"A Dog and Pony Show"
Sander Hicks interviews John Judge, Co-Director of the 9/11 Citizens Watch

Judge is also active in the Coalition on Political Assassinations (COPA) founded 1994; and Washington Peace Center ("it’s the oldest US peace center", "founded ’58" "Started at protests at Fort Detrick against US’s chemical and biological weapons.")

Interview Conducted 12/22/03 at Pistone’s Italian Restaurant, Falls Church, VA

SH: Let’s start with Governor Kean, the head of the 9/11 Commission. Last week, he told CBS, "Do you want to know what my dream is? We're gonna be reporting at the end of May. The two great political parties are having their conventions shortly after that. – My dream is that we make meaningful recommendations and those recommendations become a large part of those two parties' platforms. Because if they do, then we'll really be able to get some action, and we won't be a commission that just sits on the shelf."

JJ: [laughing]: Well, they’re sitting on lots of information, I don’t know about the shelf. The May deadline was related to the election calendar. This commission was ill-conceived, obstructed from the beginning, under-funded. They boosted the funding some but it’s nowhere near what they spent on the shuttle investigation. That was $55 million, this is like $12 million. What? Seven deaths get $55 million and 3,000 get $12 million? It’s disproportionate to what this really means. They haven’t in our view been doing the kind of investigative work they need to do, they haven’t been taking testimony under oath….

SH: I read today that if the evidence is factually-based, and if the witness is not a President, they do take the testimony under oath….

JJ: They may have in private, but at least in the public testimony they haven’t.

SH: Condoleeza Rice is reportedly nervous to testify in public under oath.

JJ: Well, Kean told us that not having them under oath would make them more forthcoming. Because then they wouldn’t be as nervous and wouldn’t bring their lawyers. It’s clear from what he says that they’re focused on recommendations. The panels that they’ve announced between now and May are all policy-related panels, until the end, and then the panels at the end are NORAD/FAA and what happened on 9/11. But don’t you think you need to know what happened on 9/11 before you formulate all your policies?

SH: Kean was promising January was going to be aggressive….

JJ: They had two very significant panels already, one on the structure of US Intelligence, they were proposing either a intelligence czar at the White House, or a MI5 style domestic spy agency. And then, they just had one on security and civil liberties. Part of our concern is that the people invited to these panel hearings are almost entirely ex- or current intelligence people, almost nobody from the outside advocacy sector. Can you imagine having a thing on civil liberties and security and not inviting the ACLU? But that’s what they did. The testimony they’re getting is not broad enough. I mean, maybe for their policy purposes and what they want to get out of it. But it’s just a dog and pony show. We really first need to get at what actually happened that day. Who was behind it. It’s just like when you go into the Warren Commission, and you have five areas of inquiry, who was Oswald, who was Ruby, who was this and that but you don’t have "Who Shot Kennedy." They’ve already had a panel on "Who are the terrorists" which was all about Al Qaeda. So they’re investigating the official line of the assumptions.

SH: You were saying yesterday to me on the phone about how Lee Hamilton responds to you often, "I don’t agree with your premise."

JJ: "Well what’s your premise", that’s my response. What are these guys’ premises?

SH: How did he use that?

JJ: One of the times he used it was with Danny Schecter, the film maker, who said there had been reports between Al Qaeda and US intelligence. He went on to ask if the Commission was going to look into that history. Hamilton said, "I don’t agree with your premise." Schechter said, "I didn’t know I had a premise." Hamilton said "Allegations of connections sounds like a premise to me."
What does that mean? I question your premise, you question mine, now are we going to have a discussion? How is that not a way to talk about something? What part of my premise do you question and why? That’s what I said to Kean. He said "There are a lot of theories out there and some of them are wrong." I said "Which ones are wrong and why?" He said, "Oh well, we’d have to finish the investigation before we knew that." Well then why did you bring it up? The Families are pretty frustrated, they have these interim reports released, and they don’t release any substance. Even the Joint Inquiry wouldn’t do that.

SH: Do you think the Commission has some substance to release? Or is it that they haven’t done that kind of work?

JJ: I think they do.

SH: Based on what?

JJ: They do have investigative teams that have been looking into things. I don’t know if they’ve gotten to the truth, but I’m sure they’ve gotten to something. And this reluctance to like, spit it all out at us? And then disappear? We look at who are they calling in public, and what are they doing, what leads are they pursuing? Maybe you don’t want to put all your cards out on the table, I can understand that. But at the very least, the hard forensic and photographic evidence should be released to the public, so we can do our own analysis of it.

SH: The 9/11 Citizens Watch has a good relationship to the 9/11 victims’ families?

JJ: Yes. We have a Family Liaison Group. The families come up to me often afterwards at hearings and say "good questions." We back them up, too, they take a position, it’s usually similar to ours. They’re on our list, they get all our material. We have liaisons through the Families for Peaceful Tomorrows.

SH: More on the subject of what the Commission should be looking at that they’re not looking at? What about Dave Frasca at the FBI? According to a recent speech I was at by Mike Ruppert, Dave Frasca was the guy who destroyed FBI Al Qaeda records, he sat on the Phoenix Memo, he also ignored the Minneapolis investigation, blocking the warrant that Coleen Rowlely wanted to get on Moussaoi. And then after 9/11 he got promoted to #2 in charge of domestic terrorism at the FBI.

JJ: Because he had done such a good job before.

SH: Right. Has the Commission called Frasca?

JJ: Not that we’re aware of. They’re being so secretive with me that I asked them the other day for them to give me the names and phone numbers of the heads of the six investigative teams and they said "we don’t release any information about our staff." This is a Federal Commission! I said "This is paid for by tax dollars, you’re not going to give me information about your staff?"

SH: And you’re not just Joe Schmoe, you’re representing a citizens group dedicated to monitoring and trying to be helpful.

JJ: We sat down with Zelikow and Felzenberg at one point and said, we want a more formal relationship with the Commission, and Zelikow, beamingly informed us that "We’re exempt from the Federal Advisory Committee Act, so we don’t have to."

SH: What’s the the Federal Advisory Committee Act?

JJ: There’s an Act that says when Federal investigations happen on topics and there are interested parties, you should have an Advisory Committee made up of those people

SH: And they said "we don’t have to play by those rules?"

JJ: The way they wrote the legislation, they’re exempt from that, and they’re also exempt from the Freedom of Information Act! I asked a lawyer and he said it’s because they’re Congressional, they’re not executive. FOIA is only for Executive records.

SH: So you really have no recourse?

JJ: They’ve accommodated the Families to some extent, they’ve hired a Family Liaison, and they’re bringing them in. But the meetings are frustrating for the families, they don’t get any information, they just get snookered. You’ve got a problem of it being underfunded and understaffed and time-limited, then you’ve got a problem with the Agencies not being cooperative and releasing the files, probably not cooperating in terms of testimony either. You’ve got a third level of problem in that the Commissioners, at least, and probably some of the investigative staff too, I’ve heard, are compromised in different ways. The Families complain that a number of people on the Commission have ties to the Airline industry, which was certainly one of their targets. And then, most of the people on the Commission have ties to earlier flawed investigations into government corruption, or intelligence in general. And ties of course to military/industrial and military/intelligence complex.

SH: Can you be more specific on that?

JJ: Well, John Lehman, former Secretary of the Navy, has a history of a lot of corporate and Pentagon inter-relation. Kean himself is tied in with the National Endowment on Democracy, which replaced the US A.I.D. as the cover for covert operations abroad. He also has some personal investments in companies that link him to Salem bin Laden. Ben-Veniste was White House Counsel [for Clinton]. Jamie Gorelick was on the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board [under Clinton]. Lee Hamilton presided over the flawed Contragate investigation that didn’t go far enough.

SH: On the Kerry Commission?

JJ: He was on an intelligence commission in the White House. They very severely limited how far Congress was going to go.

SH: Isn’t is ironic that Bob Kerrey is also former Senate Intelligence Committee?

JJ: And Kerrey was also the one who was pooh-poohing the CIA/Contra/crack cocaine investigation and got in the way of it and was rude to people about it. A former war criminal with the [Navy] SEALS and the killing of these civilians [in Vietnam], and was also on the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which ties in tightly with the Project for a New American Century, and all the neo-cons in the White House now.

SH: It’s ironic that a Democrat would be a part of that?

JJ: [laughing] Is that what you call it? "Ironic?" I thought it was standard fare. The Washington Post said it was "ironic" that Neal Bush that going to have dinner with Scott Hinckley the night after the Reagan shooting.

SH: The night after.

JJ: Yeah, so, they cancelled their plans….

SH: Newsweek printed that with a headline with "For Conspiracy Buffs Only" spinning it as "this is kooky."

JJ: They way you discount conspiracy is you put out the facts and say, "Now this will probably be taken as a conspiracy."

...

SH: If you could get the 9/11 Commission to Pursue 3 Lines of Inquiry, what would your questions be? Would you start with the FAA and NORAD?

JJ: Yes, but I would not call the the FAA/NORAD top brass at the Pentagon, I would call the pilots. I would call the base commanders, people on the horn at the air traffic controllers, in the FAA and the specific officials in NORAD headquarters. I would find which planes were "taskable", [i.e. able to be assigned to scramble and intercept wayward commercial aircraft] and why this wasn’t done. Why a plane was called back, why the Otis [Air Force Base] pilots when they turned to intercept Flight 77, which they knew about and New York was already hit, they turned to get 77 and they were called back.

SH: What’s #2?

JJ: The second thing I would do would be hearings about Bin Laden, about Bin Laden, Al Qaeda and the US intelligence connection.

SH: Back to the Mujahedin….

JJ: And whether they call in the academics, like John Cooley, or Peter Dale Scott, or the people that have done the historical research on it, or perhaps some current or former intelligence agents, around that operation and Casey’s off-the-shelf operations for that period, the 90’s out, including Contragate. Because the funding for Contragate and the Mujadedin is the same, half of it comes through Saudi Arabia through BCCI, and the other half comes from CIA and drug money either directly or through Pakistani intelligence. And the fact that Mohammed Atta was living with an Iran/Contra pilot is not a negligible fact to me.

SH: What pilot was that?

JJ: I don’t remember his name but it was in the Sarasota papers, at the time that he got the $100,000

SH: What’s #3?

JJ: If I had a third major area to go after, I guess at this point since they’re doing policy stuff it would be the Civil Liberties question. I’d re-air a hearing on that and people that are concerned with Civil Liberties would get a say.

SH: People with credentials, like the ACLU….

JJ: I mean, there are other pieces you could do, the Bush Family connections come up, the forewarnings, because not only did they have warnings and indications that this was a possibility, or an imminent possibility that summer, they had specific forewarnings, the Mayor of San Francisco was told by his security people not to fly that day. MS-NBC and Newsweek were told by Pentagon Brass not to fly that day. Rumsfeld and Ashcroft about a month ahead cancelled any commercial flights and announced they were doing that. On what basis were these forewarnings given? Track them down. Who knew and what did they know? The forewarnings are even more specific.

Now, some people focus on the unfinished investigation, well it’s not unfinished on the FBI side because they say it doesn’t mean anything, but the unfinished investigation of these put options. I never followed that that closely or put that much stock in it.

SH: Ruppert does.

JJ: Yeah, Ruppert and Kyle did.

SH: Andreas Von Bulow, the former German member of Parliament, said it the put options resulted in gains of $14 billion.

JJ: It well could be. They are things that to me, don’t necessarily highlight government complicity, though they would be interesting to know. If you could show the people….I mean it just as well could be that the people planning it that invested in it, we just don’t know. The SEC as far as we know never finished the investigation although the FBI says they investigated it and there’s nothing there.

SH: Buzzy Krongard was the head of ABBrown, Deutschbank…

JJ: Three years before.

SH: yeah….

JJ: I mean he wasn’t current at the time they were doing it.

SH: And now he’s #3 at the CIA.

JJ: And he did have a previous relationship to the Bank, I’m aware of that. But it’s just the bank, it’s not his personal investment, these banks put the money through on behalf of somebody else, and that’s why you have to have a SEC investigation, to figure that out. We would call for the SEC investigation to finish and then be transparent. It’s a potential lead but it’s one that I can’t follow on my own, it’s one the government has to follow.

Similarly, there are questions about whether the buildings were imploded, or whether they fell down from the airplane crash and the fuel exploding. Again, I don’t know but at the same time, I don’t know whether the same people who flew the planes into the buildings put explosives in the buildings, they put explosives in the buildings before. In and of itself it doesn’t tell me…I mean a lot of people say, ‘Well if that’s true then it has to be an inside job.’ Not necessarily. Somebody has to pay off their cousin, but….

So what we’ve tried to go after on Citizen’s Watch are the hard questions that can’t be brushed away. They also can’t be easily answered without doing an investigation, but then also to investigate it, not by asking the NORAD brass, who have the most invested in covering it up, but by asking the people on the bottom, at the mechanical level, each piece of this. The background of these guys would yield to more information. Like Hopsicker’s been doing down there, you go into detail about who knew them, lived around them. And now he’s coming and saying the FBI was apparently coming out and telling these people to shut up. That’s an old pattern. We know that from the Kennedy assassination, the FBI going around and telling people, don’t tell anybody. This guy Hoffman was a deaf/mute, he was across the highway [in Dallas that day], saw guys with rifles up on the grassy knoll, disassembling rifles and putting them down the sewer, after the shooting. The FBI said to him, "don’t talk to anybody about it." The guy’s a deaf/mute!

That kind of intimidation doesn’t come with a real investigation.

[interrupted briefly by a citizen reading a far-right newspaper who commented on what he had overheard of Judge’s comments]

JJ: That’s how I got a lot of my information over the years, is that I’d give a lecture and people’d come up to me and say, my father did this, my uncles did this. If we would tell the history of our own families, the whole thing would fall apart.

JJ: Mae Brussell was a mentor to me. I knew her for about 20 years. We worked together. I picked up on her first article that came out in the Realist: "Why Was Martha Mitchell Kidnapped?" It had a small connection at the end about how Nixon came to power, and Nixon’s Nazi connections. I had been working on some of the Nazi stuff, in relation to JFK so I called her and we started collaborating. I brought her to my school to speak, about once a week I would call her, I was flipping the Post and the New York Times, I would give her information that I was getting on what stories were breaking, like Watergate. She was an inspiration to me, she really worked indefatiguable, she clipped 15 daily newspapers, 50 periodicals a month, read 300 books a year, and broke it all down into a radio show she called "World Watchers" she based it on "Weight Watchers" and thought that other housewives like her would start clipping and sharing the data and having little clubs. As it turned out, I was the only one who would gather a little group every time a tape came out and we’d listen to it. We called ourselves "Brussellsprouts." It was a rewarding relation. She had such energy flowing through her. She cross reference-indexed the entire Warren Report, 1800 pages in all these folders. She recognized the people so well she could watch them move. She called and passed a note to Rose Kennedy five days before Bobby Kennedy was shot, saying the people who killed your son John are moving on Bobby. She called Mary Jo Kopechne’s parents three days before Chapaquidick and said, "They’re going to murder your daughter." And she said to me later, "I shouldn’t have said that I’m a conspiracy researcher, I should have said that I was a psychic, then they’d all love me, like Jean Dixon."

JJ: Mae cracked the code in the Kennedy Assassination because once she did the cross-referencing she could see who knew each other and who positioned Oswald as a patsy who was around him and who was behind him. It was this network of White Russian and Nazi "Solidarists" they called themselves, the East Euro. Revanchists, the rich who had lost their fortunes in the Russian Revolution, the beginnings of the Axis. They marshaled funds, a lot through Herbert Hoover, they used Hitler as a patsy, they drove into the Soviet Union….A lot of people around Oswald were people in that circle who had intelligence ties, and helped to set him up to kill Kennedy, because Kennedy wanted détente with the Soviet Union. She had seen Kennedy killed, she liked Kennedy, had voted for him. She was from the I. Magnins family the department stores in Los Angeles.

[Fragments from earlier in the interview, not as important to the 9/11 investigation story, but well worth reading:]

JJ:

"Anthrax — didn’t come from abroad, the trail led to door of Ft. Detrick and then it stopped. They realized from its DNA signature that it was Ames screen-which means U. of Iowa, which had an archive of all the known pathenogenic strains of anthrax….if you inhale [this strain] it’s a lot more lethal…. People would order various strains from them in order to work on cures for it or work to weaponize it. Once they identified it as Ames strain, it would have been possible to go back to Ames and figure out which particular batch this came from and then that batch would have had a paper trail of who had ordered that batch, but 10 days before the first Anthrax envelope was mailed, (this was recorded by the NY Times, and this was called a "bungling" of the investigation) FBI contacted the U. at Ames and convinced them to destroy the entire 70 year archive. So, there’s absolutely no paper trail left. But there is information in the public record info about Project Jefferson and Operation Clear Vision, both running in year up to 9/11 reported on September 4th and 5th, it was a international scandal, USA was doing projects and experiments with chemical and biological elements that violated international treaties that the US had signed. They claimed that they had to because something similar was going on in Russia. Project Jefferson was first ordered by Rumsfeld when he came in to Pentagon, he tasked the DIA to generate the next generation of Anthrax. Anthrax should be genetically altered to be more resistant to the normal antibiotics (which was the case with this), and more weaponized, more distributable. [At the Anthrax attacks this stuff ] …was weaponized at a level they had never seen. In other words, the earlier weaponization had gotten it down to 2 or 3 billion spores per gram, this was over a trillion spores per gram. It was a very lethal weapon. It couldn’t have been developed by some guy in a lab. But on September the 9th, two days before the attack, the DIA held a press conference here in DC and announced they had developed the next generation of anthrax. Also, right on 9/11 the White House staff was told to go on Cipro. There was also a huge contract with Bioport, who put that out right before the attack. The Peace Center began when all this was a twinkle in some geneticist’s eye.

SH: What are your conclusions about Anthrax?

JJ:

Well, I think that this was another domestic terrorist attack that had the signature of US intelligence, or military intelligence on it. I think that that’s where people have been reluctant to look.

SH:

You have told me you doubt the "Monarch Program" existed, but what about the factual evidence about the US Government’s MK-ULTRA program, and mind control?

JJ: There was a letter from Allen Dulles to Earl Warren responding to a query from Warren about suspicions that Oswald might have been programmed in the Soviet Union, because he went into for a mastoid operation on his ear and spent too many days in the hospital. Dulles wrote back and said "we have had an ongoing program of psychological manipulation for political control since the late 1940s" So, I believe they already had Manchurian Candidate capability coming out of WW II. Landsdale, who many people link to the Kennedy assassination, and Nelson Rockefeller, were intimately involved in ONI and other military intelligence programs on mind control.

****

JJ:

….G.H.W. Bush’s first big job in Texas was with Dresser Industries, DI, a subsidiary of Halliburton, and then there’s Kellogg, Brown & Root. Brown and Root, when it was an independent company, was George Brown who paid the way for LBJ all the way to the Presidency. When LBJ reversed Kennedy’s war policy, Brown & Root made $4 billion on construction of Cameroon Bay and all the construction companies in Viet Nam. And similarly, Brown & Root under Halliburton is making big money under Cheney’s investment package that sits there, you know, "blind trust" but not so blind they don’t know to give Halliburton a sweet heart deal. And then when Halliburton recently overcharges on this gas, Bush says, "Well if they did, they’ll have to pay it back." Is that what you say to a bank robber? I mean, some could go to jail for that sort of thing, they could certainly have their contract cancelled, they could also pay the money back, and they’re not allowed have future contracts. But all he says is slap their hand, oh they’ll have to pay it back. What world do they live in? They live in a world in which the law means nothing. Except when they want to kill you and then it’s "bring them to justice." [about Iraq] "We’ll either bring them to justice, or we’ll bring justice to them. Wanted Dead or Alive" was the first thing out of his mouth about 9/11 which is the posse [mentality], that has nothing to with justice. Things are so perverse, you have people on the radio saying, "given the crimes Saddam committed, he should be given a fair trail and then be executed." Hello? It’s like Alice in Wonderland, "‘first the sentence, then the evidence’ said the Queen."