“9/11 Conspiracy Roadtrip” – A Participant’s Perspective

September 8, 2011
Author: Emily Louise Church
Source: 9/11 Truth News

Hello, my name is Emily Church and I am a mute.

Well, according to the masters of propaganda at the BBC/Renegade Productions.

This summer I participated in a BBC hit piece on 9/11, entitled “Conspiracy Roadtrip”. The premise is simple: five non-believers of the official story journey across the east coast of the USA in search of the truth. On the way we meet “experts” and victims of the attacks, guided by “comedian” Andrew Maxwell who believes the 9/11 commission report was the be all and end all of the 9/11 story.

The show aired a few hours ago and I felt compelled to write my version of what happened on that 8 day roadtrip, to give you the perspective you were not shown by BBC 3.

Firstly, I must tip my hat to them. They did a wonderful editing job. Anyone who has ever had a conversation with me or knows me personally will be very much aware of my opinions re: 9/11, and how outspoken I am about them. However, on this show I appear to be pretty much silent the entire way through.

I wasn’t.

Throughout my time on the show I asked question after question. I asked every single person we met whether they believed the official story to be true and the vast majority of them said no. Ask yourselves this question: why has the footage of us meeting Tom Owen, a voice analyst who worked on the Osama Bin Laden “confession” tapes, been cut completely? There is a simple answer. Because he told us not to believe the official report. Why? Because we aren’t in the “need-to-know” category, his words, not mine. Throughout our entire meeting with Tom Owen it was pretty much clear that the director of the show wasn’t happy with his take. Like most of our meetings with “experts” she would try and steer the conversation in a direction that would better fit her hit piece.

I’d also like to ask why footage of [FAA National Operations Manager] Ben Sliney saying that someone needs to be held accountable for 9/11 was cut? Surely that’s something that the TV license paying public should be able to see? But no, it didn’t fit their requirements for the perfect hit piece.

On the journey I was one of the most vocal contributors, consistently asking questions and receiving no answers whatsoever. I wonder why? Is it completely out of this world to assume that the answers to my questions might have made the truth about 9/11 a little too clear to the viewer? Is it a ridiculous conspiracy theory to assume that the reason the BBC turned me into a mute was to create a biased hit-piece? As with most 9/11 “conspiracy” documentaries, they focused on mostly debunkable theories such as no plane hit the Pentagon and fake phone calls. In other words, shit that pushes us further away from real truth and accountability. They also did a great job at making it seem like I believed most of these theories. I’ll freely admit that before I went on the show I was a “9/11 was an inside job” sort of girl. Hell, I even have a t-shirt from infowars.com. Yes that’s right, I knowingly gave money to Alex Jones.

Before I went on the show I had an epiphany of sorts. I realized that all evidence points to a plane hitting a Pentagon, that maybe the twin towers and Building 7 weren’t a controlled demolition and maybe Dick Cheney and co hadn’t plotted the whole thing with fake hijackers. Now I don’t know what is true and what isn’t. I am not 100% convinced about controlled demolition but it is a distinct possibility. I just decided to focus on the other, less spoken about side of 9/11. The fact that with multiple warnings, the US failed to prevent an attack on their own shores. The fact that so many people have been gagged from talking about 9/11 and revealing information they might know. The fact that the 9/11 commission report, by it’s own ADMISSION was set up to fail. These are just a few of the facts that I brought up on the show. Were they shown? No.

I made it very clear, before I went to the US, that I thought these theories can sometimes be harmful to our chances of ever getting a new investigation into 9/11. I asked repeatedly to speak to some sort of government representative, someone who I could ask my questions to. And despite being told I would get to speak to someone, alas that time never came.

So tonight I watched the show and saw no effort on the BBC’s part to differentiate myself from these theories. In fact, they made it look like these theories were actually my own. As you will see if you watch the show, they told me to ask about airport security, yet they cut out clips of me asking why the hijackers weren’t prevented from entering the country. I asked why, with all of the foreknowledge that the US had, were precautions not taken to protect the innocent American people that tragically lost their lives. I didn’t get an answer.

In ten years, not one person has been held accountable for the events of 9/11, when it is now so evident that the attacks could have been prevented. Hell, even Ben Sliney said that the attacks could’ve been prevented. Why are we so comfortable with letting people get away with this? And why, after ten years, are people that dare to question the official story still painted as conspiracy theorists? Hasn’t it been proven, time and time again, that elements of the US administration covered up their criminal involvement in 9/11?

Interestingly, the whole show seemed to be centered around Charlotte, trying to portray her as something she isn’t. The editing was truly phenomenal. Here we have a typical conspiracy theorist, unwilling to listen to anyone else’s point of view and adamant that she is right. That’s not how it was. They also included an argument that Charlotte and I had and took it completely out of context. They failed to include the fact that we made up shortly afterwards, with me apologizing to her. It made me quite angry to see vicious comments about her, considering the fact that she is a friend of mine and one of the people I have stayed in most contact with after the show. Yes, I may disagree with her on some points, but that is the great thing about being able to formulate our own opinions. Charlotte and I are united on the fact that 9/11 desperately needs a new investigation. Please don’t fall for the BBC’s clever editing trick, she is not a bad person and the show misrepresented her entirely.

The same goes for Rodney, the other person I have stayed in contact with since being in the US. Again, we may not agree on everything and we have our differences, but in my experience with him he is a rational and down to earth person. Maybe we should all remember that this was a well-crafted hit piece and the editing was designed to generate ill-feeling towards Rodney and Charlotte, the most head-strong people on the show (along with myself, obviously).

And here we reach Andrew Maxwell, the Irish comedian who consistently ridiculed us and walked away in the middle of debates. See, the BBC don’t want you to know that he complained throughout the entire shoot, laughed about us behind our backs and on more than one occasion said that he wished he’d never signed on to do the show. He’s not a bad person. He was there trying to make some money, we were there trying to get some truth. It’s as simple as that.

Personally, I’m disgusted at the documentary and I think participating in the show will always be one of my biggest regrets. But at the same time, I feel pretty lucky that I got to meet the people I did and ask the questions that I did, even though they weren’t included in the show. It saddens me that I look like a dumb student who doesn’t know a thing about 9/11 and it angers me that I barely have a voice in the entire 60 minutes that the show runs for.

Overall the experience was an interesting one, but one I wouldn’t do again. Imagine intense heat, stuck on a bus all day with cameras shoved in your face, 12 hour filming days, early mornings and emotional breakdowns. It was intense to say the least.

There are a lot more grievances I have with the show but that’s something I will write about another day. Now, it’s time to get some sleep and try to find hope in the fact that I know what happened on the 9/11 Conspiracy Road Trip, I know what I said and I know the answers I got.

It would be extraordinarily naive to even consider the possibility that a family as ambitious, as cunning and as monopolistically minded as the Rothschilds could resist the temptation of becoming heavily involved on the American front.

Following their conquest of Europe early in the 1800s, the Rothschilds cast their covetous eyes on the most precious gem of them all — the United States.

America was unique in modern history. It was only the second nation in history that had ever been formed with the Bible as its law book. Its uniquely magnificent Constitution was specifically designed to limit the power of government and to keep its citizens free and prosperous. Its citizens were basically industrious immigrants who ‘yearned to breath free’ and who asked nothing more than to be given the opportunity to live and work in such a wonderfully stimulating environment.

The results — the ‘fruit’ — of such a unique experiment were so indescribably brilliant that America became a legend around the globe. Many millions across the far flung continents of the world viewed America the Beautiful as the promised land.

The Big Bankers in Europe — the Rothschilds and their cohorts — viewed the wonderful results borne by this unique experiment from an entirely different perspective; they looked upon it as a major threat to their future plans.

The establishment Times of London stated: “If that mischievous financial policy which had its origin in the North American Republic [i.e. honest Constitutionally authorized no debt money] should become indurated down to a fixture, then that government will furnish its own money without cost. It will pay off its debts and be without a debt [to the international bankers]. It will become prosperous beyond precedent in the history of the civilized governments of the world. The brains and wealth of all countries will go to North America. That government must be destroyed or it will destroy every monarchy on the globe.”

The Rothschilds and their friends sent in their financial termites to destroy America because it was becoming “prosperous beyond precedent.”

The first documentable evidence of Rothschild involvement in the financial affairs of the United States came in the late 1820s and early 1830s when the family, through their agent Nicholas Biddie, fought to defeat Andrew Jackson’s move to curtail the international bankers. The Rothschilds lost the first round when in 1832, President Jackson vetoed the move to renew the charter of the ‘Bank of the United States’ (a central bank controlled by the international bankers). In 1836 the bank went out of business.

PLAN OF DESTRUCTION

In the years following Independence, a close business relationship had developed between the cotton growing aristocracy in the South and the cotton manufacturers in England. The European bankers decided that this business connection was America’s Achilles Heel, the door through which the young American Republic could be successfully attacked and overcome.

The Illustrated University History, 1878, p. 504, tells us that the southern states swarmed with British agents. These conspired with local politicians to work against the best interests of the United States. Their carefully sown and nurtured propaganda developed into open rebellion and resulted in the secession of South Carolina on December 29, 1860. Within weeks another six states joined the conspiracy against the Union, and broke away to form the Confederate States of America, with Jefferson Davis as President.

The plotters raided armies, seized forts, arsenals, mints and other Union property. Even members of President Buchanan’s Cabinet conspired to destroy the Union by damaging the public credit and working to bankrupt the nation. Buchanan claimed to deplore secession but took no steps to check it, even when a U.S. ship was fired upon by South Carolina shore batteries.

Shortly thereafter Abraham Lincoln became President, being inaugurated on March 4, 1861. Lincoln immediately ordered a blockade on Southern ports, to cut off supplies that were pouring in from Europe. The ‘official’ date for the start of the Civil War is given as April 12, 1861, when Fort Sumter in South Carolina was bombarded by the Confederates, but it obviously began at a much earlier date.

In December, 1861, large numbers of European Troops (British, French and Spanish) poured into Mexico in defiance of the Monroe Doctrine. This, together with widespread European aid to the Confederacy strongly indicated that the Crown was preparing to enter the war. The outlook for the North, and the future of the Union, was bleak indeed.

CZAR ALEXANDER II

In this hour of extreme crisis, Lincoln appealed to the Crown’s perennial enemy, Russia, for assistance. When the envelope containing Lincoln’s urgent appeal was given to Czar Alexander II, he weighed it unopened in his hand and stated: “Before we open this paper or know its contents, we grant any request it may contain.”

Unannounced, a Russian fleet under Admiral Liviski, steamed into New York harbor on September 24, 1863, and anchored there, The Russian Pacific fleet, under Admiral Popov, arrived in San Francisco on October 12. Of this Russian act, Gideon Wells said: “They arrived at the high tide of the Confederacy and the low tide of the North, causing England and France to hesitate long enough to turn the tide for the North” (Empire of “The City,” p. 90).

History reveals that the Rothschilds were heavily involved in financing both sides in the Civil War.

Lincoln put a damper on their activities when, in 1862 and 1863, he refused to pay the exorbitant rates of interest demanded by the Rothschilds and issued constitutionally-authorized, interest free United States notes.

For this and other acts of patriotism Lincoln was shot down in cold-blood by John Wilkes Booth on April 14, 1865, just five days after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia.

http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/slavery.htm

Daily Express, Friday July 22,2011
By Cyril Dixon, Padraic Flanagan and Mark Reynolds

TWO of Britain’s leading former police officers are wanted for questioning over allegations that they withheld crucial evidence about the car crash which killed Princess Diana.

A French judge wants to ask ex-Yard chief Lord Condon and Sir David Veness why they failed to disclose the existence of a note in which she predicted her assassination.

They could face international arrest warrants as suspects should they refuse to attend interviews in Paris, sources close to the investigation indicated last night.

More here…

Related Story:

Unresolved Issues of the Diana and Dodi Inquest by John Morgan

Product Description

Review

by Prof. David Ray Griffin
Global Research, June 25, 2010

There are many questions to ask about the war in Afghanistan. One that has been widely asked is whether it will turn out to be “Obama’s Vietnam.”1 This question implies another: Is this war winnable, or is it destined to be a quagmire, like Vietnam? These questions are motivated in part by the widespread agreement that the Afghan government, under Hamid Karzai, is at least as corrupt and incompetent as the government the United States tried to prop up in South Vietnam for 20 years.

Although there are many similarities between these two wars, there is also a big difference: This time, there is no draft. If there were a draft, so that college students and their friends back home were being sent to Afghanistan, there would be huge demonstrations against this war on campuses all across this country. If the sons and daughters of wealthy and middle-class parents were coming home in boxes, or with permanent injuries or post-traumatic stress syndrome, this war would have surely been stopped long ago. People have often asked: Did we learn any of the “lessons of Vietnam”? The US government learned one: If you’re going to fight unpopular wars, don’t have a draft – hire mercenaries!

There are many other questions that have been, and should be, asked about this war, but in this essay, I focus on only one: Did the 9/11 attacks justify the war in Afghanistan?

Read more…

An Interview With Atta’s American Girlfriend Amanda`Nichols` Keller Part 1

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104×1433886

I just finished Daniel Hopsicker’s Welcome to Terrorland. He exposes the cover story of the Florida flight schools, and the ongoing cover-up. The whole thing stinks of Iran/Contra and CIA drugs. It’s the same, bloody game.

Though his style can be annoyingly breezy, I highly recommend the book. There’s original research you won’t find anywhere else but here and on his website: http://www.madcowprod.com /.

Here are some archived threads that touch on similar material:

“Jeb Bush seized flight school records at 2 AM on September 12″
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph…

“Heroin, Al Qaeda and the Florida Flight School”
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph…

And FYI, here are some notes I kept while reading the book:

1. In Venice Florida, Mohamed Atta lived for two months with an American stripper/lingerie model named Amanda Keller.

2. Atta loved to party. He was out with Keller nearly every night they were together. He was a heavy drinker, snorted coke, was a stylish dresser and wore expensive jewelry.

3. According to Keller, Atta loved pork chops.

4. Keller dumped him after he embarrassed her at a night club by dancing, poorly, atop a speaker (“doing that old ‘Roxbury head bob’ thing, you know”?)

5. Atta revenged himself later on Keller by returning to the apartment they’d shared and killing her cat and kittens, disemboweling and dismembering them in her apartment for her to find.

6. In Miami, Atta consorted with women known to be linked to the Mafia.

7. Atta’s email list included names of people who worked for defense contractors. One, for instance, worked for Canadian firm Virtual Prototypes, which helped develop the avionics for F-15, F-22 and B-2.

8. Atta was enrolled as a student at the International Officer’s School of Maxwell Airforce Base, and witnesses recall him having been introduced around at an officers’ club party.

9. Atta was fluent in at least Arabic, English, German, French and Hebrew.

10. One day when Atta was rummaging through his flight bag, Keller got a look inside. Her words:

“The thing the FBI was most interested in was his pilot bag. They asked about it a lot. He kept it locked, and they wanted to know whether I had ever seen anything in it. I told them yes. One day he opened it briefly, and there were a lot of papers in it, and there was a blue log book in a different language. Mohamed was fluent in almost any language you can think of. He had a kind of Daytimer in there, too. And a folder with all these different ID’s in it. And that’s when I saw one – because it fell out – a little blue and white thing the size of a driver’s license. It had his picture on it, and it looked like a mug shot, or a prison shot. And it didn’t look like him, and I asked him, ‘Who is this?’

“And he said, ‘that’s me.’ He told me it had been taken back when he was in some kind of militia-type deal, like a military-type deal, he said. He compared it to our military only they teach you different tactics. He didn’t elaborate.

“He didn’t say where it was from, either. But the writing looked like a cross between Hebrew and Arabic, those frilly little lines. He told me he spoke Hebrew. I said bullshit. So he started speaking it, and I guess he did.

“He told me that he went to different countries and studied. He had pilot’s license from several different countries. But all the pictures looked different. All the names were different. He had a license to fly from just about every country he had been to. He went to pilot’s school in all these countries.”

11. Atta, Keller, a stripper named Linda and two Germans, Peter and Johan, partied for three days in Key West. Atta paid for everything. Rented three rooms, one just for the men’s luggage, which Keller says contained drugs. The men had a business meeting the women were not permitted to attend. Met with people, Keller says, who flew in just to meet Atta. Somber and quiet after meeting. (Key West Airport a known drug transit point. The Sheriff used to be under orders to keep the dope sniffing dogs off airplanes, and at one time even sent patrol cars to escort the drugs to Miami.)

12. Atta was already a licensed pilot when he arrived in the US. Licenses from many different countries. He had the privileges of an instructor while he was at Huffman Aviation, and may have helped pilot South American drug runs.

13. The FBI timeline says Atta left Venice Florida in December 2000 after completing his flight training. But he didn’t. Dozens of locals say different – his landlord, neighbours, cab drivers, restaurant employees and his girlfriend, for a few instances – and have been told not to talk about it by federal authorities. The FBI publicly sought information regarding Atta’s time in various US locations, but not Venice Florida, where he spent most of his time in the US. Why the intentional misdirection? What are they trying to keep hidden?

14. Under pressure from the FBI, and despite numerous witnesses who had known them together, Keller publicly retracted her story of having lived with Atta, saying he’d been another hijacker named Mohammed, no last name, who seems to have only existed to get Atta out of this story that didn’t fit the official version.

15. Six nights before the attack, at a bar called Shuckums in Ft Lauderdale, Atta and two companions got drunk. The FBI showed up at the bar just 12 hours after the attack with pictures of two of them, one Atta, saying only “they were on the plane and passed away.” Manager Tony Amos and bartender Patricia Idrissi identified both. Manager Amos said they’d gotten “wasted,” Atta drank Stoli vodka for three straight hours. Atta blasphemed: “F*ck God!” he’s said to have cursed.

16. The witnesses then retracted the story of Atta being drunk. They now said he’d only drank cranberry juice the entire evening. Both Amos and Idrissi have gone, no one knows where, but the current bartender says she believes their leaving was somehow 9/11 related.

17. Fourteen of the 9/11 hijackers made Florida their base of operation, and clustered around two flight schools. What is it about Florida, and these flight schools, that drew them?

18. Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi paid $28,000 each to Rudi Dekkers’ Huffman Aviation for flight instruction that, the chief instructor of a neighbouring school said, was available at dozens of other nearby locations for a fraction of the price. Why did they pay an inflated price to Dekkers?

19. Dekkers’ and his financier, Wally Hilliard, purchased the flight school just months before Atta and the other hijackers began arriving. Before their purchase, the flight school catered to largely American students. After, student body became 80% foreign, mostly Middle Eastern. Yeslam bin Laden, Osama’s brother, sent students there for his business.

20. Atta also “trained” for a time at Arne Kruithof’s Florida Flight Training Center, a block away from Huffman Aviation. Amanda Keller says it is where he would go to replenish his cocaine stash.

21. Though Dutchmen Dekkers and Kruithof claimed they had not known each other before each coincidently purchased flight training schools in Venice shortly before terrorists began arriving for training, witnesses claim the two had known each other well for years before.

22. Wally Hilliard is a supposedly-retired, born again insurance executive from the Midwest (motto for his insurance company had been “Hate Sin, Fight Communism, Back the Pack!”), who upon arriving in Florida entered into aviation businesses with an assortment of criminal and covert intelligence elements.

23. Dekkers and Hilliard had not been in the flight school business before they made the purchase. They paid an inflated price for the school, and did no due diligence before the purchase. They lost millions, but this was apparently not a problem. Charlie Voss, former employee of Dekkers and an Iran/Contra pilot who’d also flown “Northern Alliance guys” in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and who had given Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi a place to stay for a few weeks when they first arrived in Venice Florida: “Rudi’s greedy, and when you’re greedy you can be used for something…. When something doesn’t make obvious business sense, sometimes it’s because things are being done for another reason that doesn’t have a lot to do with dollars and cents. His business did not add up.”

24. Dekkers went from broke to flush very quickly, without having business success with the flight school. One observer said “He didn’t even have the money to buy gas for an airplane… and yet a year later he shows up and plops a million seven, a million eight or two million dollars on the table as if it were paper money.”

25. The deputy in charge of Venice Fl airport security: “Wally and Rudi never talk inside a building, they go out to an airplane and talk inside the plane.”

26. Dekkers’ claimed he had very little interaction with Atta, and that he never saw him again after December 2000. But numerous witnesses in Venice claim Dekkers and Atta were close, and were seen at a restaurant together just two weeks before the attack.

27. Hilliard denied knowing Atta. Keller recalled, on a visit to the airport, having Hilliard ask her, “What’s a nice girl like you doing with a guy like Mohamed?”

28. Before the attack, Dekkers was having trouble paying rent on flight school. It was so bad, it was a story in the Venice paper when he paid rent. One month before attack, he stopped having trouble. Since attack, every aviation concern at Venice airport has been late at least once with their monthly rent, except for Dekkers’.

29. Both the DEA and US Customs had been interested in Dekkers as far back as 1993. He was suspected of smuggling drugs and computer chips.

30. Less than three weeks after Atta and Marwan Al-Shehi began flying lessons at Huffman Aviation, a Lear jet owned by its financier, Wally Hilliard, carrying 43 pounds of heroin was seized by the DEA. Authorities called it the biggest seizure of heroin ever in central Florida.

31. The passengers, Venezuelan nationals, were arrested, but the pilot wasn’t charged, said a DEA spokesman, “because of lack of evidence.” This, despite the fact the pilot, Diego Levine-Texar, ignored agents demands that he drop his cell phone, which had to be pried from his hand at gunpoint. Affidavit of the DEA agent: “Based on my experience I know that narcotics traffickers maintain frequent contact with one another while transporting narcotics… I believe Levine-Texar attempted to contact other accomplices as to the presence of agents and other law enforcement officials.” Information about Levine-Texar is considered “sensitive.”

32. But the DEA refused to return the plane to Hilliard. It was auctioned off. DEA said they had “reasons.” Unusual for a so-called “innocent man” to be denied the return of his possession, or compensation.

33. After Hilliard lost his plane to the DEA auction, he was loaned a plane worth $2 million for just one dollar by Truman Arnold, former chief fundraiser for the Democratic Party, who figured in the Whitewater investigation.

34. John Villada, an aviation executive in Naples Florida: “After Wally’s plane was impounded with the heroin and his pilots had machine guns stuck in their faces, the DEA came to visit our maintenance facility and Wally shouted out to me – right in front of the DEA guy – ‘Make sure all the heroin and cocaine gets hidden!’” Hilliard’s mock warning seemed to show the DEA how little he thought of them, and how well he was protected.

35. The paperwork showed the same plane had made approximately 30 weekly round trips to Venezuela with the same passengers, and they always paid cash. “They obviously weren’t even bothering to hide what they were doing,” said one observer.

36. Hilliard had got his Lear jet from World Jet Inc, owned by drug smuggling brothers Don and Bill Whittington, who had supplied the plane to CIA drug smuggler Barry Seal.

37. The Sarasota County Drug interdiction people were told that Dekkers and Hilliard had a green light to operation and that they were to stay away from them, that they… may have had some type of government protection. And the local Venice Police Department were also warned to leave them alone.

38. A former Huffman executive, speaking about the hijackers: “Early on I gleaned that these guys had government protection. They were let into this country for a specific purpose. It was a business deal.”

39. The FBI visited the home of this executive just four hours after the attacks. The purpose has been not to investigate, but to intimidate him into silence. The man says his phones were bugged, and thinks pilots were “double agents.” He quit the flight school fearing for his life, and claims he knows too much about Wally Hillier, saying he “has a family to think about.”

40. Jeb accompanied the FBI when they removed the flight school records on the early morning of September 12, and flew them to Washington.

41. Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris have flown and endorsed Hilliard’s air carrier.

42. In the days following 9/11, a number of Saudis fled the country from Florida after the attacks. They flew on Wally Hillier’s charter aircraft to private fields of military contractor Raytheon, and departed on a 747.

43. After the attacks, a virtually non-existent company that operated out of Venice Airport under Huffman’s license called Britannia Aviation was awarded a five-year, multi-million dollar contract to run the maintenance facility at Lychburg Virginia Regional Airport. (FYI, Lynchburg is the home of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty Baptist University.) Britannia did not have an FAA license to work on planes and showed assets of only $750. It was chosen over Virginia Aviation, which showed a multi-million dollar balance and boasted more than 40 employees.

44. Britannia executive Peter Martens boasted that his company had been providing maintenance at Venice Airport for “Caribe Air,” which is a notorious CIA proprietary carrier.

45. A source at the Drug Enforcement Agency says that Britannia has a “green light” from the DEA, and that local police had been warned to leave Britannia alone.

46. Martens also has ties to Falwell, having met his wife at his university in Lynchburg.

47. Many of the Venice flight trainers moonlight by flying “missionary flights” to Central and South America, for such organizations as Pat Robertson’s Operation Hope. (Are mission groups being used as fronts for covert ops?)

48. Most of Atta’s closest associates in Venice were not Arabs, but Europeans with connection to the drug trade.

49. Though flight school owners Dekkers and Kruithof had before crashed, within weeks of each other in 2002, both had near fatal crashes. Wreckage was destroyed before it could be examined.

50. According to his girlfriend, Atta was a big Beastie Boys fan.

by Robert Parry,
Global Research, July 1, 2010

The conventional view of the Iran-Contra scandal is that it covered the period 1985-86, when President Ronald Reagan became concerned about the fate of American hostages in Lebanon and agreed to secretly sell weapons to Iran’s Islamist government to gain its help in freeing the captives.

Supposedly, the scheme went awry when White House aide Oliver North and other participants got carried away, including North’s decision to divert profits from the arms sales to another one of Reagan’s priorities, the Nicaraguan contra rebels whose CIA assistance had been cut off by Congress.

The Iran-Contra scandal was exposed in fall of 1986 after the shooting down of a North supply plane over Nicaragua and revelations in Lebanon of Reagan’s arms sales to Iran. A White House staff shake-up, including North’s firing, and some wrist-slaps from Congress for Reagan’s alleged inattention to details resolved the scandal, at least that was how Official Washington saw it.

The few dissenters who wouldn’t accept that tidy conclusion – such as Iran-Contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh – were mocked and marginalized by the news media, including the Washington Post (which ran an article concluding that Walsh’s consistency in pursuing the scandal was “so un-Washington” and that he would depart as “a perceived loser”).

But an accumulating body of evidence suggests that the traditional view of Iran-Contra was mistaken, that this conventional understanding of the scandal was like starting a novel in the middle and assuming you’re reading the opening chapter.

Indeed, it now appears clear that the Iran-Contra Affair began five years earlier in 1980, with what has often been treated as a separate controversy, called the October Surprise case, dealing with alleged contacts between Reagan’s presidential campaign and Iran.

In view of the latest evidence – and the crumbling of the long-running October Surprise cover-up – there appears to have been a single Iran-Contra narrative spanning the entire 12 years of the Reagan and Bush I administration, and representing a much darker story.

And it was not simply a tale of Republican electoral skullduggery and treachery, but possibly even more troubling, a story of rogue CIA officers and Israel’s Likud hardliners sabotaging a sitting U.S. president, Jimmy Carter.

Plus, with Washington’s failure to get at the larger truth about the Iran-Contra Affair, crucial patterns were set: Republicans acted aggressively, Democrats behaved timidly, and the U.S. national news media was transformed from Watergate-era watchdogs, to lapdogs and finally to guard dogs protecting national security wrongdoing.

In that sense, the Iran-Contra/October Surprise scandal represented the missing link in a larger American political narrative covering the sweep of several decades, explaining how the United States shifted away from a nation grappling with epochal problems, from energy dependence and environmental degradation to bloated military budgets and an obsession with empire.

For all his shortcomings and half-measures, President Carter had begun promoting solar and other alternative energies; he pushed conservation programs and worked to reduce the federal deficit; and abroad, he advocated greater respect for human rights and pulled back from the imperial presidency.

More on point, he cashiered many of the freewheeling Cold Warriors of the CIA and demanded land-for-peace concessions from Israel.

Unacceptable Dangers

Carter’s potential second term presented unacceptable dangers to some powerful interests at home and overseas. The CIA Old Boys (whom legendary CIA officer Miles Copeland deemed “the CIA within the CIA”) thought they understood the true national interests even if the lazy-minded public and weak-kneed politicians didn’t.

Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and his Likud Party believed in a “Greater Israel” and were determined not to trade any more land conquered in the Six-Day War of 1967 for promises of peace with Palestinians and other Arabs. In 1980, Begin was still fuming over Carter’s Camp David pressure on him to surrender the Sinai in exchange for a peace deal with Egypt.

In other words, the deep-seated concerns of many influential forces intersected in 1980, all with a common desire to sink Carter’s reelection campaign. And the best way to do that was to undermine his efforts to gain the freedom of 52 American hostages then held in Iran. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “The CIA/Likud Sinking of Jimmy Carter.”]

The secret relationships, born of the 1980 hostage dealings, created the framework for the Reagan administration’s approval of Israel’s clandestine arms shipments to Iran beginning immediately after Reagan took office in 1981, just as the American hostages were finally released. Those initial Israeli arms sales gradually evolved into the Iran-Contra weapons transfers.

Thus, when the Iran-Contra scandal surfaced in fall 1986, the subsequent cover-up was not simply to protect Reagan from possible impeachment for violating the Arms Export Control Act and the congressional ban on military aid to the Nicaraguan contras, but from exposure of the even darker, earlier phase of the scandal, which would implicate Israel and the CIA.

In authorizing the first investigation of Iran-Contra, Reagan’s Attorney General Edwin Meese set the chronological parameters as 1985 and 1986. Congressional inquiries also focused on that narrow time frame, despite indications that the scandal began earlier, such as the mystery of an Israeli-chartered arms flight that was shot down in July 1981 after straying into Soviet air space.

Only late in the Iran-Contra criminal investigation did Walsh and his investigative team begin suspecting that the only explanation for the futile arms-for-hostage dealings regarding Lebanon in 1985-86 – when each freed hostage was replaced by a new captive – was that the tripartite relationship of Iran-Israel-and-Reagan predated the Lebanese crisis, going back to 1980.

That was one reason why Walsh’s investigators asked George H.W. Bush’s national security adviser (and former CIA officer) Donald Gregg about his possible role in delaying the release of the hostages in 1980. His denial was judged deceptive by an FBI polygrapher.

‘People on High’

Nicholas Veliotes, Reagan’s assistant secretary of state for the Middle East, described his discovery of the earlier Iran connections after the Israeli plane went down in the Soviet Union in 1981.

“It was clear to me after my conversations with people on high that indeed we had agreed that the Israelis could transship to Iran some American-origin military equipment,” Veliotes said in an interview with PBS Frontline.

In checking out the Israeli flight, Veliotes came to believe that the Reagan camp’s dealings with Iran dated back to before the 1980 election.

“It seems to have started in earnest in the period probably prior to the election of 1980, as the Israelis had identified who would become the new players in the national security area in the Reagan administration,” Veliotes said. “And I understand some contacts were made at that time.”

Though some two dozen witnesses – including senior Iranian officials and a wide range of other international players – have expanded on Veliotes’s discovery, the pressure became overpowering in the final years of George H.W. Bush’s presidency not to accept the obvious conclusions. [For details of the evidence, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]

It was easier for all involved – surely the Republicans but also the Democrats and much of the Washington press corps – to discredit the corroborated 1980 allegations. Taking the lead was the neoconservative New Republic.

In fall 1991, as Congress was deliberating whether to conduct a full investigation of the October Surprise issue, Steven Emerson, a journalist with close ties to Likud, produced a cover story for The New Republic claiming to prove the allegations were a “myth.”

Newsweek published a matching cover story also attacking the October Surprise allegations. The article, I was told, had been ordered up by executive editor Maynard Parker who was known inside Newsweek as a close ally of the CIA and an admirer of prominent neocon Elliott Abrams.

The two articles were influential in shaping Washington’s conventional wisdom, but they were both based on a misreading of attendance documents at a London historical conference which William Casey had gone to in July 1980.

The two publications put Casey at the conference on one key date – thus supposedly proving he could not have attended an alleged Madrid meeting with Iranian emissaries. However, after the two stories appeared, follow-up interviews with conference participants, including historian Robert Dallek, conclusively showed that Casey wasn’t at the conference until later.

Veteran journalist Craig Unger, who had worked on the Newsweek cover story, said the magazine knew the Casey alibi was bogus but still used it. “It was the most dishonest thing that I’ve been through in my life in journalism,” Unger later told me.

However, even though the Newsweek and New Republic stories had themselves been debunked, that didn’t stop other neoconservative-dominated publications, like the Wall Street Journal, from ladling out ridicule on anyone who dared take the October Surprise case seriously.

Peculiar Journalism

Emerson also was a close friend of Michael Zeldin, the deputy chief counsel for the House task force that investigated the October Surprise issue in 1992. Though the task force had to jettison Emerson’s bogus Casey alibi, House investigators told me Emerson frequently visited the task force’s offices and advised Zeldin and others how to read the October Surprise evidence.

Subsequent examinations of Emerson’s peculiar brand of journalism (which invariably toed the Likud line and often demonized Muslims) revealed that Emerson had financial ties to right-wing funders such as Richard Mellon Scaife and had hosted right-wing Israeli intelligence commander Yigal Carmon when Carmon came to Washington to lobby against Middle East peace talks.

In 1999, a study of Emerson’s history by John F. Sugg for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting’s magazine “Extra!” quoted an Associated Press reporter who had worked with Emerson on a project as saying of Emerson and Carmon: “I have no doubt these guys are working together.”

The Jerusalem Post reported that Emerson has “close ties to Israeli intelligence.” And “Victor Ostrovsky, who defected from Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency and has written books disclosing its secrets, calls Emerson ‘the horn’ — because he trumpets Mossad claims,” Sugg reported.

Yet, the way Washington was working by the end of the 12-year Reagan-Bush-41 era, there was little interest in getting to the bottom of a difficult national security scandal. The House task force simply applied some fantastical logic, such as claiming that because someone wrote down Casey’s home phone number on another key date that proved he was at home, to conclude nothing had happened.

Between the House task force’s finding of “no credible evidence” and the subsequent ridicule heaped on the allegations by major U.S. news outlets, the October Surprise case was cast aside as a “conspiracy theory,” which is how it is still categorized by Washington’s insiders and by Wikipedia.

However, subsequent disclosures have revealed that a flood of new evidence incriminating the Republicans arrived at the House task force in its final weeks, in December 1992, so much so that chief counsel Lawrence Barcella says he recommended that task force chairman, Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Indiana, extend the investigation for several months. However, Barcella said Hamilton refused, citing procedural difficulties.

Instead, the incriminating evidence was simply kept from other task force members, and the investigation was shut down with a finding of Republican innocence. It even appears that a late-arriving report from the Russian government about its own intelligence on the case – corroborating allegations of a Republican-Iranian deal – was not even shown to Hamilton, the chairman.

When questioned this year, Hamilton told me he had no recollection of ever seeing the Russian report (though it was addressed to him) and Barcella added that he didn’t “recall whether I showed [Hamilton] the Russian report or not.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Key October Surprise Evidence Hidden.”]

According to other recent interviews, dissent within the task force over some of the irrational arguments being used to clear the Republicans was suppressed by Hamilton and Barcella. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Tricky October Surprise Report.”]  

In other words, Official Washington preferred to sweep this unpleasant scandal under the rug rather than confront the facts and their troubling implications.

Yet, with Reagan remaining a conservative icon and his anti-government policies still in vogue among millions of Americans – slashing taxes for the rich, weakening corporate regulations, rejecting alternative energy, and expanding the military budget – the lost history of this broader Iran-Contra scandal has turned out to be a case that what the country didn’t know did turn out to hurt it.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’ are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.   

Robert Parry is a frequent contributor to Global Research.  Global Research Articles by Robert Parry

Arianna Huffington | HuffPost | April 7, 2010 07:42 PM

The cliché tells us that you can’t judge a book by its cover. Agreed. But sometimes you can tell a lot about a book by the blurbs on its cover (and just inside the cover).

Such is the case with Simon Johnson and James Kwak’s 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown, this month’s HuffPost Book Club pick. You know a book is onto something when, even in these politically polarized times, and dealing with a hot button issue like financial reform, it features side-by-side praise from both Jim Bunning and Alan Grayson. Yes, that Jim Bunning, who says that the book “makes it clear why ending ‘too big to fail’ and reforming the institutions that perpetuate it… are essential for our nation’s future economic prosperity and, more fundamentally, our democratic system.” Clearly, the need to reform our out-of-control financial system is not a right vs. left issue. (Full disclosure: I also did a blurb for the book).

The book is also incredibly timely, with the Senate gearing up for a floor debate on Sen. Dodd’s financial reform bill when it returns from Easter break. While offering an in-depth explanation of the factors that led to the financial crisis — a crisis Johnson and Kwak prove beyond any doubt is not over — 13 Bankers has the immediacy and of-the-moment feel of a blog post, the sense that this is happening now.

Original Article

Oliver Stone: Military-Intelligence Complex Killed JFK

Oliver Stone | Huffington Post | Friday, July 24, 2009

JFK and the Unspeakable

The murder of President Kennedy was a seminal event for me and for millions of Americans. It changed the course of history. It was a crushing blow to our country and to millions of people around the world. It put an abrupt end to a period of a misunderstood idealism, akin to the spirit of 1989 when the Soviet bloc to began to thaw and 2008, when our new American President was fairly elected.

Today, more than 45 years later, profound doubts persist about how President Kennedy was killed and why. My film JFK was a metaphor for all those doubts, suspicions and unanswered questions. Now an extraordinary new book offers the best account I have read of this tragedy and its significance. That book is James Douglass’s JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters. It is a book that deserves the attention of all Americans; it is one of those rare books that, by helping us understand our history, has the power to change it.

The subtitle sums up Douglass’s purpose: Why He Died and Why it Matters. In his beautifully written and exhaustively researched treatment, Douglass lays out the “motive” for Kennedy’s assassination. Simply, he traces a process of steady conversion by Kennedy from his origins as a traditional Cold Warrior to his determination to pull the world back from the edge of destruction.

Read more…

And We Are All Mortal

Nick Anez | Amazon.com | June 8, 2008

In James W. Douglass’ outstanding new book, “JFK and the Unspeakable,” the author explains the title in his introduction. Coined by spiritual writer Thomas Merton, The Unspeakable refers to “an evil whose depth and deceit seemed to go beyond the capacity of words to describe.” Regarding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the Unspeakable succeeded due to deniability by the nation’s citizens of the horrifying truth of the event and to plausible deniability by the government agencies responsible for the murder. (Vincent Bugliosi’s recent fictional paperweight is a perfect example of the plausible deniability that allows the Unspeakable to thrive.)

Many excellent books have proven that the assassination of JFK was the result of a conspiracy. Douglass verifies the certainty of the conspiracy and, as the subtitle of the book states, explains “Why He Died and Why It Matters.” He scrutinizes the historical facts surrounding the assassination, from the creation of the CIA to the gradual obliteration of the freedoms upon which this nation was founded.

This book is primarily the story of John F. Kennedy who changes from a Cold Warrior to an altruistic leader willing to risk his life to ensure that the world’s children will not become victims of a nuclear catastrophe. Equal time is spent on JFK’s presidency as on the assassination but one of the many rewards of this book is the author’s capacity to show the relationship between his policies and his death. And the book is a tragedy because it gradually becomes obvious that each step he makes toward peace steadily increases the hatred of his enemies who will eventually betray him.

It is also the story of the designated patsy, Lee Harvey Oswald. Moved around the country like a pawn by government agencies (as was the second “Oswald”), he was being set up as the scapegoat. Enter some despicable characters, including David Atlee Philips, James Hosty and, of course, Michael and Ruth Paine. Simultaneously, the Soviet Union was being set up as the evil empire behind the assassination, along with its satellite Cuba.

Douglass credibly illustrates the origin of the Crime of the Century. During President Truman’s administration, the CIA was empowered to be a paramilitary organization with unlimited powers. Truman’s successor, President Eisenhower, fell out of favor with the CIA when he planned a summit meeting with Soviet Premier Khrushchev. This was cancelled after a U.S. spy plane crashed in Russia. Eisenhower had reportedly ordered such flights cancelled and had his suspicions about who had ruined his peace plan. He subsequently issued his warning about the “military industrial complex” in his farewell address. But he didn’t defy “this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry.” He left that task to his successor, JFK.

The Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba was planned by the CIA to regain control of the island and to re-open the casinos for organized crime. President Kennedy refused to provide air support for the Cuban brigade because he knew that he had been lied to by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and by the CIA; the invasion had been designed to fail without U.S. support but they hadn’t told this to JFK who refused to fall into their trap. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK once again enraged the CIA and the Joint Chiefs by resisting their tremendous pressure on him to take military action which would have led to nuclear war.

Following that crisis, JFK became intent on ending the Cold War by establishing a peaceful relationship with the Soviet Union. However, many CIA and Pentagon personnel believed that it was better to be “dead than red” and that it was preferable to destroy civilization rather than let the Communists rule. They also knew that war generated billions of dollars into the arms industry. As a result, they would repeatedly subvert the President’s policies and isolate him within his own government. Enter some more despicable characters: Richard Bissell, Charles Cabell, Henry Cabot Lodge, Lyman Lemnitzer, Curtis LeMay and perhaps the most contemptible of all, Allen Dulles. Ironically, JFK learned to trust Khrushchev more than people within his own government.

At American University on June 10, 1963, JFK spoke about his desire for world peace. He communicated his resolve to form a new relationship with Khrushchev. He spoke about the necessity of a pursuit toward disarmament. He related his intentions to establish a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. He acknowledged his country’s past faults and recognized the Russian people as wanting peace as much as the American people. “And we are all mortal,” he stated. Though this extremely important speech was ignored in the United States, it was disseminated throughout the Soviet Union, per order of Khrushchev, who was prepared to respond favorably to JFK’s peace initiative. The speech also certified JFK’s death warrant. With so many powerful enemies opposing his policies and hating him, JFK didn’t have a chance as he was being maneuvered into the crossfire in Dallas.

President Kennedy was aware of the power of his enemies and he knew the dangers facing him. But he persevered and mandated that all U.S. personnel would be withdrawn from Vietnam; he was determined to never send in combat troops even if this meant defeat. He also refused to intervene militarily in Laos. He exchanged private letters with Khrushchev, which infuriated the CIA, and secretly initiated plans to attain rapproachement with Cuba, which further incensed the Agency. Cuba’s Fidel Castro, whom the CIA hated as intensely as it hated Kennedy, was equally eager to begin an American-Cuba dialogue. In fact, Castro was meeting with a JFK representative when the President was murdered. JFK died a martyr and the forces of evil that killed him also killed his vision of peace.

Lyndon Johnson, the CIA’s ally, assumed the presidency. He cancelled talks with Khrushchev and refused Castro’s pleas to continue the dialogue. He reversed JFK’s withdrawal plan from Vietnam as well as his plan to neutralize Laos. The military industrial complex took control of the country. The policy of plausible deniability led the way to assassinations of foreign leaders, the overthrowing of foreign governments and horrors committed all over the globe. If JFK had not been murdered, we would not have had the prolongation of the Cold War, the Vietnam War, Watergate, the purported War on Terror and the steady moral deterioration of America. Interestingly, one month after JFK’s assassination, President Truman wrote an article for The Washington Post cautioning about the threat of the CIA taking over America.

The author meticulously examines the evidence and draws conclusions which ring with unassailable truth: (1) The CIA coordinated and implemented he assassination of President Kennedy, an act of treason which destroyed democracy in the U.S. (2) The Warren Commission was created to propagate lies to conceal the truth from the American people. (3)There has been a continued cover-up by successive administrations and their stooges in the mass media. (4)The murder of JFK is directly related to the current domination of the American people by powerful oppressors within a shadow government that will continue to insist that only sustained war can keep the country safe from its enemies, never admitting that they themselves are the supreme evil.

This is an exceptional book that will be used by future historians to determine the truth about the assassination and how it changed America. And it will also be used to honor John F. Kennedy as a courageous president who believed in doing God’s work on earth. In doing so, he came into conflict with the Unspeakable and his life was extinguished.

JFK – 1/2 – Rare Seen Pictures Of The Shooter

JFK – 2/2 – Eyewitnesses Running After The Shooter

RFK to JFK: “You’re going to be assassinated”

LBJ’s phone call to Parkland Hospital

Immediately after Oswald was shot by Ruby, LBJ called Parkland Hospital and demanded that a “deathbed confession” be taken from Oswald.

The account was originally revealed by Dr. Charles Crenshaw, who was subjected to ridicule, but who was later vindicated by Parkland’s Chief Switchboard Operator, Phyllis Bartlett.

Did LBJ “let” JFK die ?

Did Johnson’s desire for the Presidency and his foreknowledge of the assassination result in his “allowing” JFK to die ?

JFK TREASON – LBJ’s MISTRESS BLOWS WHISTLE ON LBJ

by Edward Curtin

Global Research, November 25, 2009

Despite a treasure-trove of new information having emerged over the last forty-six years, there are many people who still think who killed President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and why are unanswerable questions. There are others who cling to the Lee Harvey Oswald “lone-nut” explanation proffered by the Warren Commission. Both groups agree, however, that whatever the truth, it has no contemporary relevance but is old-hat, history, stuff for conspiracy-obsessed people with nothing better to do. The general thinking is that the assassination occurred almost a half-century ago, so let’s move on.

Nothing could be further from the truth, as James Douglass shows in his extraordinary book, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters (Orbis Books, 2008). It is clearly one of the best books ever written on the Kennedy assassination and deserves a vast readership. It is bound to roil the waters of complacency that have submerged the truth of this key event in modern American history.

It’s not often that the intersection of history and contemporary events pose such a startling and chilling lesson as does the contemplation of the murder of JFK on November 22, 1963 juxtaposed with the situations faced by President Obama today. So far, at least, Obama’s behavior has mirrored Johnson’s, not Kennedy’s, as he has escalated the war in Afghanistan by 34,000. One can’t but help think that the thought of JFK’s fate might not be far from his mind as he contemplates his next move in Afghanistan.

[Read more...]