(snip) ............the Bush Justice Department officials knowingly made two provocative moves in this media vacuum.
Raison D’Etat
Intrigue usually unfolds in predictable patterns. Contrary to rumor, no official of consequence anticipated, let alone plotted, 9-11 or Oklahoma City or even the JFK assassination. What happens after the fact is that the institutions that might have prevented a catastrophe—the FBI, the CIA, the military--move quickly to shift responsibility. Political operatives will do much the same and often exploit the subsequent investigations for maximum political benefit.
The events of March 31, however, strayed dramatically from predictable patterns.
Not only did the Bush administration refuse to exploit two revelations embarrassing to the Democrats, but it also risked its own political capital by suppressing them. The Bush administration considered the potential fallout of sufficient magnitude to destabilize the government. Much depends on our stability. A world without confidence in our military or our markets is a world in chaos.
Sandy Berger understood the magnitude of the problem as well.
In his first term Clinton had hired this millionaire trade lawyer and lobbyist to be deputy national security advisor not because of his foreign policy experience, which was negligible, but because of his political instincts, which were keen and reliable.
He entrusted Berger with some very sensitive assignments, particularly in relationship to China, and rewarded him for trust with the job of National Security Advisor in his second term.
In October 2003, under the pretext of preparing for the 9-11 Commission hearings, Berger risked his career, indeed his very freedom, to steal and, in some cases, shred a series of classified memos from the National Archives.
The media have described these as after action reports in response to the millennium terrorism threat, but there is almost assuredly much more involved. The millennium threat was not worth the risk.
The wrist-slap by the Bush Justice Department suggests not the triviality of the situation, but the gravity.
For knowingly stealing and destroying copies of historically critical, top secret documents—documents that might have helped us prevent another 9-11—the Justice Department asked that Berger be fined $10,000 and lose his security clearance for three years.
Almost assuredly for “reasons of state” the Bush administration has let Berger slide and refused to exploit his embarrassment.
The Bojinka Threat.
"It remains unclear," asked the Washington Post about the Berger revelations, "why he destroyed three versions of a document, but left two other versions intact."
The answer to this question is too obvious to ask– the president's handwritten notes on a document make one version entirely more dangerous than an identical document without those notes.
Col. Buzz Patterson makes this distinction clearly.
He carried the "nuclear football" for the president during the fateful summer of 1996 and as such had almost total access.
One morning in "late-summer" 1996, he was returning a daily intelligence update to the National Security Council when he noticed the heading "Operation Bojinka."
As Patterson relates, "I keyed on a reference to a plot to use commercial airliners as weapons." As a pilot, he had a keen interest in the same.
"I can state for a fact that this information was circulated within the U.S. intelligence community," Patterson writes, "and that in late 1996 the president was aware of it."
The President’s hand written comments on the documents verified the same.
The Philippine police had uncovered plans for aerial assaults as early as January 1995 and shared those plans with the FBI almost immediately.
The man responsible for those plans was Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing, and very possibly an Iraqi intelligence agent.
His accomplice was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9-11 and allegedly Yousef’s uncle.
The 9-11 Commission was very concerned about who knew what when in regards to the use of planes as bombs."
(snip)
Anti-terrorism czar Richard Clarke had acknowledged as much during his earlier testimony. He admitted that the "knowledge about al-Qaeda having thought of using aircraft as weapons" was relatively old, "five-years, six-years old." He asked that intelligence analysts "be forgiven for not thinking about it given the fact that they hadn't seen a lot in the five or six years intervening about it."
Before the summer Olympics of 1996, in fact, Clarke had warned security planners about the possibility of Islamic terrorists hijacking a 747 and flying it into Olympic Stadium.
As a further aside, Colonel Buzz Patterson, who was in the White House the night of July 17, 1996, the night TWA Flight 800 crashed off the coast of Long Island-- tentatively places only one person in the family quarters with the President, Sandy Berger, then Deputy NSA Director.
His boss, Tony Lake, was in his own office. The fact that the President was reviewing Bojinka plans after the destruction of TWA Flight 800 makes the versions of those plans with his hand written notes on them all the more critical.
The Greg Norman factor
On April 10, 1996, the President attended the funeral of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, killed in an “inexplicable” plane crash into the terror-riddled mountains of Croatia.
Four days later President Clinton watched in shock as his buddy Greg Norman blew a six-stroke lead in the final round of the Masters.
"Yes," Clinton told press aide, Mike McCurry, "that's going to be the new theme for the campaign, that we're not going to allow ourselves to be Greg Normanized."
Clinton was horrified in a way few around him could understand. "We could have a major crisis go bad on us," he fretted constantly. "Greg Norman," he repeated to his staff. "Greg Norman."
After a drubbing in the 1994 mid-term election, Clinton had scrambled out of a desperate political hole to regain a comfortable lead in the presidential race. The turn around came at Oklahoma City.
His supporters exploited the capture of McVeigh and Nichols to denounce “hate radio” and the “Republican revolution.” The strategy worked brilliantly, but only if there were no trail back to Islamic Terrorists.
Richard Clarke has this to say about the visits of both Nichols and Yousef to the Islamic hotbed of Cebu City in the Philippines at the same time shortly before the OKC bombing:
"We do know that Nichols' bombs did not work before his Philippine stay and were deadly when he returned." Future 9-11 Commissioner and then Deputy Attorney General, Jamie Gorelick, who shut down the investigation into TWA Flight 800, shut down this investigation as well. John Doe #2 would not be found or even sought.
The Scarpa factor
Back in Kansas that late March day in 2005, the FBI on the scene would not confirm that its agents discovered anything, but ABC News and others were told by Oklahoma City's FBI office that explosive devices had indeed been found.
The news spin, at least what little surfaced in a period of predictable news frenzy, was that the FBI was embarrassed for not having found this old material 10 years prior.
As has happened all too often in the past, however, seeming FBI incompetence provides a cover for a much more troubling story.
The story, as high-level forensic economist Stephen Dresch relates it, revolves around an extraordinary figure, Gregory Scarpa Jr., a convicted mobster now serving hard time at the federal super max in Florence, Colo.
Readers may remember Scarpa from multiple Emmy-winner Peter Lance's book, Cover-Up. As Lance relates, Scarpa cooperated with the Justice Department in the summer of 1996 by scheming to rout the calls of jailmate Ramzi Yousef through to the FBI.
Unfortunately for the United States, Yousef often used two obscure languages that the FBI could not translate quickly enough, if at all.
A letter I received in the spring of 2005 from a purported NSA insider identified the key language as Baluchi, Yousef's native tongue.
Again, reportedly, Yousef's final transmission on the subject translated as follows, "What had to be done has been done, TWA 800 (last two words unintelligible)."]
What is undeniable is that the day after TWA Flight 800 blew up off the coast of Long Island, Yousef asked for a mistrial, citing the now prejudicial environment post-explosion.
He was denied. By allowing him to communicate overseas, however, the Justice Department may well have unwittingly assisted Yousef in his effort to destroy that ill-fated plane.
No one doubts that his allies were capable of it. Indeed, Yousef had bombed a plane in the Philippines, killing a passenger and almost blowing the plane out of the air.
He also served as the mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing and was convicted for the same. His uncle, Khalid Shiekh Muhammad, with whom he communicated from his New York jail, was the mastermind of 9-11.
Possibly to silence him, the Justice Department cut Scarpa no slack for his help with Yousef and deep-sixed him in Colorado for 40 years, a severe sentence for a non-lethal RICO charge.
On March 1, 2005, Scarpa called Dresch, who was consulting with an attorney on a related case. Scarpa informed Dresch that an unnamed inmate had made him aware of a cache of explosives to be used in an act of domestic terrorism, possibly on the 10th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, April 19.
Dresch surmised, correctly as it turned out, that the inmate was Terry Nichols, the convicted Oklahoma City bomber, and he immediately contacted the FBI by both phone and fax, as well as Massachusetts Congressman William Delahunt with whom Dresch had been working on an FBI-related matter.
The FBI visited Scarpa at the prison on March 3, two days later. Having been burned once, this time Scarpa insisted on a written cooperation agreement before he talked.
The following day, an FBI polygraph expert flew in from D.C. and administered what Dresch's own expert calls an "absurdly flawed examination." The FBI expert claimed that Scarpa was lying. Scarpa immediately called Dresch's associate and insisted that she and Dresch visit him.
It should be noted that the FBI's current chief counsel, Valerie Caproni, was the Clinton Justice official who oversaw Scarpa's work with Yousef.
To thicken the plot, it was also Caproni who illegally ordered the FBI to take the TWA Flight 800 investigation away from the National Transportation Safety Board and who arranged the prosecution of James and Elizabeth Sanders for James' reporting on the TWA Flight 800 investigation. The absurdly compromised Caproni has any number of reasons for keeping Scarpa out of the light.
On March 10, Dresch and his associate met with Scarpa for seven hours. He gave them a letter from Nichols that provided a highly detailed description of the cached bomb making material – nitromethane, blasting caps, kine-pak, etc. Nichols had told Scarpa that he hid this second cache 10 years ago to be used as a follow up to the Oklahoma City blast.
No longer trusting the FBI, Dresch worked through a contact, who had high-level Homeland Security connections. Together, they improvised an arrangement for Scarpa, and on March 11, Dresch laid out the offer. Scarpa relented and provided Dresch with the address of the house and detailed descriptions of the location of the cache within it.
Dresch went to Herington the following day and found the house to be vacant and for sale. His well-connected contact had not followed through, however, on retrieving the material and giving Scarpa credit where due.
Only later did the contact claim that his people were surveilling the site waiting for someone to retrieve the material. It would take nearly three more weeks, the day of Schiavo's death, for the FBI to go in.
On Friday, April 1, I called Jeff Lanza, the FBI public affairs officer on the scene, whom I have met on at least a few occasions. I left a message, asking him to confirm whether the Scarpa information led to the activity at Nichols' former home. His office paged him. He has never gotten back to me.
Lanza, however, made a point of telling the Junction City paper, as paraphrased, "that the FBI did not receive a tip leading them to search ... but rather had received the information during an investigation." But either Lanza or Gary Johnson of the FBI's Oklahoma City office is not on message. "Johnson," writes ABC News, "said the discovery was prompted by a recent tip."
In any case, when I visited the house on that Saturday morning, there were neither media, nor police, anywhere to be seen. The Scarpa story is one that many people don't want told – Valerie Caproni, chief among them. And from the looks of things, they may be succeeding.
The tie that binds
Bojinka is the tie that binds. It has four major threads—one to 9-11; a second to TWA Flight 800; a third to Oklahoma City; and a fourth to the first World Trade Center bombing.
The executioner of Bojinka and the first WTC bombing was Ramzi Yousef.
The co-conspirator of Bojinka was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Yousef’s alleged uncle. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was also the mastermind of 9-11.
There is excellent reason to believe that Yousef at least was an Iraqi agent. The Clintons severed all four threads prematurely.
Jamie Gorleick did much of the cutting. Richard Clarke plotted the “exit strategy” for TWA Flight 800.
Berger was looking for the loose ends, but which one." ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Buzz Patterson knows a whole lot .. I'm frankly surprised he's still alive, indicating he must have great protection. I bet he's jumping out of his skin, screaming inside to tell what he knows, but for the well documented Clinton revenge factor.
I think BillyBubba is in a deadly serious, classic malignant narcissistic purple rage over this .. too much is riding on the Clinton/Shrew legacy, and people who aren't careful could have "accidents." Wouldn't surprise me if the Arkanciders are on alert right now, awaiting the outcome of ABC's actions about this program and their marching orders.
Bookmark....thanks as always SW..this is amazing stuff.
Ramzi Yousef (1993 WTC) and Terry Nichols (OKC)crossed paths in the Phillipines. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (9/11) was Yousef's uncle. It is interesting to note that Yousef entered the United States on an Iraqi passport and had been known among the New York fundamentalists as "Rashid, the Iraqi". Another name that could be thrown into the mix is Abdul Rahman Yasin, a U.S. citizen who moved to Iraq in the 1960's and returned to the U.S. in 1992. After the 1993 WTC bombing, Yasin fled to Iraq and was given monthly salary and housing by Saddam Hussein's regime.
Star...please don't be mad if this is a dumb question..but, what is that exerpted from...on this post you pinged me to?
BUMP that great post!
The clintoon camp no good supmin' or others!
Always up to no good sumpin' or other!
I do hope their plot is foiled yet again.
Their plot sickens!
Thanks for the ping, S.