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FORMER SENIOR WHITE HOUSE AIDE
ACCUSES FEDERAL JUDGE
OF POSSIBLE LINKS TO ISLAMIC EXTREMISTS
By
Martin Dillon
A former White House aide with a Secret clearance warned US Attorney General, John Ashcroft a week after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, that a Federal Judge with connections to Islamic fundamentalists, refused to authorize over 20 FBI wiretaps on Al Qaeda suspects before 9/11.
Barbara Honegger, now a Senior Military Affairs Research Journalist in the Department of Defense, named the judge as Royce Lamberth. He is the chief judge in the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. It meets once a week in the Justice Department to consider wiretap requests.
Senator Arlen Specter, a member of the Congressional Intelligence Committee sitting in Washington to investigate the intelligence background to 9/11, has said he will call Judge Lamberth to testify.
In the Reagan Administration Honegger served as a high-level appointee in the Justice Department, heading a task force for the Attorney General.
Her bombshell claim is contained in documents Globe-Intel has seen. They confirm that her memo to Ashcroft is now under investigation by the House and Senate Intelligence Committees sitting in Washington.
Given her seniority, her claim will almost certainly fuel the controversy about the US intelligence community failure.
Judge Royce Lamberth presides over a court of seven judges set up under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Since then it has authorized 7,500 wiretap requests. The majority have been to tap foreign embassies in the US and abroad.
Her revelations came hours after President Bush had announced (Thursday) that he was setting up a new Homeland Defense Ministry.
Washington sources have told Globe-Intel that among the first tasks the Ministry will face is to investigate Honegger’s claims.
Globe-Intel has also learned that FBI Director, Robert Mueller, personally authorized that Honegger should be questioned.
That happened on April 4 when San Diego FBI Field Agent, Sean Moore, interviewed her.
Her allegations move the story of who-knew-what- and when beyond the now celebrated thirteen-page memo veteran FBI agent, Coleen Rowley sent to Mueller.
In her lengthy memo to Attorney General Ashcroft, Honegger states:
“It is absolutely critical that Congress obtain the list of the names of the up to 20 suspected Al Qaeda and other Islamic extremist operatives whose wiretaps were shut down or refused by Judge Royce Lambert and the FISA Court and match them with the names of the 20 9/11 hijackers, as well as with the names of all post 9/11 detainees held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and elsewhere,”
Honegger held sensitive posts in the White House during the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush snr. She is the author of a highly-acclaimed book dealing with the Iran-Contra affair.
Honegger has confirmed to Globe-Intel why she has demanded Judge Lamberth be investigated for possible complicity in the 9/11 attacks.
“On Sept. 19, 2001, a week after the attacks, I sent an "Extreme Alert"
to Attorney General Ashcroft and Thomas Picard, the FBI investigator in
charge of the New York based 9-11 investigation, by e-mail, alerting them
to evidence that the Chief Judge of this very FISA (Federal Intelligence
Surveillance Act) Court, Royce C. Lamberth, may have himself been
acting with and on behalf of Islamic extremists.
“In the mid 1980s, an Iranian fluent in Farsi, Arabic, Urdu, Russian, and a number of other languages was in frequent contact by telephone with someone he described as `my good buddy Royce, an important judge in Washington, who got me into this country.’ Further questioning of this individual, who also claimed to be a mullah able to perform Islamic marriages and funerals, led to me being told that the last name of the Washington judge was Lamberth.
“My 9/19/01 Lamberth Alert e-mail was received by
Attorney General Ashcroft and/or FBI Headquarters, as I was interviewed
by an FBI agent from a local field office regarding this communication,
at which time the agent showed me the headquarters case number
for my memo and its follow up. At my request and with his agreement,
a colleague from a federal personnel security agency sat in on that meeting
as a witness. The Congressional House and Senate Intelligence
Committees have also been made aware of these facts.
“Given this context, it is critical to the 9-11 Congressional
investigation that, prior to 9-11, this same Chief FISA Court Judge Royce Lamberth shut down "up to 20" FISA wiretaps of Al Qaeda-related suspects
linked to the near-simultaneous -- "twin" -- 1998 Africa U.S. embassy
bombings. These 20 may well be, or significantly overlap with, the 20 9-11
hijackers -- 19 plus suspected "20th hijacker," Zacarias Moussaoui.
“It is therefore absolutely critical that Congress obtain the list
of names of all of the "up to 20" suspected Al Qaeda and other Islamic
extremist operatives whose wiretaps were shut down or refused by Judge Lamberth and the FISA Court, and match them with the names of the 20 9-11 hijackers, as well as with the names of all post 9-11 detainees held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and elsewhere.”
“For the 9-11 investigation to have integrity, Congress must have
the courage to aggressively pursue these facts and leads, and be sure
not to prematurely close the door to any hypothesis - no matter how
"unthinkable." 9-11 was also unthinkable -- before it happened.”
Ends
Martin Dillon is a world-ranking authority on Eastern European intelligence. He is also the author of the global bestsellers: The Shankill Butchers (Random House), The Dirty War (Random House) and God and the Gun (Routledge, New York).