More KSM Trial Komedy Kapers
This propaganda does double-duty--goes to eleven, as it were. Not only will the masses who accept the official story be drawn to a fake account of the 9/11 plot that they will mistakenly associate with fact, fake truthers will be able to cream themselves at the mere mention of John O'Neill, the "man who knew it all".
9/11 Trial Officers Explain “Ransacking” of Legal Documents
February 15, 2013, 5:44 pm ET by Arun Rath
Some light was shed yesterday on the apparent “ransacking” of legal materials from defendants in the 9/11 trial.
Lt. Commander George A. Massucco, assistant to the Staff Judge Advocate at Guantanamo Bay, produced the materials, which he said were seized as part of Standard Operating Procedures to maintain safety at the prison facility.
Massucco testified that some of the materials had been confiscated because they were improperly stamped. Legal mail is marked with a stamp when approved, but the stamps need to be dated and initialed, markings which were missing from some of the documents. He said other materials were seized because they “were disturbing,” and the staff was “concerned for safety reasons” the material would remain in cell.
Among the items in that category were three books in the possession of co-defendant Ramzi bin-al-Shibh: The 9/11 Commission Report, Perfect Soldiers: The 9/11 Hijackers: Who They Were, Why They Did It by Terry McDermott, andThe Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda by Ali Soufan. Massucco said he could not account for three pages of legal material bin-al-Shibh’s lawyer, James Harrington, said were also missing.
Among the materials taken from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s cell was toilet paper with writing on it, and a metal pen refill hidden in the binding of a book. All the items except Black Banners and the pen refill were to be returned.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/iraq-war-on-terror/911-trial-off...
FRONTLINE > Iraq / War on Terror >
CIA Demands Heavy Cuts in Former FBI Agent’s Memoir
August 26, 2011, 11:29 am ET by Sarah Moughty
The CIA is pushing for heavy redactions in the memoir of a former FBI agent, Ali Soufan, who was at the center of many of the war on terror’s biggest controversies. According to The New York Times, some of the cuts, which the agency has demanded on national security grounds, describe episodes already in the public record:
Among them, according to the people who have seen the correspondence, is a phrase from Mr. Soufan’s 2009 testimony at a Senate hearing, freely available both as video and transcript on the Web. Also chopped are references to the word “station” to describe the C.I.A.’s overseas offices, common parlance for decades.
The agency removed the pronouns “I” and “me” from a chapter in which Mr. Soufan describes his widely reported role in the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, an important terrorist facilitator and training camp boss. And agency officials took out references to the fact that a passport photo of one of the 9/11 hijackers who later lived in San Diego, Khalid al-Midhar, had been sent to the CIA in January 2000 — an episode described both in the 9/11 commission report and Mr. Tenet’s book.
As one of only eight Arabic-speaking FBI agents, Soufan was involved in the interrogations of several Al Qaeda leaders, as well as Zubaydah. According to the Times, Soufan gives “a detailed firsthand account of the CIA’s move toward brutal treatment in its interrogations, saying the harsh methods used on [Zubaydah] were unnecessary and counterproductive” — the same words he used in a 2009 op-ed in which he said that “enhanced interrogation techniques” failed to stop “even a single imminent threat of terrorism.”
Known as one of the FBI’s top experts on Al Qaeda, Soufan also was deeply involved in the investigations of the 1998 East African embassy bombings and the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. He was a protege of former FBI Agent John O’Neill, the maverick FBI agent who was the subject of our 2002 film The Man Who Knew. O’Neill warned for years of Al Qaeda’s threat before leaving the FBI in the summer of 2001 to become head of security at the World Trade Center, where he died on 9/11.
Soufan’s book, The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda, is scheduled to come out on Sept. 12.
FRONTLINE will have a rare televised interview with Soufan airing on Tuesday, Sept. 13.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/iraq-war-on-terror/cia-demands-h...
Watch The Interrogator on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.
How Sketchy WAS John O'Neill? Very Sketchy.
O'Neill Versus Osama
Most of the victims of the September 11 attack seemed tragically random -- they were just going to work. Not John O'Neill. Until last August, he'd been the FBI's top expert on Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, a lead investigator of the USS Cole and African embassy bombings. Leaving the Bureau in frustration, he'd taken a job he thought of as retirement: World Trade Center security chief. But when he died it became clear: His own life contained as many mysteries as his enemy's.
By Robert Kolker
Dec 17, 2001 issue of New York
Monday night, we're going out, and I'll show you what you've been missing, ex-FBI agent John P. O'Neill told his friend Jerry Hauer. On O'Neill's overloaded social calendar, Mondays were reserved for Elaine's, where he was a charter member of the famously clubby crime-fighting crowd that included such legends as Bill Bratton and the late Jack Maple. His street cred carried a lot of weight, even with that group: For most of the past decade, O'Neill had been the FBI's foremost expert on Osama bin Laden. He'd been the public face of the New York field office since 1997, leading the investigation into the African embassy bombings and last year's USS Cole attack in Yemen. But his bluff, aggressive style had apparently alienated some of his superiors, and his career had stalled.
Jerry Hauer, the city's first terrorism czar under Rudy Giuliani, had just helped guide O'Neill to a soft landing in the private sector -- chief of security for the World Trade Center. The job, which could reach $300,000 with bonus, had cushioned the blow considerably. So for O'Neill, Monday, September 10, was a night to celebrate.
A typical night out with O'Neill had three or four stages. This one started with drinks at Windows on the World with his friend Robert Tucker, a former Queens assistant D.A., talking about whom he might hire at the World Trade Center. They moved on to a front table at Elaine's, where, as usual, he was noticed. "I knew he had left the FBI, so I grabbed him and said, 'John, are you okay?' " says Wallace Millard, a cop turned security expert who spotted him from a neighboring table. "He said, 'Wally, I'm the best. I've got a job that pays me three times what I got.' "
Hauer joined the party at 9:30, and they chatted about what they knew -- terrorism, security, the '93 attack on the Trade towers, the years when Hauer and O'Neill had worked closely together on bio-terror-defense strategies, the likelihood of another assault on the city. Weeks earlier, O'Neill had told one friend, "They'll never stop trying to take down those two buildings."
And as he led the charge out of Elaine's to Stage 3 at the China Club, his friends remember John O'Neill looking over and saying, "At least on my watch, I can say that there was never a terrorist attack in New York City."
'We were laughing that morning," remembers Valerie James, his girlfriend of eleven years. For once, John was in his own eleven-year-old Buick LeSabre, not a Bureau car, so he was permitted to drop her off at her job as sales director for the fashion line Sunny Choi.
He'd made it home from China Club at 2:30 -- typical -- but he was up now, and happy, and ready to take her to an 8:15 meeting she had for Fashion Week before heading to his office on the thirty-fourth floor of the north tower. "He was in a really good mood that day," James says.
James heard about the attack on the radio; it wasn't until 9:17 that a call finally came from John.
"There are body parts everywhere," he shouted. "Do you know what hit it?"James said the radio said it was a 747.
"I'll call you in a little bit," he said.
O'Neill also spoke to his 29-year-old son, J.P., who had taken the train in to visit his father at his new job but had made it only as far as Saint Vincent's Hospital. "As soon as you make it down here," he told him, "call me and I'll come and get you."
One FBI agent remembers talking with O'Neill in the lobby of Tower One, helping the Bureau and the Fire Department set up a command center. O'Neill asked him if they really got the Pentagon. He was last seen walking in the general direction of Tower Two minutes before it collapsed. His body was found a week later; it isn't clear where exactly he died. But what's not in question, at least among those who knew him, is that even before the second plane hit, O'Neill must have understood who had done it.
"I'm sure he knew who was responsible," says Teddy Leb, a friend and fan of O'Neill's who heads a foundation for law-enforcement officers. "I know that he must have been mad as hell. He must have been thinking, How in the world could we have allowed this to happen?"
In death, John O'Neill has become something bigger than he was in life -- a human embodiment of unheeded warnings. Here was a man who had studied and understood bin Laden, the cycles of his attacks, the escalation of the deaths, but whose arguments weren't followed up by government action. This had much to do with bureaucratic inertia, but it also, undoubtedly, had something to do with O'Neill -- his aggressiveness, his charisma, the fact that he didn't fit the mold of the standard-issue FBI agent.
For him, the real job started after five; his friends were his contacts, his contacts his friends. He was the only agent who could be found smoking Dominican cigars with De Niro on Tommy Mottola's yacht one night and introducing Scotland Yard spooks to the China Club's VIP level the next. He'd invariably be dressed in dark-blue pin-striped Burberry suits with white shirts and ties, his jet-black hair slicked back, his feet in size 91/2 Bruno Magli shoes, his ear to his cell phone, his hands fiddling with a BlackBerry with intelligence contacts organized by country -- Saudi Arabia, Yemen, England, Spain, France -- many of whom he'd escort to Elaine's when they came to town.
Those friends brought him intelligence that no one else in the Bureau could nail down. "You could see that come home to roost in the investigations," says U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White, whose summary arguments in the embassy-bombings case against bin Laden and others are packed with evidence that O'Neill unearthed. "John went at it comprehensively, yielding things from people in London or people in Yemen we never otherwise would have gotten."
His expertise on bin Laden was unquestioned. He took that expertise personally, and had no trouble correcting anyone, above or below him. "He was the paramount, most knowledgeable agent we had in the FBI, probably in the government, with respect to counterintelligence matters," says Louis Freeh.
"The answer would often be 'Check with John O'Neill,' " says Janet Reno. "When I walked into the room and saw John O'Neill there, I was always pleased, because I always knew I would get a reasoned analysis. He had a powerful command."
It was a life he'd chosen. As a kid, growing up in a fourth-floor walk-up in Atlantic City, O'Neill fixed in on Efrem Zimbalist Jr. in The F.B.I.
He worked part-time at FBI headquarters while at a community college in Virginia, then at American University, then at George Washington University, where he went for a forensic-science master's, all while working as a fingerprinting clerk and tour guide.
He joined the Bureau in the seventies, tracking governmental fraud, white-collar crime, and organized crime in Baltimore and as the field-office chief in Chicago. In 1995, he was reborn again when the Bureau brought him back to Washington as the section chief for counterterrorism. It was there that he became an expert in Islamic-fundamentalist extremism. And when he came to New York in 1997, it was the realization of plans he and James had made years earlier in Chicago. O'Neill, ever the striver, wasted no time recasting himself as a New York operator, buddying up with people like Jerry Hauer and Howard Safir, local law-enforcement leaders who weren't natural allies with the FBI until O'Neill came along.
Last year, ABC reporter John Miller, the Joey Bishop of the crime-fighting Rat Pack, was sitting alone in a Middle East cantina when he heard O'Neill's swaggery voice boom from behind him, "So is this the Elaine's of Yemen?"
Of course, not every late-night phone call was Bureau business. He had a wife in Linwood, New Jersey, Christine O'Neill, whom he'd married in 1971, though the two had been living apart since he moved to Chicago in 1991. There was the girlfriend, Valerie James, he'd lived with in Chicago and now here, and the children from both relationships who all looked to him as a father. The liaisons didn't stop there. "He was living with Valerie, he had another girlfriend in Washington, and he was dating someone else here in New York," says one close friend. "Before his death, they didn't know about each other."
Among his New York friends, some jaws dropped in astonishment that the widow at O'Neill's New Jersey funeral was not Valerie James. (Christine O'Neill would not comment for this story.) "There are people here who knew him for six years but never knew he had a wife and kids in Atlantic City," James tells me. "I was talking with my friend about it, and he said, 'Let's not forget, John was a spy.' I mean, in the FBI he reinvented himself into this other person -- which is why I think he compartmentalized his life."
James says that O'Neill kept other secrets: the overwhelming debts he'd racked up living a James Bond life on a Bureau salary; a plan, complete with legal papers, to divorce his wife. But is her John O'Neill the real one? Given what James has learned about him since his death, she isn't quite sure.
"I honestly believe the main mistress in John's life was the Bureau," says Pat D'Amuro, a longtime deputy in New York. "There are times when we talked, and he wondered if that was the right decision."
As early as 1995, long before the embassy bombings and the Cole attack made Osama bin Laden a household name, O'Neill made the case up the FBI food chain and in Congress that the nation's greatest threat came from the Islamic-fundamentalist groups that were emerging from the Taliban's takeover of Afghanistan. "John had this scenario that's going on now figured out eight years ago," says an old FBI colleague, John Blaha. "That this is the way it is, and this is the way it's gonna have to be resolved."
In the 20-20 hindsight of September 11, O'Neill's confidential briefings in the mid-nineties "were right on, in terms of these kinds of people and what they could potentially do to us," says Robert Blitzer, a former deputy of O'Neill's. "Just the scope of their infrastructure in the U.S. -- and inherent to that is the fact that they could go operational at any time."
Unlike his colleagues, he went public with his opinions. In 1996, he told a conference of private-security managers about new groups that had beaten the Soviets in Afghanistan and who "can assemble quickly and can quickly disperse and are extraordinarily hard to track." The following year, he called the Islamic-fundamentalist victory in Afghanistan a watershed moment: "They beat one of the largest standing armies in the world at that time, which gave them a buoyed sense of success -- that they could take on other countries like the U.S." O'Neill's deafening clarity, however, often translated better outside the office than in the FBI. He wanted to command, direct, control, and manage everything he was responsible for, and inevitably he pissed off many of the wrong people.
"There was occasionally controversy that swirled around John," says Barry Mawn, his superior in New York. "I mean, John for the most part didn't suffer fools. And either by his direct words or maybe expressions, I think he made some people feel uncomfortable, like he was challenging them."
"He had elbows -- he'd press his point very hard," says Mary Jo White. "Others might have been more diplomatic -- but less effective when it matters."
On July 4, 1998, Jerry Hauer was riding in his car up First Avenue near 20th Street, not far from O'Neill's apartment in Peter Cooper Village, when he spotted his friend walking down the street in short pants. Hauer told his driver to slow down; he thought he'd give John some grief about showing off his knees. "How's it going?" Hauer said.
O'Neill wasn't in the moo. He leaned into the car window. "My friend's causing trouble again," he said.
"Who?"
"OBL," O'Neill said softly. "This guy's a problem."
One month later, simultaneous bombs near the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killed 224 people. As soon as the bombings took place, O'Neill was on the phone with colleagues, calling bin Laden the prime suspect. "John was really the first to say that maybe Al Qaeda was responsible for that," confirms the New York field-office director at the time, Lew Schiliro. "The coordination it took to hit both embassies four minutes apart, the idea of a cell operating in Kenya, their ability to strike at relatively unprotected embassies, the nature of the explosives that they used -- pretty much at the outset he had a strong belief that they were behind it."
And when it came time for Mary Jo White to expand her World Trade Center indictments to include the embassy-bombing suspects, Schiliro says, O'Neill was there to connect the dots. "The evolution from the World Trade Center to Ramzi Yousef, who was arrested in Pakistan, and the plot in the Pacific to plant explosives in twelve U.S. airliners -- and his connecting to bin Laden. When the bombings happened, John was a student of this, and he brought a lot of information to bear on it."
Last year, when Schiliro left the New York field office to be replaced by Barry Mawn, O'Neill was furious about being passed over. In his mind, he clearly outclassed most of his counterparts in Washington. He would travel with Louis Freeh to Saudi Arabia; they'd stay home. He'd be in Yemen within hours of the Cole bombing; they'd work the phones. Inside the Bureau, his impact never registered the way it had with others.
In this wildly altered political landscape, all sides are trying to lay claim to John O'Neill's legacy; he's a Rorschach test. If you lean toward the right, like some of his New York friends, you believe O'Neill quit in a fury when the diplomats neutered him. David Cornstein, who ran Finlay jewelers and now is chairman of the New York Olympic Games commission, used to tailgate with O'Neill at Giants and Jets games. "We concurred," he says, "that the country after the Cold War had really fallen a bit asleep, and there was a liberal movement toward more and more civil rights, and the country wasn't observant enough to realize that the world had changed and our view of the way security should be should change, too."
But if you lean to the left, like the French authors Guillaume Dasquié and Jean-Charles Brisard, who feature a July interview with O'Neill in their new book, Ben Laden, La Vérité Interdite, you've outed O'Neill as a sort of smoking gun -- a man who they say all but confirmed in his final months that George W. Bush's oil-industry-bred administration was so worried about alienating Saudi Arabia that it decided to negotiate with the Taliban rather than go after it. Before September 11, they argue, the United States' primary goal was to build a pipeline in Central Asia -- tapping oilfields in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan, through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean.
In July, over drinks at Elaine's, O'Neill began to open up to Brisard about his frustrations, which, it turned out, stretched back to the 1996 investigation of the Riyadh army-base bombing. O'Neill made several trips to Saudi Arabia, one with Freeh, but witnesses were executed before the FBI could question them. (Brisard was also impressed by O'Neill's social clout. Elaine Kaufman herself and James Woods came by and said hello. "I had the feeling he knew everyone in the city," he says.) [James Woods claimed later to have sat next to one of the alleged hijackers on one of their test runs... -gReT]
O'Neill complained about the inability of U.S. diplomacy to obtain anything from King Fahd. He told the Frenchman that "every answer, every key to dismantling the Osama bin Laden organizations are in Saudi Arabia."
He ran into another diplomatic barrier last year in Yemen, after the Cole bombing. Within days of arriving, he'd knocked heads with the ambassador, Barbara Bodine. While the FBI was interrogating witnesses, the State Department was trying to coax Yemeni diplomats into pledging not to support terror. The conflicting agendas, combined with O'Neill's determination, were explosive. He wanted his agents to carry automatic weapons, like their Yemeni counterparts; she insisted they carry smaller arms, like diplomats. By the time Barry Mawn arrived, Bodine was calling O'Neill an outright liar. O'Neill's comments about the ambassador, friends say, weren't printable.
"He always had a singular focus on the people he sent into harm's way," says Freeh, who wouldn't comment directly about Bodine. "I'm sure he ruffled a couple of feathers doing that. In Yemen, he would call me literally in the middle of the night and say, 'Boss, I'm not comfortable with our situation here.' "
When O'Neill came back for Thanksgiving, James was shocked to see him exhausted and twenty pounds lighter. He never returned: Bodine told Freeh that O'Neill wasn't allowed to. One more irony came after September 11. The FBI returned after Bodine left her job, and according to Mawn, Yemeni authorities were so moved by O'Neill's death that they began cooperating with the investigation again.
The scuffle with the ambassador made the papers. And before long, O'Neill's press coverage got worse. On August 19, the Times printed that he was under investigation. A year earlier, he'd attended a retirement seminar in Tampa, left a conference room to make a call, and come back to find his briefcase had been stolen. It turned up in a nearby hotel without his lighter and cigar cutter, but still with some classified documents that he shouldn't have taken from his office. O'Neill had reported it to the police and the Bureau right away. Under normal circumstances, this never would have been made public. But O'Neill thought he knew why it had.
"He thought the leak might have come from Washington," says Mawn. That same month, O'Neill told Mawn and others that Dick Clarke, the president's terrorism czar at the National Security Council, had asked O'Neill whether he wanted his name put forward to succeed him.
"It would be a powerful position," Mawn says. "That person would have direct contact with the FBI and turn around and influence top Cabinet people, and possibly even the president. So if I was somebody who didn't like him, it would be because he is getting into a position of power that could possibly get back to the Bureau to do things his way."
But it didn't matter. After Yemen, O'Neill had started seriously thinking about getting out. Part of that was financial pressure. "He was frustrated and angry," James says. "And he needed to make money."
The other part was the bed he'd made himself. Louis Freeh's No. 2, Tom Pickard, had told him point-blank that after the briefcase incident, there'd be little chance of his getting Mawn's job in New York -- the only Bureau post he really wanted.
"I told him he had a tough row to hoe to get it," says Pickard, who retired at the end of November, and whom Jerry Hauer believes was the biggest roadblock in O'Neill's career. When it came to field-office-chief candidates, he said, "Janet Reno particularly insisted that there were no blemishes on that person's career. I think John shone best when there was a crisis. He'd put in phenomenal hours, he was completely dedicated, he wasn't distracted by anyone else. I don't know if he would have thrived on the day-to-day, 'What are we gonna do about the budget?' business. John was more of a take-charge, action guy."
On Saturday, September 8, Valerie and John attended a wedding at the Plaza -- a class reunion of old FBI men and cops. John was beaming the whole evening, and he and Valerie danced nearly every song. Valerie says that people turned to them and said, "God, if this is what retirement does . . . "
Three weeks later, there was another reunion -- O'Neill's funeral. The service in Atlantic City -- could it have been otherwise? -- was brimming with ironies. The service demanded four-star security for Louis Freeh, Mary Jo White, and a host of FBI brass -- an official place of honor given to a man who had just left the Bureau in frustration. It also featured Christine O'Neill as the widow. O'Neill's son and daughter rarely saw their father in his final years, while James's children, Jay and Stacy, were left wondering more about the man they called their father. Jay even called O'Neill "Dad" in a speech at the Elaine's wake a few days later, to the surprise of some people there.
His biological family got his memorial flags from the Bureau. Resentful about being overlooked, Stacy pinched two that the Bureau had sent to Elaine's. She's been asked to return them. She hasn't.
"I'm the one who has to reinvent myself now," Valerie James told me one afternoon recently, poking at a salad near her office in the fashion district. "My psychiatrist says I can't go on with my life if I keep talking about him, but I feel like I have to honor his memory."
She'd wanted to leave him in the fall of '99. He wasn't as much fun as he was in Chicago. The strain of the job, the embassy-bombing investigation, was getting to him. Her kids adored him, but it was not working for her, she told him. The late nights without her also had something to do with it. "He promised that when he left the FBI, he'd clean up his life," she said.
When I asked what that meant, she smiled. "Being a little straighter of a guy," she said.
The secret girlfriends aren't so secret anymore. James doesn't speak directly about them. Still, she doesn't have any illusions about the man she just lost. "John was all about his job," she said. "I don't know if John was a genius, but you look at smart people like Jack Kennedy, they don't necessarily lead Ward and June Cleaver lives. It doesn't necessarily mean they're bad people. I'll say this, though: Knowing everything I've learned since he died, I would do the last eleven years over again exactly as I did. And so would my kids. I know because I asked them."
Her John was different from everyone else's. "You see, to me, he wasn't the FBI," she said. "He was my lover and my friend." It's just that the end he met brought the many different lives he led crashing down, finally, together.
"It was a complicated death," she said, "for a complicated man."
Who Borrowed John O'Neill's Briefcase?
F.B.I. Is Investigating a Senior Counterterrorism Agent
By DAVID JOHNSTON and JAMES RISEN
Published: August 19, 2001
The F.B.I. has begun an internal investigation into one of its most senior counterterrorism officials, who misplaced a briefcase containing highly classified information last year. The briefcase contained a number of sensitive documents, including a report outlining virtually every national security operation in New York, government officials said.
The official, John O'Neill, 49, is the special agent in charge of national security in the Federal Bureau of Investigation's New York office. The job is among the most powerful in the F.B.I., and, although Mr. O'Neill is not widely known, he has overseen cases like the terrorist bombing of the Navy destroyer Cole in Yemen last year and the bombings of American embassies in East Africa in 1998.
The briefcase incident was seen as potentially so serious that the Justice Department conducted a criminal investigation. The inquiry ended in recent weeks with a decision by the department's internal security section not to prosecute, law enforcement officials said.
Mr. O'Neill left his briefcase in a hotel conference room while he attended an F.B.I. meeting in Tampa, Fla., last summer. The briefcase was stolen, but the local authorities recovered it and returned it to him within hours with the contents.
Jill Stillman, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department, said that department officials would not comment on the matter. Requests to discuss the matter with Mr. O'Neill were made to bureau officials in New York and Washington. In both cases, they said that he declined to comment on the case.
After the criminal inquiry, the bureau's internal affairs unit began its own investigation to determine whether Mr. O'Neill had violated F.B.I. rules against mishandling classified information.
Officials identified one document in the briefcase as a draft of what is known in the bureau as the Annual Field Office Report for national security operations in New York. The closely guarded report contained a description of every counterespionage and counterterrorism program in New York and detailed the budget and manpower for each operation. The document, submitted to bureau headquarters, is used as a central planning tool each year.
F.B.I. agents are prohibited from removing classified documents from their offices without authorization. Violations are punishable by censure, suspension or even dismissal, depending on the seriousness.
But the outcome of the internal inquiry is uncertain. Even if the inquiry finds that Mr. O'Neill violated regulations, he is unlikely to be sanctioned. He has been planning to retire and told associates in recent days that he would step down next week. He is expected to take a job as a private security consultant.
Several officials said that Mr. O'Neill became the subject of especially intense scrutiny partly because law enforcement officials did not want to treat the matter lightly after the cases of John M. Deutch, the former director of Central Intelligence, and Wen Ho Lee, the Los Alamos nuclear weapons scientist.
Mr. Deutch lost his security clearances and was the subject of a Justice Department investigation for mishandling classified material after he placed classified documents on unclassified computers in his home. Mr. Deutch was pardoned by President Clinton in January.
Dr. Lee pleaded guilty in September 2000 to one count of mishandling classified material just as the rest of the government's case against him collapsed.
In Mr. O'Neill's case, F.B.I. officials were alarmed, in part, because of the sensitivity of the documents involved, including details about the bureau's counterterrorism and counterintelligence operations. One document contained highly sensitive information about an F.B.I. source.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/19/us/fbi-is-investigating-a-senior-count...
set up to look like a simple robbery...
"A year earlier, he'd attended a retirement seminar in Tampa, left a conference room to make a call, and come back to find his briefcase had been stolen. It turned up in a nearby hotel without his lighter and cigar cutter, but still with some classified documents that he shouldn't have taken from his office. O'Neill had reported it to the police and the Bureau right away. Under normal circumstances, this never would have been made public. But O'Neill thought he knew why it had.
"He thought the leak might have come from Washington," says Mawn."
So the motive, clearly, was to steal his cigar cutter and lighter, not to take the classified documents, since the stupid thief probably didn't know what they were, or why O'Neill had taken them with him to an FBI retirement seminar in Florida. Since the technology doesn't exist to copy such documents quickly, we can safely assume that if the thief had wanted them he would have taken them along with the smoking paraphernalia. And O'Neill reported it immediately, which means he obviously wasn't feeling guilty or deceitful after the boneheaded move of leaving such sensitive information unattended in such close proximity to his valuable cigar cutter and lighter. Maybe just a little dumb, and worried maybe that such a lapse in judgment may hurt his chances at landing a cushy private sector job making three times what the FBI paid him. And the story should have just disappeared, being so uninteresting and non-controversial, but it was leaked because some lame Bush-appointed Ambassador in Yemen had it in for him, probably because he was getting so close to exposing the 9/11 plot being organized by Bush Co. Poor John O'Neill!
Was John O'Neill tasked with planting 9/11 story in advance?
As early as 1995, long before the embassy bombings and the Cole
attack made Osama bin Laden a household name, O'Neill made the case up
the FBI food chain and in Congress that the nation's greatest threat
came from the Islamic-fundamentalist groups that were emerging from the
Taliban's takeover of Afghanistan. "John had this scenario that's
going on now figured out eight years ago," says an old FBI colleague,
John Blaha. "That this is the way it is, and this is the way it's gonna
have to be resolved."
In the 20-20 hindsight of September 11, O'Neill's confidential
briefings in the mid-nineties "were right on, in terms of these kinds of
people and what they could potentially do to us," says Robert Blitzer, a
former deputy of O'Neill's. "Just the scope of their infrastructure in
the U.S. -- and inherent to that is the fact that they could go
operational at any time."
Unlike his colleagues, he went public with his opinions. In 1996, he
told a conference of private-security managers about new groups that had
beaten the Soviets in Afghanistan and who "can assemble quickly and can
quickly disperse and are extraordinarily hard to track." The following
year, he called the Islamic-fundamentalist victory in Afghanistan a
watershed moment: "They beat one of the largest standing armies in the
world at that time, which gave them a buoyed sense of success -- that
they could take on other countries like the U.S." O'Neill's deafening
clarity, however, often translated better outside the office than in the
FBI. He wanted to command, direct, control, and manage everything he
was responsible for, and inevitably he pissed off many of the wrong
people.
"There was occasionally controversy that swirled around John," says
Barry Mawn, his superior in New York. "I mean, John for the most part
didn't suffer fools. And either by his direct words or maybe
expressions, I think he made some people feel uncomfortable, like he was
challenging them."
"He had elbows -- he'd press his point very hard," says Mary Jo
White. "Others might have been more diplomatic -- but less effective
when it matters."
On July 4, 1998, Jerry Hauer was riding in his car up First Avenue
near 20th Street, not far from O'Neill's apartment in Peter Cooper
Village, when he spotted his friend walking down the street in short
pants. Hauer told his driver to slow down; he thought he'd give John
some grief about showing off his knees. "How's it going?" Hauer said.
O'Neill wasn't in the moo. He leaned into the car window. "My friend's causing trouble again," he said.
"Who?"
"OBL," O'Neill said softly. "This guy's a problem."
One month later, simultaneous bombs near the U.S. embassies in
Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killed 224 people. As soon
as the bombings took place, O'Neill was on the phone with colleagues,
calling bin Laden the prime suspect. "John was really the first to say
that maybe Al Qaeda was responsible for that," confirms the New York
field-office director at the time, Lew Schiliro. "The coordination it
took to hit both embassies four minutes apart, the idea of a cell
operating in Kenya, their ability to strike at relatively unprotected
embassies, the nature of the explosives that they used -- pretty much at
the outset he had a strong belief that they were behind it."
And when it came time for Mary Jo White to expand her World Trade
Center indictments to include the embassy-bombing suspects, Schiliro
says, O'Neill was there to connect the dots. "The evolution from the
World Trade Center to Ramzi Yousef, who was arrested in Pakistan, and
the plot in the Pacific to plant explosives in twelve U.S. airliners --
and his connecting to bin Laden. When the bombings happened, John was a
student of this, and he brought a lot of information to bear on it."
Last year, when Schiliro left the New York field office to be
replaced by Barry Mawn, O'Neill was furious about being passed over. In
his mind, he clearly outclassed most of his counterparts in Washington.
He would travel with Louis Freeh to Saudi Arabia; they'd stay home. He'd
be in Yemen within hours of the Cole bombing; they'd work the phones.
Inside the Bureau, his impact never registered the way it had with
others.
In this wildly altered political landscape, all sides are trying to
lay claim to John O'Neill's legacy; he's a Rorschach test. If you lean
toward the right, like some of his New York friends, you believe O'Neill
quit in a fury when the diplomats neutered him. David Cornstein, who
ran Finlay jewelers and now is chairman of the New York Olympic Games
commission, used to tailgate with O'Neill at Giants and Jets games. "We
concurred," he says, "that the country after the Cold War had really
fallen a bit asleep, and there was a liberal movement toward more and
more civil rights, and the country wasn't observant enough to realize
that the world had changed and our view of the way security should be
should change, too."
But if you lean to the left, like the French authors Guillaume
Dasquié and Jean-Charles Brisard, who feature a July interview with
O'Neill in their new book, Ben Laden, La Vérité Interdite, you've outed
O'Neill as a sort of smoking gun -- a man who they say all but confirmed
in his final months that George W. Bush's oil-industry-bred
administration was so worried about alienating Saudi Arabia that it
decided to negotiate with the Taliban rather than go after it. Before
September 11, they argue, the United States' primary goal was to build a
pipeline in Central Asia -- tapping oilfields in Turkmenistan,
Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan, through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the
Indian Ocean.
In July, over drinks at Elaine's, O'Neill began to open up to Brisard
about his frustrations, which, it turned out, stretched back to the
1996 investigation of the Riyadh army-base bombing. O'Neill made several
trips to Saudi Arabia, one with Freeh, but witnesses were executed
before the FBI could question them. (Brisard was also impressed by
O'Neill's social clout. Elaine Kaufman herself and James Woods came by
and said hello. "I had the feeling he knew everyone in the city," he
says.) [James Woods claimed later to have sat near four of the alleged
hijackers on one of their test runs... -gReT]
O'Neill complained about the inability of U.S. diplomacy to obtain
anything from King Fahd. He told the Frenchman that "every answer, every
key to dismantling the Osama bin Laden organizations are in Saudi
Arabia."
He ran into another diplomatic barrier last year in Yemen, after the
Cole bombing. Within days of arriving, he'd knocked heads with the
ambassador, Barbara Bodine. While the FBI was interrogating witnesses,
the State Department was trying to coax Yemeni diplomats into pledging
not to support terror. The conflicting agendas, combined with O'Neill's
determination, were explosive. He wanted his agents to carry automatic
weapons, like their Yemeni counterparts; she insisted they carry smaller
arms, like diplomats. By the time Barry Mawn arrived, Bodine was
calling O'Neill an outright liar. O'Neill's comments about the
ambassador, friends say, weren't printable.
"He always had a singular focus on the people he sent into harm's
way," says Freeh, who wouldn't comment directly about Bodine. "I'm sure
he ruffled a couple of feathers doing that. In Yemen, he would call me
literally in the middle of the night and say, 'Boss, I'm not comfortable
with our situation here.' "
When O'Neill came back for Thanksgiving, James was shocked to see him
exhausted and twenty pounds lighter. He never returned: Bodine told
Freeh that O'Neill wasn't allowed to. One more irony came after
September 11. The FBI returned after Bodine left her job, and according
to Mawn, Yemeni authorities were so moved by O'Neill's death that they
began cooperating with the investigation again.
The scuffle with the ambassador made the papers. And before long,
O'Neill's press coverage got worse. On August 19, the Times printed that
he was under investigation. A year earlier, he'd attended a retirement
seminar in Tampa, left a conference room to make a call, and come back
to find his briefcase had been stolen. It turned up in a nearby hotel
without his lighter and cigar cutter, but still with some classified
documents that he shouldn't have taken from his office. O'Neill had
reported it to the police and the Bureau right away. Under normal
circumstances, this never would have been made public. But O'Neill
thought he knew why it had.
"He thought the leak might have come from Washington," says Mawn.
Not unlike the following:
Dr. MacQueen calls this story "Mohamed Atta seeks a loan". Months before 9/11, the alleged 9/11 hijackers were trying to attract public attention. According to mainstream news reports, Atta tried to obtain a large loan from a U.S. loans officer and threatened to kill her and then gives away the 9/11 plot. Dr. MacQueen argues that this is not characteristic of a top secretive operative planning the biggest terrorist attack on U.S. soil. This is characteristic of a person tasked with planting the narrative ahead of time. Dr. MacQueen also shares important information about 9/11 being connected with the anthrax attacks and that the same people were behind both attacks.
Dr. MacQueen: alleged 9/11 hijackers tasked with planting official story in advance from 911academia on Vimeo.
More James Woods on 9/11
Pretty sure these links are now dead--found this post at http://www.southshoreforums.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=11843 Looks like the internets have been scrubbed pretty clean of Woods' hateful screed--unlike Mel Gibson's... Hmmm.
http://www.zap2it.com/movies/news/story/0,1259,---10619,00.html
HOLLYWOOD (Zap2it.com) - Emmy-award winning, Oscar-nominated actor James Woods, whose personal beliefs are often as controversial as the roles he plays, has landed himself in hot water following remarks he made to Channel 5 KTLA's entertainment editor Sam Rubin about terrorists and people who harbor terrorists.
Only in Hollywood would Woods have "landed himself in hot water" for these remarks...
Watch it here...
Real Media...
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Windows Media Player...
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http://mfile.akamai.com/2189/asf/zap2it.download.akamai.com/2189/archive/zap2it/ktla/zap2it_jameswoods_lo.asf?obj=v0001;xtn=.asx
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another version
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread1671/pg1
Words of wisdom from Hollywood actor James Woods on the War on Terror :
"I'm not about appeasing, ya know, any of these crappy little Arab states that want to hold us hostage over oil and so on and decide they're going to use terrorism or state support it or whatever
"If I had any evidence that any single country was supporting one ounce of terrorism I would say wipe them off the face of the earth. That's how I feel and I'll never change it. And it's blatantly obvious to the most casual observer to me that that is the correct position to take, ya know, but these other guys want to negotiate and placate and appease and do all that, ya know ?"
"I'm sort of not your average liberal Hollywood bear here so, you know, this is just a personal opinion but I happen to think right now that this is a war that we're now engaged in with the single most ruthless and cunning enemy that we have ever encountered because it's the first enemy we've ever had who doesn't mind if he is destroyed along with us. And he has no agenda other than our complete and utter and total destruction. It's 'we want you eradicated from the face of the Earth.' Well, simple logic tells you that if somebody wants you dead you have one course of action: To get them deader sooner."
Woods also argued: "If this had happened to the Russians, about three major cities in the Middle East would have been parking lots in twenty minutes. They would have been molten green glass, not a single thing would have lived there for 250,000 years and they wouldn't have worried about the consequences because there would not have been any because the remaining terrorist states would have said 'we get the message.'"