Abu Sayyaf & the CIA'S Terror Incubator in the Philippines
It ís generally agreed that the same arm of Al Quaeda responsible for the 1993 WTC bombing returned on 9/11/01 to finish the job. Itís a reasonable assumption that the first attempt to level the towers, and the subsequent paths of blind cleric Rahman's fellow conspirators, should provide some answers to questions left in the wake of 911 concerning its obscure history and sponsorship.
Media histories of al-Queda trace its roots to Saudi Arabia. Founder Osama Bin Laden pushed early funding through the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO), as arranged in meetings between al Qaeda's inner-circle and the charity's directors. (The Saudi government funded terrorist attacks on Israel in utter secrecy throughout most of the 1990's via charities in Virginia and Florida.
1) Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Ladenís lieutenant, was employed by the IIRO in Albania. The Philippine branch office was run by Osamaís brother-in-law (1986-94), who made a hand-off of cash to the Abu Sayyaf, an al Quaeda offshoot.
2) The DoD, CIA and other opaque branches of government, drawn by the lure of Japanese and German gold (gold??), maintained a particularly busy presence in the Philippines as the Marcos kleptocracy declined and fell. Khashoggi's Iran-contra ally, Oliver North, oversaw back door shipments of the recovered gold, much of it to Arab governments, some of it to Middle Eastern terrorists trading on the black market. North met with Osama Bin Ladenís money men often to negotiate exchange of the gold.
The Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG), like Al Quaeda, owed its existence to the intelligence establishment. The ASG was co-founded by Edwin Angeles, an undercover agent for the Defense Intelligence Group at the Department of National Defense, Republic of the Philippines. His Muslim handle was ìIbrahim Yakubî and as the organizationís operations officer and chief recruiter, he was largely responsible for the spread - and criminalization - of the Abu Sayyaf.
Filipino television news reporter Arlyn de la Cruz, in her history of the ASG, writes that Angeles/Yokub "holds the key to the deep intricacies of how some government agencies manipulated the rawness of the Abu Sayyaf during its early years." This observation still applies, and can be said of al Quaeda, the CIA-bred Taliban mutation, as well.
It was Angeles who actually introduced the idea of kidnapping as part of the fund-raising activities of the Abu Sayyaf," she recalls - this would be the abduction of a wealthy woman in Davao. "Edwin planned the abduction and even initiated the plan himself." The victim was held not far from the Brigade Headquarters of the Philippine Marines in Tabuk. She was released after her family paid the million-pesos ransom to Abu Sayyaf.
The next abductee was Luis "Ton-Ton" Biel, a five year-old child, and his grandfather ... then Claretian priest Bernardo Blanco. Soon, the media were requesting interviews, and ìYokubî stepped before the cameras to act the role of lethal but well-spoken religious lunatic. Angeles, according to Cruz, was a "good speaker, a good actor. He spoke like a Leftist leader espousing Fundamentalist principles."
The May 16 2004, an accidental blast at the Evergreen Hotel in Davao was a clear statement that the Al Quaeda offshoot still functions as an intelligence front, a proxy army of the National Security Council that exists to justify intervention in the Philippines.
The explosion - publicized in the States as the work of the dread ASG - was set off by a store of dynamite belonging to one Michael Meiring, an African-born, naturalized, proverbially Ugly American citizen. Meiring claimed that Abu Sayyafís mad dogs had lobbed a grenade into his hotel room, an alibi proven to be false upon examination of the scene by local police. Meiring was so badly injured that both of his legs had to be amputated at the knees.
The dynamite, the Manila Times reported, also tore off his mantle of obscurity, exposing the accident-prone Ugly American ìand his numerous American and Filipino partners, to the public limelight.î6 From the rubble at the Evergreen Hotel emerged the story of ìa complex man, whose trail leads back to South Africa and boxes supposedly containing US Federal Reserve notes and bonds obtained from the Abu Sayyaf. The Times reported that employees of the hotel ìclaimed that while they were cleaning Meiring's room before the explosion, he warned them not to touch two metal boxes, which he said contained important documents. Police investigators said they recovered blasting caps and ammonium nitrate from the room, where Meiring had stayed since Dec. 14, 2001.
Meiring refused to talk to Philipine police. Bloodied and burned by the explosion, he was whisked out of the country on a chartered plane, according Col. Lino Calingasan, a local immigratiion official, by agents of the FBI and NSC. ìAmerican David Hawthorn, a close friend of Meiring, claimed the blast victim had confessed passing to Mandelaís government the proceeds of a box of old US federal notes. That box was one in a set of twelve, containing an estimated $500-million in counterfeit American notes.
Hawthorn had been shown a letter from the South African government and a US Treasury permit to support his story. Hawthorn also saw a ëpacking listí that had ìa cover sheet printed with the words US ARMY, the Army seal, some numbers and a group of upper case letters. Meiring, he said, claimed the list represented the serial numbers of the missing notes, dating back to 1937. Similar ëboxesí were recovered by United States Secret Service and the Philippine Central Bank late last year. Other counterfeit bonds and currency were also recovered from a hotel in Davao a few months ago. It has been reported that these were to be ... shipped to Las Vegas, Nevada.
Philippine police discovered that Meiring, the NSC amputee, had run with neo-nazis and Islamic radicals alike, including the Abu Sayyaf and other radical fronts. His key contact in Nevada was financier James Rowe of Nevada, an executive producer for Wild Rose Productions, an independent documentary production company in New Green Valley, near Las Vegas. Rowe, in turn, ran with white supremacists and tax rebels in Nevada, also neo-nazis in the United States and Germany. Another of Meiringís contacts back home was Chuck Ager, an ultracon mining engineer in Colorado. Another was Nina North (possibly an alias), a CIA operative who took over ìback doorî financial transactions in black market gold formerly conducted by Oliver North. Another was Filipino-American Bob Gould, a tax protester from Hayward, California in league with Fred Obado, leader of the Kodar Kiram terrorist cell, son of Sultan Jumalul Kiram.
Meiring operated a shell company called PAROUSIA - a term used by right-wing Christian evangelicals, a reference to the second coming of Christ.
But Meiers wasnít the only home-grown terrorist running loose in the Philippines: Three Vietnamese terrorists arrested last year for plotting to blow up the Vietnamese Embassy here were assets of the US intelligence community, the Times reported.
KAHANA
Robert J. Freidman, a journalist for the Village Voice, wrote one of the most signally important articles of the previous decade, ìThe CIA and the Sheikh.î5 The feature was an inventory of critical leads, eroded over time, sadly, by opportunities lost.
If the killers of Rabbi Meir Kahana, the vitriolic leader of the Jewish Defense League, had been captured and sentenced, Freidman contends, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing - and by extension, 911 - would have never have occurred.
On November 5, 1990, Freidman wrote, El Sayyid Nosair, a pudgy, bearded 34-year-old Egyptian American and a core member of the El Salaam Mosque, calmly walked up to the podium of a conference room in the Halloran House, a midtown Manhattan hotel, after Kahane had finished a one-hour speech. Moments later, Kahane was shot once in the throat at point-blank range with a .357 magnum, and Nosair bolted outside. During a running gun battle down Lexington Avenue, Nosair was wounded by an off-duty postal inspector and finally captured by New York City police.
An FBI informant told Freidman that Nosair frequented the El Salaam Mosque in Jersey City. Nosair was close with Sheikh Abdel Rahman. I told them that, four days before, I saw with my own eyes the Sheikh meeting with Nosair at a Lebanese restaurant on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. It was 7 p.m. There was Nosair, the Sheikh, a person escorting the Sheikh, and another person I don't know. They were deep in conversation."
After the arrest of Kahaneís assailant, police found evidence that Kahane's murder was just the first in a planned spree. Scrawled on a bank calendar in Nosair's home was a hit list that included the names of a U.S. representative, two federal judges, and a former assistant U.S. Attorney.
The secretive clutch of Muslims from the Mosque often met with Nosair to discuss means of destroying symbols of the Israeli-loving Babylon they despised, "the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty. The World Trade Center.
Many are wondering why there wasn't a comprehensive, wide-ranging investigation of Meir Kahane's murder, Friedman reported. What investigators would have found if they had done their job thoroughly is that Sheikh Abdel Rahman and El Sayyid Nosair were at the heart of a far-flung terrorist conspiracy.
1) John Loftus, What Congress does not know about Enron and 9/11, May 31, 2002, http://www.john-loftus.com/enron3.asp#congress
2) Dore Gold, The Suicide Bombing Attacks in Saudi Arabia: A Preliminary Assessment, Jerusalem Issue Brief, Institute for Contemporary Affairs, Vol. 2, No. 28, May 13, 2003, http://www.jcpa.org/brief/brief2-28.htm
3) Edith Regalado, CIA whisks away Brit-Am blast victim; now in US, Philippine Star, July 9, 2002.
4) Anon., ìEdwin Angeles: The spy who came in from the cold, INQ7.net, http://www.inq7.net/specials/inside_abusayyaf/2001/features/spy_turns_bandit .htm
5) Robert J. Freidman, The CIA and the Sheikh, Village Voice, March 30, 1993.
6) See, http://www.voxfux.com/archives/00000105.htm for a summary of the Manila Times series written by Dorian Zumel-Sicat and Jeannette Andrade, May 29, 2002 through May 31, 2002. Also see, Manila Timesí news reports to June 19, 2002.
7) Ibid.
Saudi Entrepeneur Adnan Khashoggi Linked to 911 Terrorists
PART 7 ADDENDUM: IRAN-CONTRA TIES TO THE OKLAHOMA CITY BOMBING
"[McVeigh's attorneys] said they believe the FBI still has information that others helped McVeigh.... They have even suggested that some government authorities might have known about the bombing plot in advance..." - Los Angeles Times, 6-7-01
OpEd prophets and televised martinets dismiss out-of-hand the possibility that the government had anything to do with the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995. But David Hoffman, a reporter in San Francisco, begged to differ. He put together a dense book, The Oklahoma Bombing and the Politics of Terror (Feral House), noting numerous connections of Iran-contra's "Secret Team" to the bombing. Unfortunately, the FBI's Oliver "Buck" Revell filed suit against Feral House when he discovered a single unsubstantiated fact. The book was recalled. It is no longer available (although Amazon.Com still has a limited number of copies and scalps them for $100 a copy). Hoffman's investigation led him to conclude that elements of the "Octopus" (linked in a "small world" way with Buck Revell) were deeply involved in the bombing.
My own Virtual Government: CIA Mind Control Operations in America (Feral House, 1997) has a chapter on the devastation in Oklahoma City. That book is still on the shelves but no major publication has ever reviewed it and its contents on the bombing have been completely ignored by the revisionist press at large. I also came to conclude that the Iran-contra crowd was responsible for the bombing and subsequent cover-up.
The Team's ties to known terrorists are already thoroughly documented. The Iran-contra affair itself involved arms deals with terrorists. After the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland, Bob Woodward reported in the Washington Post (12-4-88) that sensitive documents aboard the plane would have linked Oliver North to Abu Nidal, the most dangerous terrorist operating at the time. Nidal had access to a quantity of Semtex H plastic explosive and air-pressure-sensitive detonation bombs sold to Libya by the CIAís Edwin Wilson (see: Los Angeles Times, 12-28-88). In 1989, Americans for Middle East Understanding reported in The Link, a newsletter, that Donald Gregg, an advisor to George Bush, Sr., was the administrationís contact to the Mike Harari network. Harrari, an Isreali Mossad agent, led an assassination squad in the 1970s that targeted Palestinians. One of the Harrari groupís most notorious acts was the murder of a Moroccan waiter in Norway mistakenly identified as an agent of the Ali Salamehís Black Septembers.
There was a concerted attempt by Vincent Cannistraro, an Iran-contra player, federal "experts" and CIA spin doctors to pin ultimate responsibility for the Alfred P. Murrah FB bombing on Osama Bin Laden's mystery terorists. Cannistraro ONCE blamed the murders In Oklahoma City on "ENVIRONMENTALISTS out to DESTROY all human life on earth." He NOW claims (see the June 11, 2001 issue of The New American, published by the fascist John Birch Society) that he had intelligence information BEFORE the blast concerning Middle Eastern terrorists. The contradiction is glaring: If his claim has any weight, if he indeed KNEW that Muslim extremists had designs on a major American target, WHY did he tell reporters immediately after the blast that ENVIRONMENTALISTS were responsible?
In The Boston Globe, on May 16, 1995, another CIA Iran-contra figure, anti-terrorism "expert" Neil Livingstone, also claimed that Middle Eastern terrorists engineered the Oklahoma blast. A veteran of Air America, the notorious CIA opium courier in Southeast Asia, Livingstone once publicly defended the Agencyís assassination manual. He was recruited to Air America by James Cunningham, its founder - later a central participant in CIA "renegade" Edwin Wilsonís arms sales to Ghaddafi. Livingstone has long-standing ties to Israeli intelligence and the fascist Popular Alliance Party of Spain. He was also an executive at Robert Keith Grayís public relations firm Gray & Co. in the District of Columbia. He was brought into the firm by Charles Crawford, who ran the International Division that served as a branch office of Oliver Northís civilian supply network.
Openly tying a Middle Eastern terrorists to the bombing diverts attention from possible CIA involvement: "There is a remarkable similarity between the methods used by Islamic terrorists in the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, the attack on the World Trade Center, and the bombing in Oklahoma. The truckload of explosives is almost a signature or calling card and it is the weapon of choice among these groups." Livingstone noted: "Very typically, these terrorists have found homegrown radicals to use as dupes in the actual bombings. They have supplied the money and the technical expertise and highly skilled operatives to guide a project and then get out of town before they can be apprehended." This is also the modus operandi of a certain American intelligence agency.
For the record, there WAS indeed a Middle Eastern connection - but like McVeigh and Nichols, the Muslim terrorists involved were linked to the Iran-contra players and other ranking Pentagonians who remained in the background of the 1987-88 congressional investigation of Irangate (it focused on Oliver North's civilain network almost exclusively and bent over backwards to avoid discussion of the core military and intelligence ties).
"The Iran-contra Players and the CIA's War on America," Virtual Government, by Alex Constantine, Feral House, 1997
(snip)
Who should step forward immediately after the bombing but a chorus of "National Security Experts" drawn from hundreds of propagandists squatting in the duck-blinds of the corporate press.
The most strident terrorism "expert" consulted by the media was Vincent Cannistraro, the former CIA officer who ran covert ops for the NSC during the Iran-contra debacle ó with its cocaine backdrop. In 1991, Cannistraro told the San Francisco Chronicle that sinister "environmentalists" had mustered into "clandestine cells," plotting to develop technologies to diminish, even "eliminate" the entire human race.
Cannistraro performed a similar service for the Contragate contingent at the NSC by blaming the Gander crash on Iraqui terrorists. In fact, the plane was bearing a score of intelligence agents to the U.S. when it crashed in Newfoundland. Several of them had gathered damning information on John Singlaub, North and related Pentagon/CIA subterfuges abroad.
In December 1990, Gene Wheaton, formerly an investigator for the Christic Institute, concluded a probe of the Arrow Air jet crash with the comment, "the official version is a cover-up, and the Canadian and U.S. government officials who are responsible have been criminally negligent or worse." On board had been over 20 crack commandos from the Special Forces, identified on the passenger log as "warrant officers." Arrow Air itself was a CIA dummy front, and bore a ton of mystery cargo when the jet and its 256 passengers went down.
Wheaton discovered that Arrow had transported arms from Israel to Iran on Northís behalf as part of the arms-for- hostages swap. The mid-flight explosion, he claims, was a retaliatory strike by the Iranians for a swindle perpetrated by the Reagan administrationís pugnacious schemer, Oliver North. Five years on, seeds planted by the Iran-contra players resulted in another bombing ó of the Alfred Murrah Building in Oklahoma City....
Larry Nichols [a vocal Clinton critic] is a CIA veteran of the contra guns-for-drugs network. Nichols fought under John Singlaub in Vietnam, and reported to the World Anti-Communist League official during the Nicaraguan contra war.
Singlaub is an anti-Communist of the 1950s genus, and it was during that decade, as deputy CIA station chief in South Korea, that his political psychopathology found an outlet. During the Korean war he fell in with a circle of Seoulís most powerful politicians, spies and industrialists. His sole ambition in life since appears to be fundraising to destroy Communism. In Vietnam, Singlaub organized the dreaded Phoenix Program under his Special Operations Group, a bund of 10,000 troops unleashed in the south to conduct covert raids, assassinations of Viet Minh by the tens of thousands, psychological warfare and sabotage missions. Ollie North was one of John Singlaubís second lieutenants.
Claire Sterling writes that Singlaub "the centurion came to be regarded with awe by a whole generation of military men and intelligence officers, many of whom shared his conservative views about the way things should be in Asia. Around him grew a following that developed into an infrastructure at the Pentagon and CIA."
The quarter of covert intelligence that took part in the Iran-contra scandal was represented in the Oklahoma bombing case by Michael Tigar, the attorney representing Terry Nichols. In the 1960s and í70s, Tigar was employed by the law firm of Williams, Wadden & Stein. He reported to Edward Bennett Williams, the head of the firm, a powerful Beltway attorney on intimate terms with the CIA. Williams often referred to Tigar as his "most brilliant protÈgÈ."
The law firm sprang into existence to cater to the same interagency intelligence underground implicated in drug distribution, mind control and a pile of exploding compost in Oklahoma City.
A senior partner of the firm was Brendon Sullivan, the high-strung legal phenomenon who represented Oliver North during the Congressional Iran-contra hearings.
Williams, a Jesuit, was offered the post of CIA director by two presidents. He refused, possibly because he was already a de facto CIA functionary, and thereby shaped history ó Gerald Ford gave the job to George Bush instead. Robert Maheu, the CIA hit man, attended Holy Cross with Williams and was a close friend. In 1958, the famed attorney referred Maheu to Los Angeles mobster Johnny Roselli to plot against Cuban premier Fidel Castro.
Junk bond magnate Michael Milken, a client of the firm, openly wept at his funeral in 1988. Williamsí client roster included Joseph McCarthy, Mafia don Frank Costello, Jimmy Hoffa, Frank Sinatra, Armand Hammer and John Connally. He was general counsel to Georgetown University, which has long maintained a symbiotic relationship with Langley.
Tigar came to the firm after resigning his position as a Supreme Court clerk. He represented some extremely high-powered clients for a journeyman attorney. He coached Bobby Baker, the LBJ aide imprisoned for tax fraud and influence peddling in 1967, before Senate appearances. Tigar defended John Connally when the former Texas governor was accused of pocketing a bribe. Connally was acquitted. Tigar was rewarded with a prize bull. He packed the beast off to Fidel Castro.
One San Francisco reporter described Tigar, with his danger-high-voltage wardrobe and crewcut, as appearing "more like a Young Republican than the spell-binding firebrand he was a dozen years ago." The press has made much of his radical days at Berekely, his representation of Angela Davis, but he has more than comforted critical neo-"conservatives" by taking on far-right clients. One of the most controversial was John Demjanjuk, the accused Nazi war criminal. Tigar also represented Clayton Jackson, the California lobbyist convicted for money laundering, racketeering and offering a bribe to state senator Alan Robbins.
He agreed to counsel Terry Nichols at the request of three federal judges.
Like his mercurial attorney, Nichols was turned out by the same national security bund behind the Iran-contra swaps and the World Trade Center bombing, not to mention foreign coups, death squad outrages, drug imports and a long history of homicidal covert operations.
After his arrest, federal agents discovered that Terry Nichols had a locker full of gold and silver bullion stored in a locker in Las Vegas. Gold, like guns and drugs, is a favored currency in the international netherworld of "spycraft."
Nichols obtained the gold in November, 1994 while on a junket to the Philippines.
Terry Nichols hid a dagger under his compost-smeared cloak. Lana Padilla, his ex-wife, called a news conference on July 13 after visiting him in prison. She said that Nichols made frequent trips to the Philippines since 1989 ó so many, in fact, that the farmer from Kansas had charged $40,000 in air fares to his credit cards. Ms. Padilla also claimed that Tim McVeigh footed the bill for the 1989 trip.
The gold, Padilla said, was given to Nichols by a party unknown in the Philippines ó allegedly a bearded Islamic involved in the World Trade Center bombing.
Padilla said that Nichols never took Mary Fay, his current wife (a mail-order bride from the Philippines), when he travelled, even though her family lived in Cebu. Cebu is a well-known terrorist haunt in the Phillipines.
Nichols told Lana, before departing for his last visit to the Philippines, "I might not be coming back." He travelled with a gun, she said ó and managed to pass through airport security gates. Before he left, he entrusted her with $20,000 for McVeigh in case he never returned. He did, and he was noticeably on edge, "Those people can kill you," he said with a shudder, "Iím never going back there again."
Critics of the CIA have dismissed Padillaís tale of terrorists in the Philippines as a ploy to distract attention from the true source of the funds. One of Padillaíshrillest critics was Tony Sgarlatti, host of "The Truth (as I see it)," a cable program originating in Minnesota that purports to raise the lid on secret government. Sgarlattiís video credits include "Proof that UFOs are Real" and "What the Government isnít telling you about AIDS."
"Itís very clear that Lana is lying," Sgarlatti argued with prescient confidence, noting that heíd spoken with an unnamed official of the bombing investigative team.
"Lana is trying to make money selling her story to the tabloid newspapers," Sgarlatti said. "Terry Nichols only knew Tim McVeigh for a short time, about five weeks." The court affidavit of Terry Nichols, however, states that he and McVeigh had experimented with explosives as long ago as 1992.
Sgarlatti was employing a time-tested technique for discrediting a troublesome witness ó the old tabloid fever gambit. As a matter of fact, bearded Islamic bomb-tossers with safe houses in the Philippines have proved useful to the national security crowd.
And the investigation of the World Trade Center bombing was not as painstaking as it might have been. Sandbags were repeatedly dropped in the path of investigators by the CIA. One veteran FBI agent, in a Village Voice story that appeared on March 30, 1993, claimed that Sheikh Abdel Rahman was a core conspirator. "It was no accident that the sheikh got a visa and that heís still in the country," one veteran FBI agent laments. "Heís here under the banner of national security, the State Department, the NSA and the CIA. I havenít seen a lone-gunman theory advocated [so forcefully] since the John F. Kennedy assassination."
Jack Blum, a former investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee, was appalled. "One of the big problems here is that many suspects in the World Trade Center bombing were associated with the mujahedeen," Blum pointed out. "There are components of our government that are absolutely disinterested in following that path because it leads back to people we supported in the Afghan war."
"We" are a deep cover infantry of counter-insurgent drug smugglers, arms dealers, money launderers and professional liars.
There is a bridge spanning the World Trade Center and the Oklahoma City federal building. Itís in the Philippines.
And itís made of gold ó Japanese and Nazi gold buried in underground vaults once used to imprison and torture American prisoners of war and local insurgents. Approximately 1,000 tons of the loot was liberated by Ferdinand Marcos before his ouster. Billions of dollars worth were shipped overseas by American intelligence agents and the Mafia. Much of the horde was cabbaged away in a high-security, subterranean storage cachÈ buried beneath the Zurich airport. This vault was once used to conceal European gold from Hitlerís greedy SS scavengers. Fifty years later, some of the same bullion has found its way into the campaign coffers of ultra-conservative political candidates in the U.S., according to the Las Vegas Sun.
But Marcos didnít recover the lionís share of the pelf. A six-month series in the Sun reported in 1993 that Marcos abandoned thousands of tons of gold hidden in his homeland. Gary Thompson, the newspaperës former managing editor, and journalist Steve Kanigher published copies of gold certificates from Credit Suisse, deposit records from the Union Bank of Switzerland, the correspondence of Corazon Aquino and letters to Reagan administration officials documenting witness accounts that lackeys of the CIA and Army Special Forces carted off an unknown quantity of the bullion. They followed one lead after another, flying around the world for 11 months to piece together an elaborate story of political corruption and greed.
The gold extraction was sanctioned by Lt. General Robert Schweitzer, President Reaganís senior military liaison to the National Security Council, and Lt. General Daniel Graham, then director of the DIA and a key consultant on the Strategic Defense Initiative. Schweitzer and retired General John Singlaub, the aforementioned veteran of the Iran-contra affair, joined the board of Nippon Star, a Japanese conglomerate with branches in the Philippines. As they explained to two plaintive Nippon Star consultants, "the company is going out of business ó the National Security Council is taking over."
Among those recruited to run the intelligence front was retired Army Colonel Dan Myers, a former aide to Watergate celebrity G. Gordon Liddy. Eldon "Dan" Cummings, a Pentagon staffer, was named vice president.
Schwartzís ambitious aide, Oliver North, was already dabbling in the gold trade. In 1985, he attempted to sell 44 tons of Marcos bullion, worth $465 million, on the black market. He blithely suggested skimming $5 million to finance the Nicaraguan contra war, but the deal fell through when North, true to form, stiffed the Israeli middlemen on the Marcos payroll.
Tapes and documents implicating American officials in the gold transfers were withheld from the Iran-contra committee by Major General Colin Powell, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and William Odom, director of the NSA. "It wasnít so much the mention of gold that concerned them," say Thompson and Kanigher. "It was Marcos talking (on tape) about contributions to U.S. presidential campaigns and the use of the gold proceeds to fund illegal arms deals."
To extract the gold, Ray Cline, then deputy director of the CIA, organized a working group that included a chief regulator of the S&L industry. Citibank was drawn into the operation to negotiate ownership of a Philippine gold horde secreted in the Bahamas.NASA pilots drew up a plan to transport the bullion (a link to Caslpan?)
Bo Gritz, the swashbuckling Idaho militia leader who ran for president with David Duke as his running mate, also travelled to the Philippines to participate in the gold dig. Gritz claims that he struck out ó but the Special Forces veteran has been known to spin a plausible denial or two in his time.
The upshot was that either Lana Padilla was telling the truth about Terry Nicholsí mystery trips abroad, or she is a scholar of national security studies with an emphasis on black ops. Her allusion to terrorists from the Middle East was hardly far-fetched. General Schweitzerís crew from the NSC hired a team of lawyers to sell the gold recovered in the Philippines. Much of it was sold off to Middle Eastern terrorists. Some of them have indeed been linked to the World Trade Center bombing, according to Kanigher and Thompson.
It is not at all unlikely that Terry Nichols should have had dealings with the rabid foreign clients of the national security sector
Cannistraro is an egotistical liar, I'd love to see his butt nailed. I'm still trying to tie him to the Niger forgeries...I just know he was up to his neck in that too. He threatened me once on here already when he thought I was getting too close. From my files:
Also, Rocco only "procured" the documents, he did not forge them. Fitzgerald went to Italy to investigate the Niger Embassy (in Rome) burglary...where the letterhead and seals for the forgeries were stolen. Ex-CIA agent (and coincidentally, an advisor to the Vatican in Rome),Vincent Cannistraro has stated that Alan Wolf and Duane Clarridge were the actual forgers, but his account is the only one available that I can find on the subject. He has also pointed the finger at Michael Ledeen, but Ledeen has publicly made a statement that he had nothing to do with it and demanded an apology from Cannistraro.
In addition, despite what the MSM is reporting, the Italians released a press report yesterday saying they had nothing to do with the forgeries:
Italy denies role in fake documents on Iraq
This was also backed up by Rocco here
Cannistraro's "theory" falls apart when you consider that he:
1) blamed SISME (the Italians), which has proven to be wrong
2) bases his assumptions on a Dec 2001 Ledeen meeting, when Cannistraro himself was in Rome in Nov 2001, which would make him just as suspect.
I also discovered that Cannistraro worked directly with Clarridge during Iran Contra, so he has alot of nerve bringing that up in connection to Ledeen. Another interesting tidbit (#47) that I discovered is that Wolf and Clarridge worked with Aldrich Ames, who outed Plame to the Russians in the 90's. Coincidence? I think not. Cannistraro trying to kill two birds with one stone to cover his own carcass seems to be the more likely answer. Equally suspicious is the Hersch article, where Cannistraro and another unnamed agent state the exact route the documents took and Cannistraro actually admits that he called the CIA about the documents before they were proven to be false. This begs the question...just how did Cannistraro know about the documents before they were vetted? Sounds a whole lot like Wilson's slip-up about seeing the documents.
Two other names just crept into this...Niger Ambassador Adamou Chekou, who was in charge at the Embassy when the break-in and forgeries occurred and Wissam al-Zahawiah, Iraqi Ambassador to the Holy See. Seems Italian Intelligence was eavesdropping on these two and discovered their "hotline".
Did you read that carefully. Holy See? As in Vatican? Where Vincent Cannistraro is the security advisor?