Tuesday 3 August 2004

9/11 Report: Another Whitewash

by Trowbridge H. Ford

As the below e-mail, one of a half dozen I sent the 9/11 Commission, shows, it was apprised of the fact that the CIA had informed the White House in August 2001 what it believed the hijackers would attempt, knew all the hijackers embarked on their mission on the fatal day despite the fact they had box cutters with them, let the first flight depart from Boston without any agents on board for fear that they might tip off the hijackers what the Agency's counter measures were, placed around unarmed 15 agents under the direction of Ms. Barbara Olson, wife of Solicitor General Ted Olson, to help regain control of the airliners when they reached Los Angeles, how the Agency's counterstroke in law enforcement blew up in its face when the hijackers turned out to be suicide bombers, how the Justice Department attempted to cover up the failure by refusing to release the complete passenger lists of the flights in order to hide the presence of the agents on them, the President waited an inordinate length of time to appoint the commission in the hope the public would forget the most relevant facts about the tragedy, and how it was made up in a bipartisan fashion, under staff director Philip Zelichow, to insure that the cover up was legitimized.

Of course, the Commission might contend that it never received my e-mails, but I wrote a special article for Issue Eight of Eye Spy! magazine, entitled "THE PRELUDE", elaborating in considerable detail the above claims, concluding on this note:

"Instead Washington relied upon deep agent Barbara Olson to do the job, supervising apparently a dozen or so agents to see that the terrorist cells were safely escorted across the country for a big sting....Soon after takeoff, after the planes from Boston had crashed into the WTC, the agents on the United flight not even having time to react to the hijacking before it crashed into the South Tower, she learned that the flights to Los Angeles had just been decoys to confuse authorities, and there would be no roundup of more suspects when they arrived on the West Coast. Instead the two other planes headed back for the Pentagon and the capitol, and the new plans left the isolated M. Olson telephoning frantically to her husband: *What do I do? What do I tell the pilot to do?' " (p. 32)

Then, of course, Washington's officialdom might have claimed that this was just more irresponsible ravings by the unbalanced Mr. Ford, but the editor of Eye Spy! magazine, Mark Ian Birdsall, volunteered this in an e-mail on April 11, 2002: "Many, many thanks for your letter. Before commenting, let me say your feature that I called THE PRELUDE has been received very, very well in Washington D. C. It is excellent. Usually, there is a back lash from the Establishment, but not on this occasion. As one says, you have hit the jackpot!"

As it turned out, there were no jackpots for anyone. I ultimately was not even paid for my expenses by Mr. Birdsall - recovery actions against him would achieve nothing, as court and legal costs, up to £5,000, would more than wipe out what I was demanding. As for the victims, their survivors, and the rest of the country, they have not been rewarded in any way either, as the whole fiasco has only been resolved in the way I concluded in the Eye Spy! article, with all the dirty bits left out: "I believe there must be an independent commission to determine the causes and results of the disaster, and to make recommendations about the restructuring of America's intelligence, and law-enforcement systems so this kind of outrage never occurs again..." (p. 33)

----- Original Message -----
From: TROWBRIDGE FORD
To: info@9-11Commission.gov
Sent: Friday, July 25, 2003 12:44 PM
Subject: Vice Chairman Lee Hamilton's role in cover ups


Dear Sirs,

Since the stage has now been set for Vice Chairman Lee Hamilton to swing into action - the Congressional Joint Intelligence Committee censored Report on the 9-11 attacks has finally been issued - I think that the 9-11 Commission should be told of Hamilton's expected role in such situations. Hamilton legitimizes whatever cover up is necessary, as his support of Professor Philip Zelikow as your Staff Director has demonstrated in this case.

Zelikow, as I indicated in previous e-mails, has already demonstrated his commitment to a cover up by claiming that the Federal Bureau of Investigation did not have the institutional capacity to prevent such attacks, what Director Robert Mueller has denied, and what the government has indicated is unnecessary to remedy by refusing to create an American-style MI5, the British Security Service.

As I indicated in my articles for Eye Spy! magazine, especially "O'Neill: A Voice in the Wilderness?" in Issue Thirteen (pp. 22-3) before the Joint Committee had written its Report, the 9-11 attacks could have been prevented if the Bureau's counterterrorism chief in New York, John O'Neill, has not been prevented from tracking down Khalid Al-Midhar, Nawaf Al-Hamzi, and company by Bureau Headquarters, the CIA, the State Department, and others. In the wake of the transition of power to the Republicans, and the Robert Hanssen spy scandal, the White House, Freeh's people, the CIA, and other agencies were unwilling to do anything dramatic which might benefit anyone else, or backfire on themselves.

Consequently, the Bureau, once O'Neill had been sidelined, adopted a wait-and-see attitude about possible terrorism in the San Diego area, the Agency went into the law enforcement mode with gusto, the White House took on a low profile about possible operations, Solicitor General Ted Olson recruited his wife Barbara to supervise the spooks now playing the role of cops on the suspected hijacked planes, and the like. Of course, as we all should know, the Agency's unprecedented role in law-enforcement blew up in its face, with the hijackers crashing the air liners into the WTC and the Pentagon rather than forcing them to go to LA.

In the context, it is hardly surprising that the Joint Committee Report avoids any significant revelation about either O'Neill or Olson, and makes up for the counterterrorist omissions by blaming the Saudis apparently for all the loose ends, though the Bureau is not investigating any charges against them, and Tenet's people are unwilling to declassify any possible clarifications of the confusion.

If this isn't bad enough, we can now look forward to how Hamilton and Zelikow will let it all play out in your hearings, Commissioner Tim Roemer providing all the necessary connections between the one investigation, and the other. While Commissioner John Lehman, as I tried to indicate earlier, is too closely connected to excesses by the Reagan administration, especially its plan to have the assassination of Swedish statsminister Olof Palme (Operation Tree) trigger a non-nuclear conclusion to the Cold War (Operation Armageddon), Commissioner Hamilton is too closely associated to the cover up of the Iran-Contra scandal, as I provide an introduction to in the attachment to this e-mail.

Any reading of the history of the Iran-Contra scandal shows Congressman Hamilton giving bipartisan support to what the aggressive Dick Cheney was demanding from Congress, and the Special Counsels, especially Lawrence Walsh. While Attorney General Edwin Meese, without the help of the compromised Bureau (See Attachment for details about Webster.), was allowing Oliver North to destroy all the evidence he could, especially about 'the secret' within the scandal, Hamilton kept up the pressure for the Marine to testify before Congress (See, e.g., Walsh, Firewall, p. 48ff.), what would immunize the Lt. Col. from successful prosecution while legitimizing the containment of the scandal his House Intelligence Committee and the Tower Commission testimony had already laid out.

Hamilton was only interested in the money generated by the illegal sales, and how the proceeds had been shared, not whether North was just spreading a pack of lies about other operations to protect the President! Hamilton had no positive reaction even to North's feeble conviction which was later thrown out because of the testimony he had been forced to supply Congress, Hamilton
explaining feebly that he did not think that it would cripple the prosecution completely. He was not even surprised when it came out that NSA Poindexter had lied to Congress about North's attempt to sneak a shipment of HAWK missiles in November 1985 from Israel to Iran through a third country, what the White House claimed was Portugal but was actually Sweden (See Richard Reeves' article "The Palme Obsession" in the March 1, 1987 issue of The New York Times Magazine, esp. p. 56.)

Hamilton, after he poohed-poohed the idea of SOD Caspar Weinberger's notes about operations, especially those against Sweden, being important, another claim which proved to be false, finished off his role in the cover up by discounting the importance of President Bush's last-minute pardons of most of the crooks involved. Hamilton would have been completely satisfied with a few feeble confessions of wrong doing by the Presidents. (See Walsh, p. 508.)

If this isn't enough to turn one's stomach completely against American government, I don't know what will, though I can just imagine what the Commission is going to come up with. In any case, it has been enough for me, and you will be hearing no more from me no matter what contortions you go through to cover up one of the latest horrors.

Sincerely yours,
Trowbridge Ford