and his deputy Michael Maltbie, who ignored 70 pleas by Zacarias Moussaoui.s FBI interrogator to let him investigate the contents of Moussaoui.s computer before 9/11. Attention should also be directed to Phillip Zelikow, NSC adviser along with Zalmay Khalizad to then NSC Adviser Condoleezza Rice before and on 9/11. Zelikow both orchestrated The 9/11 Commission Report cover up of the administration.s inside job and, at Rice.s personal request, rewrote the Bush administration.s official national strategic plan draft to better match the global domination agenda of the pre-9/11 PNAC manifesto.
These are just some of the names being knitted into the scroll of the September 11 Truth Revolution.
Notes:
1. The clock stopped at the moment the Great Earthquake hit San Francisco on April 18, 1906 is at http://sfgate.com/greatquake/.
2. The clock at the Pentagon heliport just outside the west section, frozen at 9:31:40 am by the violent event at the Pentagon, was posted on an official Navy web site at: http://www.news.navy.mil/view_single.asp?id=2480Pentagonclock_BBC. Yet another stopped Pentagon clock is in the September 11 exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution. It was originally posted at http://www.americanhistory.si.edu/september11/
collection/record.asp?ID=19.
3. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) timeline document "Executive Summary Chronology of a Multiple Hijacking Crisis, September 11, 2001."
4. Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moller interview with Denmark Radio P3, September 12, 2001, 6:15 am Denmark time. "...I saw smoke and fire rising from the Pentagon at 9:32...My first impression was that a bomb had been detonated at the Pentagon." The audio of this radio interview is in the 9/11 video documentary "Bomberne som Forsvandt" by Danish researcher Henrik Melvang, available at www.unmask.dk and at www.bombsinsidewtc.dk. See also 9/11 timeline by European researcher Jose Garcia in Reality, Truth and Evil Facts, Questions and Perspectives on September 11, 2001, Temple Lodge Publications, 2005.
5. The 9/11 Conspiracy, Catfeet Press/Open Court, James Fetzer, editor, 2006, chapter by Prof. James Fetzer; and photos of a JT8D turbojet engine and the remnant found at the Pentagon at http://www.simmeringfrogs.com/articles/jt8d.html.
6. Report by two civilian defense contractor employees at "Secret Global Hawk Refit for Sky Warrior," http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2005/
05/318250.shtml.
7. 9/11 -- Coup Against America: The Pentagon Analysis, compilation of Pentagon eyewitness reports, photos and analyses with hundreds of references, by Pete Tiradera, 2006, available from petertiradera@yahoo.com.
8. Pentagon eyewitness Don Perkal to MSNBC: "Even before stepping outside, I could smell the cordite. I knew explosives had gone off somewhere." Also eyewitness account of AmTrak electrical engineer Samuel Danner who was at the site and said he smelled cordite (American Free Press, July 7, 2006, reporting based on audio report by Republic Broadcasting Network, summary at http://www.total911.info/2006/07/pentagon-eyewitness-ids-global-hawk.html).
9. Author interview with former Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict, Monterey, California; summary posted on Naval Postgraduate School web site www.nps.navy.mil, subsequently changed to www.nps.edu. Article no longer posted; hard copy available from the author.
10. Videotaped testimony of William ("Willy") Rodriguez, former World Trade Center janitor and the last person to leave the WTC alive on September 11, in the 9/11 documentary "Loose Change," second edition", text in parentheses added: "All of a sudden we hear .Boom!. in the basement. I thought it was a generator that blew up, and I said to myself, .Oh, my God, I think it was a generator. And I was going to verbalize it, and when I finished saying that in my mind I heard (another, second) .Boom!. right on the top (above), pretty far away. And so it was a difference (in space and time) between coming from the basement and coming from the top...and a person comes running into the office (in the first basement level, from a deeper basement level) saying .Explosion!....and he said .(it was from) The elevators!. And there were many (deep basement WTC1) explosions."
11. "Agency (NRO) Planned Exercise on September 11 Built Around a Plane Crashing into a Building," Associated Press, August 22, 2002; by Jonathan Lumpkin; "They Scrambled Jets, but It was a Race They Couldn.t Win," Syracuse Post-Standard, January 20, 2002, by Hart Seely; "Rome Staff.s Efforts on 9/11 Earn Praise, Commission Says Military Did the Best It Could with the Information It Had," Syracuse Post-Standard, June 18, 2004, by Hart Seely; Complete 9/11 Military Exercises Timeline, Cooperative Research, at http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=complete_911_timeline&before.9/11
=militaryExercises;
Crossing the Rubicon, by Michael Ruppert, Chapter 19: "Wargames and High Tech: Paralyzing the System to Pull Off the Attacks" and Chapter 20: "Q&A: Many Asked, Some Answered -- and a Golden Moment," New Society Publishers, 2004. In the Acknowledgements to Rubicon, p. xi, Ruppert credits the author with what he refers to as "the Holy Grail of 9/11 research" (p. 336): Thanks to Barbara Honegger, who kept hammering on the wargames until we all paid notice... you showed me the most important lead I needed to put it all together."
12. "Detainee.s Suit Gains Support from Jet.s Log," New York Times, March 30, 2005, p. A1. Key excerpt, text in parentheses added: "Mr. Arar (a "rendered" detainee) says he followed the (Gulfstream jet) plane.s movements on a map displayed on a video screen (inside the plane), watching it as he traveled to Dulles Airport outside Washington, to a Maine Airport he believed was in Portland (Maine), to Rome, and finally to Amman, Jordan, where he was blindfolded and driven to Syria." Though the FAA claims its records show a plane on that date making the other stops but landing in Bangor, not Portland, Maine, the detainee.s account may be accurate, as only Portland.s airport is labeled an "International Jet Port," specializing in landings and takeoffs of just such private, corporate and government jets.
13. Ironically, at the final hearing of the Kean Commission, where its report was released to the press and public, commissioner John Lehman responded to the question, What if anything remained unknown, by noting that the Commission still wasn.t clear as to "how Atta chose the date for the attacks."
14. Summary interrogation of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, claimed "mastermind" of the September 11 attack plot, read into the Zacarias Moussaoui sentencing trial record by the prosecution on March 27, 2006; the full text is part of the court proceedings transcript for that date available through Exemplaris.com.
15. The 9/11 Commission Report, note 116, p. 458, at http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report.pdf.
Key excerpt: "On 9/11, NORAD was scheduled to conduct a military exercise, Vigilant Guardian, which postulated a bomber attack from the former Soviet Union."
16. Air War Over America: Sept. 11 Alters Face of Air Defense Mission, by Leslie Filson, US Air Force account of the events of September 11, p. 66. Also "Civilian Planes to be Grounded 12 Hours Today in Defense Test," New York Times, October 14, 1961, pp. 1 and 4; "Civilian Planes Halted 12 Hours in Defense Test: Joint Maneuvers Fill Air Over Canada and US with Military Craft, Cities .Hit. by Bombers," New York Times, October 15, 1961, pp. 1 and 46; "Computer is Key to Area Defense: Ever-Alert Device in (New) Jersey Joins in Air Exercises," New York Times, October 15, 1961, p. 46; and "US-Canada Test of Air Defense Rated a Success: President Receives a Report on Maneuvers, Search is Pushed for Missing B.52," New York Times, October 16, 1961, pp. 1 and 16.
17. For example, see "Flight 11: The Twin Flight", by "Woody Box" at http://new.globalfreepress.com/article.pl?sid=04/03/14/212247, and "Flight 11 and Flight 93 .Survived." at http://inn.globalfreepress.com/modules/
news/article.php?storyid=858.
18. "Moussaoui, Undermining Case, Now Ties Himself to 9/11 Plot," New York Times, March 28, 2006, pp. A1 and A14.
19. Newsweek, September 24, 2001.
20. "Michael Chertoff - Where All the Questions Should Start," January 12, 2005, http://allspinzone.blogspot.com.
Source:
http://blog.lege.net/content/
Seven_Hours_in_September.pdf
