Throughout the summer, a major scandal has been brewing in Lithuania. In late July, the country suffered a landmark defeat in the European Court of Human Rights in a case brought by Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi national held in secret detention and brutally tortured for four years in CIA black sites around the world – including Lithuania. While Western governments and news outlets have ignored the judgement, the ECHR’s conclusions produced bitter political division locally, with the opposition calling for a new investigation into the CIA’s use and abuse of the country during the US-led ‘War on Terror’.
Lithuania’s ruling coalition, in keeping with previous governments, is resistant to any further damaging light being shed on their territory hosting criminal operations of American intelligence for many years in total secret, with perpetrators of horrendous torture insulated from any legal repercussions or professional consequence. Their resistance is understandable. On top of not wanting to offend their colossal US ally, Lithuania’s ruling elites are keen to conceal from the local population, and the world, how their ‘independence’ under Western hegemony comes with unseen strings attached. When those strings entail intimate collusion in grave crimes, it’s Lithuania that suffers the consequences.
How did the ECHR rule against Lithuania?
Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri is accused of being the mastermind of the October 2000 USS Cole bombing, and heading Al Qaeda in the Persian Gulf. He was captured by the CIA in November 2002. Over the next four years, he was held in nine separate CIA black sites, and brutally tortured every step of the way. Five months of his ordeal were spent at a specially constructed facility in Lithuania, named ‘Detention Site Violet’ in internal CIA memos, from November 2005 to March 2006. Lithuania denied any responsibility for al-Nashiri’s maltreatment, and contested the evidentiary basis of his claims. The ECHR found Vilnius’ culpability was “proven beyond reasonable doubt.”
During his incarceration in Lithuania, al-Nashiri was held incommunicado in solitary confinement and denied any contact with the outside world. His removal from the country was conducted with the Lithuanian government’s full knowledge he could face “a flagrant denial of justice and the death penalty” if extradited to the US, where he has remained in Guantanamo Bay until today. The ECHR unanimously found Vilnius violated numerous Articles of the European Convention on Human Rights through the country’s complicity with the CIA’s treatment of al-Nashiri, including right to a fair trial, right to respect for private and family life, right to life, and inhuman or degrading treatment.
Is this Lithuania’s first run in with the ECHR over CIA torture?
The ruling on al-Nashiri’s treatment is the third ECHR judgement against Lithuania over its involvement in the CIA torture program. In May 2018, the court ruled state authorities conspired with the CIA and subjected high-profile prisoner Abu Zubaydah to inhuman treatment, sensory isolation, and violation of his fundamental rights to liberty and security. Vilnius was ordered to pay him €100,000 in damages, which he has been unable to collect due to his ongoing detention in Guantanamo Bay. It was just the beginning of Lithuania’s major legal woes over its part in the CIA’s torture program.
In January 2024, the ECHR ruled Lithuania was responsible for arbitrarily detaining Saudi national Mustafa al-Hawsawi. Like Zubaydah, he was held in Detention Site Violet, exposing him to arbitrary detention and ill-treatment, and failing to conduct an effective local criminal probe into his incarceration and torture. Lithuania was ordered to pay €100,000 to al-Hawsawi in damages and €30,000 in costs. It’s not just the ECHR which has sought to hold Lithuania accountable, either. In 2022, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention found Vilnius was complicit in torture and secret detention of alleged terrorists on the CIA’s behalf.
All along, the ECHR has condemned the Lithuanian authorities for the country’s involvement in the CIA’s torture program, which saw many ‘high value’ detainees – including accused 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed – pass through Detention Site Violet’s secret doors. The court has also harshly criticized Vilnius for its stubborn refusal to conduct serious criminal and/or public investigations into the secret CIA prison network constructed on Lithuania’s soil, and the involvement in and knowledge of these operations on the part of the country’s security, intelligence, and policing apparatus. But it’s abundantly clear the microscopic Baltic state was heavily complicit.
What are the Lithuanians hiding?
Despite the conspiracy of silence in Vilnius, numerous local investigations in the US and at the EU level have created damning trails of breadcrumbs leading straight from Detention Site Violet to the highest levels of the Lithuanian state. It is confirmed the CIA obtained approval from the country’s political leaders before constructing the black sites. One Lithuanian official was reportedly “shocked” by the proposals, but agreed anyway – it was an offer they couldn’t refuse. The CIA offered $1 million to its Lithuanian ‘partner’ agencies to “show appreciation” for their support, with the cash funneled through “complex mechanisms” to conceal the payments.
The Lithuanian parliament’s own Committee on National Security and Defence (CNSD) found the country’s State Security Department (SSD) accounting of funds it received for the operation was “inappropriate.” The construction of two separate CIA black sites was also concluded to have been “blessed by the top officials of the State.” The first was abandoned due to its small size limiting how many detainees could be held there at one time. This led to Detention Site Violet being built, with Lithuanian officials including then-President Rolandas Paksas kept in the loop regularly on its progress by the CIA. High-ranking SSD directors were also well-aware.
Meanwhile, SSD staff were highly active participants in the torture program on-the-ground from 2002 onwards, structuring and equipping the covert facilities according to CIA specifications and requirements.
Lithuania’s domestic spying agency enjoyed “unrestricted access to all the premises” of the two prisons, although the CIA was largely allowed to act without supervision there. Detention Site Violet was constructed in a former horse riding school located just 15 miles from Vilnius, the property having been bought by a CIA front company based in Panama, called Elite LLC. Coincidentally, this purchase was completed in March 2004, right when Lithuania became a NATO member. ABC News reported:
“On a series of thick concrete pads, [the CIA] installed what a source called ‘prefabricated pods’ to house prisoners, each separated from the other by five or six feet. Each pod included a shower, a bed and a toilet. Separate cells were constructed for interrogations… The prison pods inside the barn were not visible to locals. They describe seeing large amounts of earth being excavated during the summer of 2004. Locals who saw the activity at the prison and approached to ask for work were turned away by English-speaking guards. The guards were replaced by new guards every 90 days.”
How were CIA prisoners tortured in Lithuania?
Despite plentiful open source details on Detention Site Violet and the Lithuanian state’s cognizance and culpability in the torture program, the crucial question of what happened to CIA prisoners in the country has never been satisfactorily resolved. However, it has been confirmed Mustafa al-Hawsawi was denied medical treatment after suffering severe health issues from repeated rectal rehydration – a form of sexual abuse – while in CIA detention. An Inspector General report found Detention Site Violet – in keeping with other black sites – did not have resources for treating serious mental or physical conditions inflicted by the torture, despite both being common.
Under the CIA’s own guidelines, “in situations where a detainee’s medical condition cannot be adequately treated at the detention facility, detention facility staff and local CIA station personnel arrange access to the host country’s health care system.” However, Lithuanian officials “reneged on previous assurances that they would arrange inpatient treatment or have declined to become involved in providing medical treatment for CIA detainees.” Ultimately, al-Hawsawi was transferred to a third country for treatment, with the CIA covering the costs. Difficulties with the Lithuanian authorities over al-Hawsawi’s treatment ultimately resulted in Detention Site Violet’s March 2006 closure, when its remaining prisoners were transferred to Afghanistan.
Lithuania’s stonewalling of serious investigations into the country’s involvement in the CIA torture program means we do not know for sure the torture techniques to which detainees were subjected there. However, in light of the ECHR’s ruling on al-Nashiri, it may be relevant to consider how he was treated at a CIA black site in Poland.
This included being forced into excruciating standing stress positions for days – which resulted in a medical officer intervention, over fears his shoulders could dislocate – mock executions with a handgun, and the use of a cordless power drill. A January 2003 CIA cable noted concerns over this abuse at agency headquarters:
“We have serious reservations with the continued used of enhanced techniques with Nashiri and its long term impact on him. Subject has been held for three months in very difficult conditions, both physically and mentally… Continued enhanced methods may push subject over the edge psychologically.”
The very same day, the CIA’s chief of interrogations announced his early retirement. “I will no longer be associated in any way with the interrogation program due to serious reservation I have about the current state of affairs,” he wrote. “Instead, I will be retiring shortly. This is a train wreak [sic] waiting to happen and I intend to get the hell off the train before it happens.”
Is Lithuania the only NATO country implicated in CIA torture?
Today, much remains concealed and uncertain about the CIA’s torture program. But it is clear Lithuania was far from alone in assisting the CIA commit horrendous crimes against humanity on its territory, without political or public oversight. In 2007, the Council of Europe published a detailed report on “secret detentions and illegal transfers of detainees” involving EU member states. Poland and Romania were also found to have eagerly abetted the CIA’s demonic activities, despite government denials of knowledge and/or culpability. The CoE found “the key arrangements for CIA clandestine operations in Europe were secured on a bilateral level.”
In Lithuania, Poland, and Romania, formal agreements with local governments and the CIA covered all manner of cooperation, including building the prisons, material support, and operational security, along with cast-iron promises of “non-interference” in the CIA’s criminality. This extended collusion to airport staff, which helped falsify flight records to conceal the arrival and departure of CIA detainees, and prevented customs and border officials from inspecting planes carrying prisoners. However, EU and NATO countries assisted the CIA’s torture program in more low-key ways throughout its operation. One notorious example is the rendition of Khaled El-Masri from North Macedonia.
Two-and-a-half decades on, the events of 9/11 and all that followed still casts a long shadow on every corner of the world, and justice continues to be denied to an unknown number of people – many of them completely innocent – who fell victim to the CIA’s global torture conspiracy. The ECHR’s latest ruling against Lithuania should, one might think, trigger a long-overdue public inquiry into how officials in Vilnius knowingly colluded in an operation that was completely illegal and unethical, along with appropriate punishments for the figures involved. As 9/11’s silver anniversary has just been marked, it’s never been more vital that the truth be finally told.
On the eve of 9/11’s silver anniversary, it was widely reported that a forthcoming New York District Court civil case brought against notorious Saudi government operative Omar Bayoumi would deliver “smoking gun” proof tying Riyadh directly to the attacks. Yet evidence alleging that Saudi intelligence managed two future hijackers as potential assets and did so through a “liaison relationship” with the CIA has lain largely unexamined in plain sight. As scrutiny of Riyadh grows, the agency’s shadow remains almost entirely outside the frame.
Bayoumi has long been accused by major news outlets and US officials of maintaining an intimate and suspicious relationship with hijackers Nawaf Hazmi and Khalid Mihdhar, immediately upon their arrival in the US in January 2000.
A subsequent FBI investigation, dubbed Operation Encore, concluded there was a “50/50 chance” Bayoumi (and the House of Saud by extension) had detailed advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks. This explosive finding was not publicly divulged until March 2022.
Far less attention followed a year later, when a bombshell filing lodged in the Office of Military Commissions – the military court system overseeing prosecutions of 9/11 defendants – surfaced publicly.
The document summarizes classified government discovery disclosures and private interviews conducted with anonymous high-ranking US intelligence officials. Its contents set out confidential-source allegations that the CIA sought to recruit at least Hazmi and Mihdhar, if not others who later participated in the 9/11 attacks, “via a liaison relationship” with Riyadh’s General Intelligence Directorate.
The declaration also alleges that the 9/11 Commission was deliberately sabotaged by its chief Philip Zelikow, who personally endeavored “to blunt” inquiries “into Saudi involvement with the hijackers.” Concurrently, senior FBI officials tasked with investigating the attacks were prohibited from interviewing Saudi nationals, despite “many” leads pointing directly to Riyadh’s Washington, D.C., embassy. According to the filing’s sources, probing those connections risked exposing the Saudi General Intelligence Directorate (GID) as a CIA “cutout” in its clandestine dealings with the future hijackers.
High-ranking FBI officials quoted in the filing discuss how the GID was a longstanding CIA “proxy,” exploited by the agency whenever it was “unwise or not practical … to undertake an operation directly.”
This need was particularly pronounced in the context of cloak-and-dagger CIA connivances conducted “on US soil.” After 25 years, it appears Riyadh could finally take the fall for a dastardly CIA operation that one way or another resulted in 9/11. As planned, there is little chance of the agency itself landing in the dock.
‘CIA team’
Among the court filing’smost dynamite excerpts is the insider testimony of an FBI special agent, who was posted to Alec Station – the CIA’s Al-Qaeda tracking unit, ultimately responsible for recruiting Hazmi and Mihdhar as assets.
When, in January 2000, the special agent learned the pair – known Al-Qaeda operatives under intensive CIA and NSA surveillance – had multi-entry visas to the US, they produced a report warning Bureau headquarters. Its dispatch was blocked by an unnamed CIA analyst.
According to the agent’s account, the same analyst directed the GID to make contact with Hazmi and Mihdhar upon their arrival, then falsely told subsequent US government inquiries that the FBI had been informed of the pair’s presence in the US.
The agent also alleged having witnessed CIA director George Tenet and operations director James Pavitt boast about how they “conspired to obstruct the 9/11 Commission” by concealing the analyst’s activities and identity from investigators.
In the process, an extraordinary, hitherto unreported component of Riyadh’s relationship with the hijackers remained determinedly unexplored. The FBI special agent alleged Hazmi and Mihdhar were explicitly provided US visas by the American consulate in Jeddah, “to facilitate the operation run by the Saudis’ GID and the CIA team.”
This disclosure is all the more tantalizing given that 15 of the 19 hijackers obtained a total of 18 visas in Saudi Arabia. Fourteen were issued at the US consulate in Jeddah, 11 of them by a single consular officer, Shayna Steinger. Many of the applications were incomplete or contained details that should have invited far greater scrutiny.
Steinger arrived at the Jeddah consulate in July 2000, fresh out of Columbia University, and went on to approve visa applications for 11 future hijackers. At the time, consular officers in Jeddah were divided over how rigorously Saudi applicants should be screened. Some argued that young Saudi men should be interviewed and required to demonstrate a clear purpose for travel, but the consulate generally followed a more permissive approach.
However, Steinger personally took it upon herself to reverse this policy. Moreover, she issued visas to future 9/11 hijackers despite their applications frequently being incomplete or error-strewn, based on forged documents, and their contents giving ample grounds for suspicion.
Steinger nonetheless interviewed Hani Hanjour, who purportedly piloted Flight 77, which struck the Pentagon. Afterward, she rejected his application for a three-year US visa, due to apparent doubts over his stated purposes in the country. Nonetheless, Steinger approved Hanjour’s renewed application two weeks later.
In ensuing official investigations, she offered wildly contradictory accounts of why the hijackers’ visas were granted. In Hanjour’s case, Steinger initially claimed he provided requested supporting documentation.
She subsequently admitted he actually hadn’t, but Hanjour’s “middle-class” background purportedly led her to conclude he was trustworthy.
If the court filing’s account is accurate, future 9/11 hijackers were granted entry to the US so the CIA could recruit them upon arrival, raising the troubling possibility that Steinger was acting on Agency instructions.
A network hidden in plain sight
Once Hazmi and Mihdhar touched down in Los Angeles in January 2000, almost immediately they crossed paths with Omar Bayoumi at an airport restaurant. FBI reports cited in the court filing indicate a witness who observed their meeting saw Bayoumi “dropping a piece of paper” near the pair’s table, “then striking up a conversation with them” in a manner that appeared “unnatural.” The witness relayed this account to the Bureau in 2002, but it was never publicized.
In interviews with Operation Encore investigators years later, Bayoumi maintained that his meeting with Hazmi and Mihdhar was pure happenstance. The extraordinary assistance he gave them immediately thereafter – including finding them an apartment, co-signing their lease, setting up bank accounts for them, and gifting them substantial sums toward their rent – was simply charity for fellow Muslims who could barely speak English and were unfamiliar with western culture, Bayoumi asserted. But the filing offers numerous striking insights into the dark reality of his contact with the future hijackers.
For example, it appears Bayoumi was secretly instructed to recruit Hazmi and Mihdhar at the Saudi Consulate in Los Angeles by extremist cleric and Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs official Fahad Thumairy.
The filing cites evidence indicating Bayoumi was himself in California “to spy on local dissidents” of Saudi extraction. He was seen with the two 9/11 hijackers “on numerous occasions,” going to the extent of organizing “a social gathering for the hijackers.” We can only guess who may also have been in attendance.
Another stunning exposure in the filing concerns Hazmi and Mihdhar lodging with long-time FBI informant and asset Abdussattar Shaikh from September 2000 onwards. Shaikh failing to provide their surnames to his handler despite being asked has been known for many years.
The joint congressional and Senate intelligence committee probe into 9/11 ruled the pair’s stay with Shaikh was “the [US] intelligence community’s best chance to unravel the September 11 plot.” Insulating Hazmi and Midhar from Bureau scrutiny may have been his explicit objective.
The filing indicates he himself “was receiving funds” from Riyadh, while simultaneously serving as an FBI informant. “Prominent” Saudis “would stay at Shaikh’s boarding house while visiting California,” it states.
His mission was “to monitor the activities of [Saudi] citizens while they were abroad.” Hani Hanjour also stayed with Shaikh alongside Hazmi, after Mihdhar returned to Saudi Arabia in late 2000. It appears that at every stage Stateside, the hijackers were in intimate proximity with figures connected to Saudi intelligence.
If the filing’s account that the GID was acting on the CIA’s behalf is accurate, this contact raises the obvious prospect that the agency – via its Riyadh “proxy” – was directly monitoring the movements of Hazmi, Mihdhar, and Hanjour – if not other Saudi-born hijackers – from the moment they entered the US at the agency’s direction, until 9/11 itself.
How far the CIA could have tracked or influenced their actions and movements remains unknown. The proximity described in the filing nevertheless demands an explanation.
The files Langley kept from the FBI
The established record shows that Alec Station repeatedly withheld the presence of Hazmi and Mihdhar in the US from the FBI until it was too late. The filing records how in June 2001 Station representatives showed senior Bureau officials photographs of three Al-Qaeda operatives, including Hazmi and Mihdhar.
However, the CIA refused to answer questions about the individuals in the photos, or provide identifying information. Had it done so, the FBI could have readily found Hazmi and Mihdhar’s names and addresses listed in San Diego’s local phone directory.
This was a flagrant dangle, obviously intended to gauge the Bureau’s knowledge of the identities of the individuals pictured, and their presence in the US. The filing also indicates the FBI conducted a dedicated counterintelligence investigation into Bayoumi prior to 9/11, due to suspicions that “he was operating as an intelligence officer.” Yet, when the Bureau contacted the CIA for information on Bayoumi, they were told the agency “held no files” on him at all – a “falsehood.”
In reality, the CIA maintained plentiful “operational” records on Bayoumi, which were “never passed to the FBI.” Such brazen stonewalling persisted long after 9/11. Upon learning tens of thousands of dollars had been sent from Haifa bin Faisal, wife of Saudi ambassador to the US Bandar bin Sultan, to Bayoumi’s wife, the Bureau attempted to subpoena their financial records from Washington, D.C.’s Riggs Bank. Per the filing, “officials at Riggs thwarted the FBI’s efforts to obtain the records for a year.”
Riggs Bank, which counted US presidents and CIA-installed Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet as clients, collapsed amid major money laundering scandals in 2005. Post-9/11 investigations identified financial improprieties in accounts held by several wealthy Saudis – including a lack of required background checks and consistent failure to alert regulators over large transactions violating federal banking laws.
Riggs’s downfall precisely mirrors the unceremonious end of many confirmed CIA front banks past, such as Bank of Credit and Commerce International, which assisted criminal cloak-and-dagger connivances including Iran/Contra.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the filing records how “diplomatic pressure” was exerted on the FBI not to investigate Riyad’s myriad connections to 9/11. Bureau agents testifying to the joint inquiry into the attacks were moreover “instructed not to reveal the full extent of Saudi involvement with Al-Qaeda.”
Senior officials at FBI headquarters knew “of both Bayoumi’s affiliation with Saudi intelligence and … the existence of the CIA’s operation to recruit Hazmi and Mihdhar,” but “suppressed investigations” into these burning matters.
The filing concludes by noting Bayoumi was subsequently arrested in Britain on immigration charges immediately after 9/11, with authorities finding “extremist literature in his apartment.” The significance of this disclosure has gone entirely unnoticed since 2022.
Only now, as a result of the New York court case, has the media acknowledged how, within days of the attacks, “game-changing” evidence directly implicating Bayoumi in 9/11 was seized from his British home by counterterror police, then shared with the FBI, which British investigators say failed to provide crucial information in return.
The evidence Britain could not pursue
The seized material reportedly included a phonebook listing over two dozen Saudi government officials in the US and Saudi Arabia; flight simulator software; tickets and travel documents; and a notepad featuring a sketch of an aircraft.
An accompanying note from a British counterterrorism officer stated of the latter: “contains handwritten notes mathematical calculations re height of planes.” A member of the 9/11 families’ legal team behind the court action told BBC, “it’s the mathematical calculation of the [Pentagon] crash.”
By 22 September 2001, this seemingly incontrovertible windfall was in the Bureau’s possession. So too were highly illuminating home video tapes of Bayoumi roaming around Washington, D.C. in 1999, highlighting security measures in place at the Capitol building, openly discussing nearby Reagan National Airport, and referencing an unspecified “plan” on camera. Other tapes feature Bayoumi in close quarters with senior Al-Qaeda figures such as US-born cleric Anwar Awlaki, assassinated in a September 2011 US drone strike in Yemen.
While British detectives apparently believed the evidence could support an extradition request, the FBI did not supply the material needed to sustain one. Bayoumi was released after seven days without charge and later returned to Saudi Arabia.
The US response takes on darker significance alongside allegations that the CIA used its Saudi liaison to approach Hazmi and Mihdhar while withholding their presence from the FBI.
It does, however, strengthen the case for investigating whether an aborted recruitment operation was concealed after ending in catastrophe. Media reluctance to examine the filing’s “proxy” allegations ensures that question remains safely outside the courtroom.
We must ask ourselves whether the 2016 Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA), which permitted the families of 9/11 victims to sue Riyadh in US courts, was purposefully passed to keep the House of Saud in line.
Successive Saudi governments have fought tooth and nail to overturn the legislation, while released correspondence indicates that Saudi representatives sought help from convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein to lobby for its repeal behind closed doors.
JASTA proved controversial in some quarters, with some critics warning it could trigger reciprocal legislation in foreign countries, given criminal US activities abroad. Legal experts argued it undercut the principle of sovereign immunity.
The plaintiffs’ evidence may yet establish that Saudi officials provided material support to the hijackers. The military filing raises a separate and more dangerous question: whether some of those officials were acting as a CIA cutout in their dealings with future 9/11 hijackers.
But the CIA is not a defendant in the civil action, and Bayoumi is not personally on trial. The state-secrets privilege has repeatedly shielded the agency’s clandestine operations from meaningful judicial scrutiny.
Unless the alleged liaison channel is examined, the Saudi case may expose one layer of the 9/11 support network while leaving the most protected layer untouched.
You know the drill by now: 19 Muslim hijackers directed by a man on dialysis in an undisclosed cave in Afghanistan outsmarted NORAD, the CIA, and the FBI armed with nothing more than box-cutters and blind optimism.
You also know that even if these coke-snorting, liquor-guzzling, religious fundamentalists weren’t too busy hitting strip clubs or gambling in Vegas to finally get around to their plans of jihad, a number of logistical hurdles should have stopped them: airport security, military interceptor planes, or their inability to fly single-engine Cessnas, let alone commercial airliners.
So that leaves two important questions unanswered: who did 9/11, and how did they pull it off?
Skeptics of the official story have supplied their own answers to these questions.
You have probably heard the 9/11 Truth Movement’s Greatest Hits play on an endless loop for the past twenty years.
WTC 7, “Dancing Israelis”, the Project for a New American Century, a New Pearl Harbor, etc.
Even Roger Waters took some time out of his busy schedule to go on Tucker Carlson so he could do his best rendition of the 9/11 Truth Movement’s Greatest Hits as opposed to his own catalogue of Greatest Hits from the Pink Floyd days.
But you’ve heard all of that.
You’re not here for the greatest hits.
You’re here for the blueprint. The who and the why.
No more entry-level 9/11 Truth for Dummies tier drivel. If you want that, you’re in luck because the internet is saturated with trite, stale information regarding what took place on 9/11.
In my last video, I discussed some of the nonsense holding back 9/11 Truth from becoming 9/11 Justice.
So let’s shift our focus to what really matters: who did 9/11 and how they did it.
What we will see is that the complex operation behind 9/11 involved both an inside and an outside layer. The outside handled sensitive issues like the logistics of airport security and ensuring that the World Trade Center Complex fell into the right hands. The inside made sure that WTC security didn’t get in the way and that the attacks were profitable, among other things.
Who was in charge of securing the hijacked planes? Who had access to the WTC buildings? Who amongst them had access to demolition explosives? Who profited? Who made sure these individuals were never found out?
Without these two operational layers working in tandem to accomplish all this, 9/11 would not have been possible.
So let’s move past surface-level talk of steel’s melting point and the physics of free-fall speed.
Let’s explore the ins and outs of this inside-outside job.
Act I: The Outside Element – The Gatekeepers
Of the four planes hijacked on 9/11, three departed from airports whose security was provided by one company: Huntleigh USA, a subsidiary of ICTS International.
So who is ICTS?
A quick Google search might net someone the answer that ICTS is a Dutch aviation security firm. However, ICTS is about as Dutch as Benjamin Netanyahu is Palestinian.
The company was formed in 1982 by alumni of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security and counter-intelligence agency, and former employees of El Al, Israel’s national airline. Shin Bet has a long, sordid history of extrajudicial killings, assassinations, and torture. El Al has its own unique past regarding international drug smuggling. As early as 1973, an El Al steward was arrested for attempting to smuggle a quarter million dollars in opium and hashish into the United States. Decades later, the pattern of El Al drug trafficking continued, with a cocaine smuggling ring involving the security liaison between El Al and Shin Bet teaming up with a former Shin Bet official and head of security for the Office of the Prime Minister.
In short, ICTS was not your typical security outfit. Based off all outward appearances, it appears to be an Israeli intelligence front. A look at the upper brass of ICTS reveals a number of interesting connections pertaining to 9/11.
The Israel Corporation was founded by the State of Israel and Shaul Eisenberg. Eisenberg’s multinational conglomerate—The Eisenberg Group—had as one of its subsidiaries Atwell Security. Atwell was the recipient of a contract with the New York Port Authority in 1987 to provide security for the World Trade Center complex. Atwell lost the contract after the discovery that Atwell’s President Avraham Shalom (operating under the alias Avraham Bendor) was the former Head of Shin Bet responsible for the murder of two Palestinians and its subsequent cover-up. To spare himself from criminal prosecution, Shalom blackmailed the Israeli government with a list of extrajudicial assassinations by various Israeli agencies, securing himself and his co-conspirators a presidential pardon in exchange for his resignation, as detailed in Rise and Kill First by Ronen Bergman.
Israeli Nuclear Theft, PROMIS Software, and the WTC
Eitan’s shadow looms large in the seedy annals of Israeli Intelligence.
Eitan posed as a chemist while traveling to Pennsylvania to visit NUMEC, a nuclear processing plant alleged to have supplied Israel with the enriched uranium the country used to acquire its nuclear arsenal. A declassified FBI document lists an individual named Avraham Bendor accompanying Eitan on this Pennsylvania trip. The FBI released a detailed statement in 1980 made by a former NUMEC employee who said in 1965 that he “encountered armed strangers on the uranium plant’s loading dock one night in early 1965. The NUMEC employee said they were loading what appeared to be canisters of HEU onto a truck in racks that he had not seen before.” The man also saw a shipping manifest showing the ship was bound for Israel indicating it was likely on the Zim-Israel shipping line which it was according to the National Security Archive. He said that a NUMEC manager later “threatened him to keep his mouth shut about what he had seen.”
According to the testimony of ex-Mossad agent Ari-Ben Menashee, Eitan was the brainchild of installing a trapdoor for Israeli intelligence into PROMIS software—the software later sold by Robert Maxwell to sensitive US defense facilities such as Sandia National Laboratories, which is at the center of US nuclear weapons systems.
Notice the incestuous loop: Zim Shipping, Atwell Security, and the WTC complex were all tethered to NUMEC-era Israeli intelligence networks. Menachem Atzmon not only had a position with both Zim and the Israel corporation at the time of the failed Atwell contract, but he went on to hold a senior position at the company responsible for the security of three of the four airports from which planes were hijacked on 9/11.
The Atzmon-Friedman-Netanyahu Axis
Atzmon’s network extended directly into the highest echelons of power where Israeli and American interests meet through Steven L. Friedman—a childhood friend of Benjamin Netanyahu and the American legal counsel for the Likud Party. Friedman was officially registered with the Justice Department as a foreign agent for the Likud Party until 1996.
Atzmon was the President of the Israel Development Fund. The fund was established by Friedman in 1989. During the time period when Atzmon worked as the President of the Israel Development Fund, he also worked as the national treasurer of the Likud Party. In Israel, Atzmon was convicted of campaign finance fraud and given a suspended one-year prison sentence. Despite denials by Atzmon, close associates of Netanyahu claimed that the fund functioned as a source for illicit cash for Netanyahu’s successful 1993 campaign to lead the Likud party.
ICTS Financial Crimes
Atzmon wasn’t the only questionable figure at ICTS.
Ezra Harel, Harel’s father, and Atzmon were arrested and questioned in Israel after driving a separate company, Rogosin, into total insolvency. According to Haaretz, the company suffered from years of odd investments and high-management fees that Harel himself pocketed. The company eventually grew incapable of paying back bondholders after torching more than 100 million shekels.
Against this backdrop of Israeli intelligence and financial crime, the ICTS track record of “security failures” borders on the unbelievable.
Richard Reid
The Shoe Bomber (Richard Reid): ICTS guarded the departure gate for Reid’s flight. Just a day earlier, Reid had been flagged and delayed by an ICTS agent due to his disheveled appearance and lack of luggage. Yet the next day, Reid waltzed through security with a Walkman loaded with anti-Israeli messages, an issue of Newsweek featuring pictures of Osama bin Laden, and explosives. As The Sword and the Neck describes it, “looking like he just finished shopping at Terrorists-R-Us.” Not too long before the attempted attack, Reid had been flying around on El Al to Tel Aviv. Reid’s father said, “My son is a determined boy, and I can imagine him being determined enough to blow himself to bits, but I just can’t believe that he would want to hurt anyone else in doing it unless, that is, he has been brainwashed.”
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab
The Underwear Bomber (Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab): Farouk departed from a flight in Amsterdam with screening provided by ICTS. Farouk was known to US intelligence after his father warned two CIA officers at the US embassy in Nigeria of Farouk’s extremist views. US State Department officials were prevented from revoking his visa by US intelligence lest their Al Qaeda investigation be foiled.
The Surveillance Afterlife
ICTS didn’t vanish after the War on Terror reached its apex. It evolved.
Eisenberg got his start at the Port Authority after being nominated by Governor Christine Todd Whitman to chair the Commission on Privatization and Competitive Contracting in 1994. After the 9/11 attacks, Whitman, the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency at the time of 9/11, assured the public within days of the attacks that the air in Manhattan was safe to breathe despite the buildings containing lead and asbestos because the concentrations were such that they didn’t “pose a health hazard.”
A class action lawsuit was filed against Whitman and the EPA, with Judge Deborah Batts of the Federal District Court in Manhattan saying that the “allegations in this case of Whitman’s reassuring and misleading statements of safety after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks are without question conscience-shocking.”
The effort to privatize the WTC complex was in large part spearheaded by the economic strategy of New York Governor George Pataki. Lew Eisenberg worked on the transition teams of Pataki, Whitman, and even the Bush-Cheney transition team.
Another prominent individual largely responsible for ensuring that the WTC complex ended up in the right hands was billionaire Ronald Lauder, the sole heir of the Estee Lauder cosmetics fortune.
From Reagan to Netanyahu to Epstein to the World Trade Center
Not only was Lauder on Pataki’s Council on Privatization, but he was also a major donor to none other than Steven Friedman’s charity, the Israel Research Foundation, which was closely tied to the Israel Development Fund. Lauder not only abetted Netanyahu’s ascent to power through financial contributions alongside Friedman and Eisenberg, but the cosmetics heir also helped pull political strings for his friend Bibi.
Lauder brought Republican campaign strategist Arthur Finkelstein in on Netanyahu’s campaign against Shimon Peres. Finkelstein’s propaganda, in addition to a series of conveniently timed suicide bombings in the weeks leading up to the elections, led to Netanyahu winning in a shocking upset. Finkelstein worked as a strategist for other people inside the Lauder orbit, including not only Lauder himself during his failed 1989 New York City Mayoral Campaign, but for George Pataki and New York Senator Alfonso D’Amato, the man who urged Lauder to run for office.
To understand the importance of this nexus of connections centering on Lauder, we must pull back and look at Lauder himself. Lauder’s role extends far beyond just New York City Politics and the ascendancy of Benjamin Netanyahu.
In addition to being the sole heir of the Estée Lauder Cosmetics fortune, Lauder has long been a prominent figure in the world of Jewish philanthropy, currently holding the position of President of the World Jewish Congress, where he works alongside others like Baron David de Rothschild of the infamous Rothschild banking dynasty.
Lauder held a position in Ronald Reagan’s cabinet during the Republican’s first term as the United States Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for European and NATO Affairs. During Reagan’s second term, Lauder landed a position as the US Ambassador to Austria. While this ambassadorship may seem like a dull, historical footnote at first, it becomes much more interesting when one realizes that Lauder may have been the individual responsible for securing Jeffery Epstein his fake Austrian passport.
Lauder’s later ties to Epstein and those in his circle are a matter of record.
Epstein’s Austrian passport featured a photograph of him alongside a non-Jewish name, which would have had to have come to him through an unconventional channel since Epstein did not meet the requirements needed to obtain the passport, such as long-term residency in Austria. Given Lauder and Epstein’s mutual acquaintances Donald Trump, Leslie Wexner, and Epstein’s former Bear Stearns employer Alan Greenberg, Lauder as the unconventional channel through which the passport was obtained would make sense. Also, given the history of Israeli intelligence using ambassadors to procure fake passports for operatives and Lauder’s undeniable sympathies for the Zionist cause, the likelihood of Lauder procuring the passport seems high.
The tight-knit milieu of wealthy businessmen and Israeli-intelligence-linked individuals with ties to the World Trade Center, the airports from which the 9/11 planes were hijacked, and the Likud Party comes full circle with Larry Silverstein—the man who acquired the World Trade Center complex only six weeks before the buildings he purchased became cemented in the public mind as the symbol of terrorism.
Lucky Larry
Larry Silverstein
The financial windfall Larry Silverstein found himself at the center of as a result of the September 11th attacks is nothing short of mind-boggling.
The Insurance Heist: In April of 2001, a group of several different investors led by Silverstein Properties came to an agreement, and Larry Silverstein, who had already acquired WTC 7, signed a 99-year lease for $3.2 billion for buildings 4 and 5. Silverstein only put $14 million of his own money down on the lease. The WTC had earlier that year been estimated to be worth $1.2 billion, and the Port Authority only had $1.5 billion in insurance coverage on the WTC, yet Silverstein managed to finagle $3.55 billion of insurance on the buildings.
Right to Rebuild: Silverstein’s insurance broker was unable to cover such a large amount, and the deal had to be split among 25 different dealers. The complicated and unusual deal was finalized the month of the attacks. The Silverstein group was even given the right to rebuild and expand if the buildings were destroyed.
Removing the Asbestos Removal Problem: The WTC buildings were in the process of having asbestos removed from the buildings, which was an extremely costly process. As of May of 2001, prior to Silverstein acquiring the buildings, the Port Authority received a ruling on a longstanding suit against their insurers seeking more than $600 million dollars to cover the costs of asbestos removal. Ultimately the ruling was that the all-risk insurance policy held did not entitle their insurers to include this under their coverage.
The Double-Indemnity Jackpot: As James Corbett of the Corbett Report states in 9/11 Trillions: Follow the Money, “Within hours of the destruction of the Twin Towers on September 11th, Silverstein was on the phone to his lawyers, trying to determine if his insurance policies could construe the attacks as two separate, insurable incidents rather than one.”
Not only would Silverstein rake in cash hand over fists as a result of the attacks and avoid all the prickly complications of asbestos abatement which would have costed hundreds of millions of dollars, but the SEC offices in WTC 7 which were investigating systemic financial corruption stemming from the dot-com bubble were conveniently destroyed along with the offices of some of the other tenants housing sensitive information such as the Department of Defense, CIA, Secret Service, and New York Office of Emergency Management. Similar to the Pentagon being struck in the Budget Analyst Office the day after Donald Rumsfeld announced $2.3 trillion the Pentagon couldn’t account for.
Silverstein—similar to many individuals involved in the decision to privatize the WTC complex—is no stranger to those in the highest echelons of Israeli political power. Silverstein collected friendships with Israeli Prime Ministers the way a more normal individual might collect postage stamps or trading cards. Former Israeli Prime Ministers Silverstein counts as friends are Yitzhak Rabin, Benjamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon. Silverstein is also a friend of current Israeli president Isaac Herzog. Netanyahu and Silverstein were so close that despite political differences, Bibi found time every Sunday to call Silverstein. Silverstein offered Epstein-associate Ehud Barak a job as his representative in Israel after Barak left the army in 1995. Many of these friendships were accrued by Silverstein when he was in the process of attempting to create a free trade initiative in the Negev. Some in Israel were skeptical of the proposal, due to such free trade zones having been established in third-world countries where workers receive starvation wages while entrepreneurs reap the benefits of tax exemption and high profits. Others were concerned the free trade zone would be a hub for money laundering. Eventually, after numerous unsuccessful attempts, Silverstein dropped the initiative.
With the airports’ security secured and the ink still drying on the World Trade Center’s paperwork, Israeli operatives were operating on American soil en masse while suspicious tenants roamed the halls which Lucky Larry Silverstein had just acquired.
Act III: The Outside Element – Soothsayers and Prophets
Israel’s role as the beneficiary of the American empire’s war on terror is obvious, with the policy goals stated in the Oded Yinon plan, the Clean Break memo, and the various writings of the Neo-Conservative, Project for a New American Century aligned think tanks largely accomplished as a result of America’s declaration to fight a global war against terrorism as a result of 9/11. However, one can simply turn to Benjamin Netanyahu, whose lackeys were securing their positions in the World Trade Center and the airports from which the planes were hijacked on 9/11 to gather his feelings regarding the worst crime to ever take place on American soil.
“Asked tonight what the attack meant for relations between the United States and Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister, replied, ‘It’s very good.’ Then he edited himself: ‘Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy.’” (“A Day of Terror: The Israelis; Spilled Blood is Seen as Bond That Draws Two Nations Closer,” New York Times, Sept. 12, 2001.)
While the remains of corpses still burned in the rubble and a country that is supposedly Israel’s greatest ally still reeled from the devastation of the attacks, Netanyahu stated that the attacks were very good for American-Israeli relations to none other than The New York Times—what many would consider the most prominent and prestigious publication in the world.
The Israeli Prime Minister’s thoughts regarding 9/11 and its benefit to Israel didn’t change in the following years.
“We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq.” — Benjamin Netanyahu, ‘Did Israel Benefit from the 9/11 Attacks?, The Economist (April 16, 2008)
Netanyahu’s callous feelings regarding the attacks, combined with the fact that prominent individuals responsible for his ascendancy to power held sensitive positions in the World Trade Center and three of the four airports from which planes were hijacked, are a cause for concern.
Other high-level Israeli political figures and intelligence personnel displayed a seemingly prophetic intuition regarding Arab terrorism in New York City and the alleged culprit of the attacks in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.
Former Israeli Prime Minister and a fellow friend of Lucky Larry Silverstein, Ehud Barak, went on the BBC possibly only an hour after the attacks to insinuate that Osama Bin Laden had perpetrated the attacks, then stated that Bin Laden was hiding in Afghanistan, and then declared that America needed to wage a war on terror in response to the attacks.
Not only did Netanyahu and Barak share a commonality despite their political differences in being chummy with WTC owner Silverstein, but the two were in the IDF Unit Sayaret Maktal, with one of the unit’s specialties being response to airplane hijackings.
Arnon Milchan, the Israeli spy turned Hollywood Mogul producing films such as L.A. Confidential, Pretty Woman, Natural Born Killers, and JFK, was involved with a couple of films with, let’s call it, fortuitous imagery pertaining to 9/11. (Say what you will about the man, but he has some heavy hitters under his filmography.)
Israeli intelligence asset Milchan was the Executive Producer of The Medusa Touch, in which a commercial airliner crashes into a skyscraper.
Milchan was also one of the producers of David Fincher’s Fight Club, which ends with Ed Norton and Helena Bonham Carter watching a series of high-rise towers brought down via controlled demolition by a terrorist organization targeting banking institutions, accompanied by the eerie track “Where’s my mind?” by The Pixies.
The former Director of the Mossad, Isser Harel, in a 1979 conversation with journalist Michael Evans, had what one could generously call incredible foresight. Evans recalls the interview in the Jerusalem Post, “I sat with former Mossad chief Isser Harel for a conversation about Arab terrorism. As he handed me a cup of hot tea and a plate of cookies, I asked him, ‘Do you think terrorism will come to America, and if so, where and why?’ Harel looked at his American visitor and replied, ‘I fear it will come to you in America. America has the power but not the will to fight terrorism…’ As to the where, Harel continued, ‘New York City is the symbol of freedom and capitalism. It’s likely they will strike the Empire State Building, your tallest building [he mistakenly thought] and a symbol of your power.’ … Twenty-one years later, the first part of Harel’s prediction came true; except, of course, that the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were much taller than the Empire State Building.”
Act IV: The Outside Element- The Intelligence Web
“Dancing Israelis”
Leading up to 9/11, Israeli intelligence continued to weave its web of influence not only through the halls of the World Trade Center complex and the runways from which the hijacked planes took off, but through the entire American political and economic ecosystem.
The most well-known example of the Israeli intelligence presence in the United States as it pertains to 9/11 is in the case of the “Dancing Israelis.”
On the morning of 9/11, within minutes of the first plane striking the WTC, three men were spotted seated on top of a moving van, taking pictures of the towers, laughing, and celebrating. After being spotted, they fled the scene, and the FBI put out an all-points bulletin for officers to look for a white van with Urban Moving Systems on its side. Later on at 3:56 PM, the van was pulled over, and five men were inside: Sivan Kurzberg and his brother, Paul, Yaron Shmuel, Oded Ellner, and Omar Marmari.
Kurzberg, according to the police report, told the officers, “We are Israeli. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem.”
Despite the men telling police an innocent explanation for their behavior that day, when the photographs were developed, it was revealed that the men were indeed celebrating, laughing, high-fiving, and Sivan Kurzberg was even photographed holding up a lighter to the flame-engulfed WTC building in the background.
The FBI confirmed that two of the men had ties to Israeli intelligence and believed them to be working on some kind of Mossad operation. One of them had $4,700 in his sock, and the men had plane tickets for various places around the globe for their immediate departure. FBI reports show the men making contradictory statements to investigators. The men were held in federal custody for 71 days, then deported back to Israel. The owner of Urban Moving Systems, Dominik Sueter, was questioned by the FBI, with the agency concluding that “Urban Moving may have been providing cover for an Israeli intelligence operation”.
When investigators returned to question Sueter, they found that he had hastily fled to Israel.
What conclusions did the FBI draw from their investigation? Well, they thought they were likely Israeli intelligence, but don’t worry, they think their target was not the US but rather studying Islamic Groups and Charities with potential ties to terrorist networks.
Later on, on Israeli television, where the men were being interviewed, Oded Ellner said they were there to document the event.
It was none other than Epstein associate Alan Dershowitz who stepped in as a negotiator on behalf of the men when they were being held in federal custody in order to smooth things over with the U.S. Government, as Christopher Ketcham reported in CounterPunch.
The Israeli “Art Students”
In January of 2001, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) began receiving a number of reports of young Israeli “art students” attempting to gain access to the offices of the DEA and other law enforcement and Department of Defense agencies. A deluge of these kinds of reports came in from over 40 cities within the first six months of 2001. Israelis were discovered diagramming the inside of federal buildings and possessing photographs of federal agents. One report claimed that between March of 2001 and September 11th, 140 Israelis were detained or arrested, with another report claiming that an additional 60 were detained or deported following the attacks.
One can read about these Israeli “art students” in a 60-page DEA memo intended only for senior officials at the Department of Justice, which was leaked to the press. The memo contains a summation of the modus operadi of these “art students”: “In general, these individuals appear to be organized in teams of 8 to 10 people, with one person described as the ‘Team Leader’. They are usually encountered in pairs or individually carrying a makeshift art portfolio. Several times, they have been seen or admitted to being dropped off in an area by the Team Leader, who returns later to pick them up. The females are usually described as very attractive, and all are generally in their early to mid-20s. Most admit to having served in the Israeli military. This is not surprising given the mandatory military service required in Israel; however, a majority of those questioned have stated they served in military intelligence, electronic signal intercept, or explosive ordnance units. Some have been linked to high-ranking officials in the Israeli military. One was the son of a two-star general, one served as the bodyguard to the head of the Israeli Army, one served in a Patriot missile unit. That these people are now traveling in the U.S. selling art seems not to fit their background.”
Not only does the memo mention that some of the Israeli nationals had a background in demolition and explosive ordinance units, but the Orlando DEA had linked these “art students” to an ongoing drug investigation involving MDMA. However, Ketcham in his article mentions that this could possibly be a smokescreen to conceal the more obvious spying angle.
In December of 2001, Fox News aired a four-part series conducted by Carl Cameron where he reported that these “art students” were at the center of an investigation by federal officials into the existence of a possible Israeli espionage ring which was tracking Al Qaeda leading up to 9/11. One investigator said to Cameron, “Evidence linking these Israelis to 9/11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It’s classified information.”
In the four-part series when the question was put forward by a Fox anchor to Cameron as to the question of Israeli foreknowledge of 9/11 and how clear it was to ‘investigators that some Israeli agents may have known’, Cameron states, “Well, it’s very explosive information obviously and there’s a great deal of evidence that they say they have collected none of it necessarily conclusive it’s more when they put it all together a bigger question they say is ‘How could they not have known?’ Almost a direct quote.”
Israeli Intelligence and the 9/11 Hijackers
Christopher Ketcham, who wrote a piece on the Israeli art students for Salon, later wrote a piece for CounterPunch magazine expanding upon this research, delving into the story of the Urban Moving Systems employees detained after 9/11. Ketcham, in an outstanding feat of journalism, unveiled a number of damning revelations relating to the vast network of Israeli nationals operating in the United States and the alleged 9/11 hijackers. Perhaps the most damning of these is the proximity of the Urban Moving Systems and art-peddling Israeli nationals to the 9/11 hijackers.
All five hijackers of American Airlines 77, which struck the Pentagon, had addresses or were active within a six-mile radius of towns associated with the Urban Moving Systems Israelis. They were all operating on the same stomping grounds of northern New Jersey.
One of the “art students”, former Israeli Military Intelligence Officer Hanan Serfaty, rented two separate apartments close to the mail-drop location and apartment of Mohammed Atta. The distance between Atta’s mail-drop and one of Serfaty’s apartments was approximately 2,700 feet. Atta and the hijacker pilot of United Airlines 175 shared an apartment only 1,800 feet from Serfaty’s apartment. Serfaty was moving around significant sums of cash. These strange happenings occurred in Hollywood, Florida, an area which, according to the aforementioned DEA memo, appeared to be “a central point for these individuals, with several having addresses in this area”.
More than thirty of the 120 “art students” lived in Hollywood, which was home to nine of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers, with five more in the surrounding area.
Christopher Ketcham writes in CounterPunch, “In at least six urban centers, suspected Israeli spies and 9/11 hijackers and/or al-Qaeda–connected suspects lived and operated near one another, in some cases less than half a mile apart, for various periods during 2000–01 in the run-up to the attacks. In addition to northern New Jersey and Hollywood, Florida, these centers included Arlington and Fredericksburg, Virginia; Atlanta; Oklahoma City; Los Angeles; and San Diego.”
German publication Die Zeit reported that the Mossad provided US intelligence with the names of two of the hijackers prior to the attacks—Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi—with these two operating in Hollywood, Florida, in close proximity to Israeli “art students” as well as the Urban Moving Systems Israelis in New Jersey. Hazmi also visited Oklahoma City on almost the same dates as three of the art students. (Interesting aside: Zacarias Moussaoui, who allegedly planned to participate in 9/11, was in flight school in Oklahoma from February to May of 2001. This school was visited by Atta and al-Shehhi. Moussaoui just so happened to meet the shoe bomber that ICTS let through their gates, according to some accounts.)
One of the “art students” arrested leading up to 9/11, Michal Gal, was bailed out by an employee of Amdocs, an Israeli telecommunications company which counted some of the largest phone companies and US government agencies among its clients. The company, whose upper brass was filled with former Israeli Military personnel, was investigated twice within a single decade on charges involving espionage-related leaks of data. This in part resulted in them becoming one of the subjects of the four-part Carl Cameron Fox News investigation.
Amdocs acquired an Israeli company called Comverse. Comverse bought the Israeli instant messaging company Odigo in 2002, but already had a stake in the company as early as January of 2001. Odigo is notorious amongst those who believe that Israel is responsible for 9/11 due to two Odigo employees working at the company’s offices just outside Tel Aviv receiving warning of a non-specific terrorist attack about to take place only two hours prior to the 9/11 attacks in New York. The Odigo offices in New York were within a mile of the WTC complex.
Now some have theorized that the Israeli “art students” as well as the Urban Moving Israelis were not necessarily directing the hijackers, but were merely monitoring Islamic Fundamentalist groups. Others have theorized that the “art students” may not have been intelligence at all, but part of an Israeli ecstasy peddling ring, an idea hinted at in the DEA memo. Ketcham mentions that the mention of MDMA trafficking could possibly serve as a smokescreen. Ketcham even makes the astute observation that the obvious nature of the Israeli “art students” and their spying might have been serving the purpose of drawing attention to themselves to either distract from the real Israeli operatives at work on American soil or to confuse and muddy the waters of any potential investigation.
A cousin of one of the 9/11 hijackers was reported by the New York Timesto be a potential Israeli spy reporting on Hezbollah and Palestinian groups to Israeli intelligence.
What we can say is that the “dancing Israelis” and their fellow countrymen and women, in conjunction with the ties of Israeli intelligence to the WTC and airport security through ICTS, Zim, Silverstein, Lauder, Friedman, and the other assorted cast of characters, paint an obvious picture of who plays the outside role in this inside-outside job. Through Ketcham’s investigative journalism, we can see how not only did the outside angle ensure control of airport security and the World Trade Center, but they even managed to keep tabs on and possibly direct the hijackers themselves.
Act V: The Outside Element- The Clean-Up Crew
Just as important as having people in place at the World Trade Center complex and airports was having people amenable to the plans of the Inside-Outside plotters who could ensure that no legitimate investigation into the attacks ever took place. Even a cursory glance at the official story, which men like Ehud Barak were seeding into the public consciousness within moments of the attacks, reveals obvious inconsistencies. So how did the plotters manage to keep the legal system from becoming a thorn in their side?
One such mechanism of control was the 9/11 Victims Compensation Fund. In my previous piece, I mentioned how Jordana Feldman, who ran the Epstein Victim’s Compensation Fund, was a crucial individual when it came to the 9/11 Victims Compensation Fund. Feldman designed the fund alongside Ken Feinberg. Feinberg was one of three arbitrators who helped determine the market value of the Zapruder film, the video showing the assassination of President Kennedy. The Zapruder film was purchased by Time-Life, whose co-founder Henry Luce had a relationship with the CIA. The role of two of the individuals heading the fund in the aftermath of separate historical events widely considered to be subject to institutional cover-up remains pertinent to the role of both Feinberg and Feldman with the 9/11 fund.
A non-negotiable clause of the 9/11 Victims Compensation Fund was that, in order to receive any kind of settlement, no lawsuit could be filed against the airlines for any lack of security. This helped to further shield companies like ICTS from legal culpability and suspicion. That this clause was worked into the conditions of the Compensation Fund perhaps shouldn’t come as a surprise when we see the conflicts of interest involving people involved in the distribution of the funds.
All of the cases were presided over by Judge Alvin Hellerstein of the Southern District of New York. Hellerstein did not disclose his own conflict of interest in his rulings, specifically as it relates to Huntleigh USA and ICTS. Hellerstein’s son Joseph Hellerstein worked for law firm Amit, Pollak, Matalon and Company, based in Tel Aviv, Israel. The firm represented an Israeli defense contractor partnered with Boeing, a sister company of ICTS, and RFID device company Better Online Solutions (BOS).
Boaz Harel, the brother of Ezra Harel, took over the majority interest of ICTS after the death of his brother, who sat on the board of BOS. The chairman of the BOS board was Edouard Cukierman, the president of a private equity firm that owned Catalyst Investments, which had as its president Boaz Harel. Catalyst Investments was a major shareholder of BOS. While this convoluted thread is difficult to untangle, one can read the motion filed in the US second court of Appeals by 9/11 widow Ellen Miriani, which parses out the incestous nature of the Hellserstein-ICTS axis in detail. (Side note: the Israeli defense contractor Hellerstein’s son represented, Aeronautics Defense Systems, specializes in unmanned aerial systems including the Dominator UAS which is modeled on twin-engine passenger aircraft.)
Hellerstein also represented Cantor Fitzgerald. Those who read my last piece will be familiar with the head of Cantor, Howard Lutnick, an Epstein associate currently working in the Trump administration who was conspicuously absent from his office in the direct impact zone of the North Tower on 9/11. Lutnick gave office space to fellow Epstein-associate and former wife of Prince Andrew, Sarah Ferguson, who also was absent from the North Tower on 9/11 despite a meeting she had scheduled. After 9/11, Cantor allegedly brought in more money than they had before the attacks. The company was fortunate not to suffer from an inability to trade due to the existence of their revolutionary electronic trading platform e-speed. This type of software is reminiscent of software owned by other tenants in the Twin Towers, whom we will address in detail later.
Hellerstein appointed Sheila Birnbaum to settle as many of the cases as possible. Birnbaum was a lawyer at the firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom.
The law firm Skadden had a history of serving Israeli companies. One senior partner, Ken Bialkin, was the National Chairman of the ADL in addition to working for a host of other Zionist groups. Bialkin was instrumental in forging ties between American and Israeli companies and guiding Israeli companies to go public in the United States.
We can also see people friendly to Israel in the institutional cover-up of 9/11 heading the legal proceedings involving Larry Silverstein and his World Trade Center insurance settlement.
Who was the judge presiding over Silverstein’s case?
None other than Michael Mukasey.
Michael Mukasey
In my previous article, I mentioned Mukasey and his son’s role in Jeffrey Epstein’s legal defense as well as the father-son duo’s overall careers as legal fixers for white-collar criminals. However, I think we all need a quick refresher. For more detail, I encourage you to visit my previous article, 9/11 was an Epstein Job.
Michael Mukasey grew very close to 9/11 cover-up artist and later Mayor of New York Rudy Giuliani when the two worked at the same law firm in the seventies.
Michael, along with his son Marc, worked as a justice advisor on Giuliani’s presidential campaign.
Michael Mukasey was the US Attorney General from September of 2007 to January of 2009, meaning he was the Attorney General during the finalization of Jeffrey Epstein’s Sweetheart Deal, as well as Epstein’s conviction and sentencing. Epstein’s sweetheart deal seemingly would need the institutional blessing of Michael Mukasey.
Epstein and Ghislaine acquired legal counsel from Michael’s son Marc, who worked for Giuliani’s law firm.
Marc, in addition to representing people such as FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried for his cryptocurrency fraud arrest and Congressman Matt Gaetz after allegations of sex trafficking, also represented Epstein associate Trump during his first term when people were probing into the president’s finances.
Marc Mukasey represented Israeli entrepreneur Joel Zamel, who formed a strategic partnership between his firm, Psy-Group, and Cambridge Analytica that helped propel Trump into the Oval Office. Psy-Group was an Israeli Private Intelligence agency with headquarters in Tel Aviv and Washington, D.C.
The same outside element that had ties to the World Trade Center complex, airport security, and even the movements of the hijackers themselves also left behind their indistinguishable fingerprints on the legal proceedings and investigations into the attacks. But what about those on the inside?
Act VI: The Inside Element
While the outside element managed to obtain a presence on the inside, we will see that several connections extending past the explicitly Israeli-Outside faction exist and are worthy of consideration. The outside and inside elements should not be viewed as conflicting or opposing groups. Rather, 9/11 was the result of a confluence of this outside-Israeli faction and the Inside element—a circle of WTC tenants, Bush Administration officials, prominent Neo-Conservatives, intelligence assets, and private interests with these two groups sharing mutual interests and ideologies in common. In fact, the confluence is so complete that at times the groups can seemingly lose contrast, operating as one singular entity. This group cohesion was essential to the success of their operation.
So what groups and individuals comprise the inside element?
After the 1993 WTC bombing, Kroll was contracted to revamp the security of the complex.
Jerome Hauer
Jerome Hauer, the Managing Director of Kroll at the time of 9/11, instead of going to his office in the WTC, made television appearances announcing that the man responsible for the attacks was none other than Osama Bin Laden, as well as dismissing the notion that any kind of explosives had been used. This display, reminiscent of Ehud Barak’s appearance on the BBC, is even more conspicuous given Hauer’s position managing security for the WTC.
Hauer’s position at Kroll was not his first job at the WTC complex.
As part of the mayor’s office under Giuliani, in 1996, the Office of Emergency Management (OEM) was created to respond to emergencies and help facilitate communications between different agencies in the event of an emergency. The OEM’s emergency operations center was housed on the 23rd floor of WTC 7, a controversial decision following the 1993 WTC attacks. The decision to place the Emergency Operations Center in the WTC was allegedly made by Jerome Hauer, the first director of the OEM, who had been appointed to the position by Giuliani.
The New York Times described Hauer’s job with the OEM as “sitting around all day thinking up horrifying ways for things to be destroyed and people to die.”
Speaking to the Times, Hauer mentioned the kinds of emergencies he was concerned with, saying, “helicopter crash, subway fire, water main break, ice storm, heat wave, blackout, building collapse, building collapse, building collapse.”
Not only was Hauer obsessed with building collapses, even going so far as to keep trophies from building collapses the way a serial killer might collect the jewelry of the women he dismembers, but he was also tapped into the Bush administration. On the day of 9/11, Hauer advised top officials in the Bush administration to start taking the antibiotic Cipro. Hauer also began hinting to the media that Saddam Hussein was going to unleash an anthrax attack through foreign terrorists.
Hauer had previously worked at Scientific Applications International Corporation, which employed Stephen Hatfill, the initial suspect in the investigation of the Anthrax attacks. SAIC worked on developing protocols for handling anthrax “hoax letters”.
SAIC just so happens to hold patents related to thermite.
Hauer’s strange connections relating to 9/11 do not end here. Hauer hired John P. O’Neill to Kroll just before 9/11. O’Neill had been an FBI Special Investigator with expert knowledge of Osama bin Laden and the Al-Qaeda networks alleged to have committed the 1993 WTC bombing. O’Neill would not be as lucky as Hauer and other top executives at the WTC complex. O’Neill died in the attacks.
In the aftermath of 9/11, public officials and the mainstream media repeated that the poor response to the attacks largely centered around a failure of imagination. After all, who could have foreseen planes flying into buildings as an act of terrorism?
During his career, Jenkins served as an advisor to many different government agencies, including the State Department and the Department of Defense. Jenkins is an expert on terrorism and transportation security, and in 2000 was an advisor to the National Commission on Terrorism. In addition to all of this, Jenkins had been an advisor to the president of the RAND Corporation after his time in the Special Forces. Some other RAND advisors during the time of Jenkins’ advisory role were Donald Rumsfeld, Frank Carlucci of the Carlyle Group, Condoleezza Rice, and PNAC member Francis Fukuyama.
Perhaps the most interesting endeavor Jenkins undertook during his career as a civil servant, as it pertains to 9/11, was his time as a member of the White House Commission on Aviation and Security in the late 90’s. In this position, Jenkins worked with CIA director John Deutch and James Abrahamson of Securacom, a company that provided security services for the WTC after the 1993 bombing by integrating the various electronic security systems installed in the buildings. The commission, with Abrahamson, Deutch, and Jenkins, recommended that all airliners and the FAA’s Wide Area Augmentation System should be updated with a modernized Global Positioning System (GPS). Some authors have theorized that GPS-guided autopilot systems took remote control of the planes hijacked on 9/11.
Securacom Secures Control?
A discussion of the World Trade Center wouldn’t be complete without delving deeper into the previously mentioned Securacom, which James Abrahamson was employed by in addition to his role with Jenkins on aviation security for the Clinton White House.
Securacom began work for the WTC following the 1993 bombing. The company later changed its name to Stratesec after a lawsuit was filed against them by a smaller company named Securacomm. The court found an effort by Securacom to financially “bury” the plaintiff in an attempt to crush the smaller company through “vexatious litigation”.
In addition to James Abrahamson of the Aviation and Security Commission, Stratesec also had Wirt Walker III, a relative of the Bush family, and Marvin Bush, the brother of George W. Bush, on its board. Marvin Bush sat on the Board of Directors from 1993 to 2000, leaving to work for HCC Insurance, one of the many companies providing insurance coverage to the WTC.
Stratesec had several interesting clients in light of the September 11 attacks. Not only did they provide security for the WTC, but they also were contracted by United Airlines and Dulles Airport for security purposes.
An FBI memo details how the FBI was considering investigating potential 9/11 related insider trading involving Stratesec after discovering 56,000 shares of Stratesec were purchased between September 6th and September 10th. Stratec shares went from $.75 a share to $1.49 once the markets opened back up after the attack, with the companies airport security systems being in higher demand after the attacks. An investigation was not pursued, with the FBI memo stating that “no ties to terrorism or other negative information” was discovered during their investigation of the two redacted individuals.
Profiteers? Perpetrators?
The North Tower was struck by American Airlines Flight 11 between floors 93 and 99. A single tenant, Marsh and McLennan, occupied all of these floors as well as one floor above the point of impact. Tenants of the WTC were responsible for any upgrades in leased spaces. Marsh fireproofed floors 93-100. Additionally, Marsh demolished floors 95-98 before updating the fire alarm and sprinkler systems of those floors. Marsh made modifications to floor 94 in 1998 and floor 95 in 2000.
The chairman and CEO of Marsh and McLennan at the time of 9/11 was Jeffrey Greenberg. In 1993, American International Group (AIG), a finance and insurance company, bought 23% of Kroll. The head of AIG at the time was Maurice Greenberg. Maurice’s son, Jeffrey Greenberg, two years after AIG acquired the 23% stake in Kroll, left AIG to work at Marsh and McLennan.
The CEO of Marsh, Jeffrey Greenberg, was in midtown Manhattan at the time of the attacks at the company’s headquarters, where he had an “unobstructed view of lower Manhattan,” where he saw “smoke rising from One World Trade Center and the fireball erupt from the second tower.”
Greenberg stepped down from his position at Marsh after being charged by New York State Attorney Elliot Spitzer of running a kickback scheme, but “Mr. Greenberg was never charged with any wrongdoing, while Mr. Spitzer was later engulfed in a prostitute scandal.”
Maurice Greenberg was also in Spitzer’s crosshairs, with Spitzer alleging that AIG was involved in sham reinsurance transactions and shady accounting practices.
AIG has a colorful history that has been the source of scrutiny and questions regarding the monumental bailout they received after 2008, as well as the company’s ties to the CIA’s precursor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and allegations of money laundering possibly related to cocaine trafficking out of Mena, Arkansas during Bill Clinton’s tenure as Governor.
Donald Rumsfeld (Left) and Paul Bremer (Right)
Paul Bremer worked as the CEO of Marsh Crisis Consulting, a subsidiary of Marsh and McLennan. And maybe not so coincidentally, just hours after the attacks, he would appear on MSNBC to announce that the attacks were carried out by Osama Bin Laden. Bremer and 1,700 other employees of Marsh had offices in the North Tower from floors 93 to 100, the exact area of the collision. 294 of Marsh’s employees died in the attacks while Bremer spoke cool, calm, and collected to his televised audience—just like fellow WTC employee Hauer.
Another such individual worthy of consideration is Stephen Friedman (not to be confused with Netanyahu’s childhood chum), who worked as a Senior Principal at Marsh and McLennan Capital Corp at the time of the attacks.
Friedman’s resume reads like a who’s who of the Western establishment.
An alumnus of Cornell and member of the elite Quill and Dagger secret society—sharing secret society lineage with Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Bush Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, and Clinton’s National Security Advisor Sandy Berger (who was later caught stuffing 9/11 commission documents in his socks).
Marsh, which was in the direct impact zone of the North Towers, occupying floors 93-100, had 294 of their employees die in the attacks. One lucky survivor who just so happened to be running late due to traffic, Richard Groves, exposed the link between the company AIG and Marsh, a software called Silverstream possibly used to funnel money through the WTC during the 9/11 attacks.
The year before 9/11, Marsh contracted Silverstream software to create a digital connection between Marsh and their clients for the purpose of paperless transactions. Silverstream had already provided similar software for companies like Alex Brown, Deutsche Bank, and Morgan Stanley, but the software created for Marsh far exceeded the software Silverstream created for these other companies. Richard Andrew Grove, a salesman who managed the project for Silverstream, noticed fiscal anomalies in the billing of the account of this project. After discovering $10 million in suspicious purchase orders with vendors appearing to sell Marsh large quantities of suspicious hardware.
Grove approached Marsh executives with these anomalies, and some executives urged him to keep quiet. Executives at Marsh Grove felt he could trust were killed on September 11th during a conference call, which Grove was running late to due to traffic. The Marsh executives who had told Grove to keep quiet were the ones who had scheduled the meeting and were also the ones absent.
After September 11th, Convar, a German firm was hired to retrieve data from hard disks discovered at Ground Zero.
In an article published on CNN titled Computer Disk Drives from WTC Could Yield Clues, states, “An unexplained surge in transactions was recorded before the attacks, leading to speculation that someone might have profited from previous knowledge of the terrorist plot by moving sums of money. But because the facilities of many financial companies processing the transactions were housed in New York’s World Trade Center, destroyed in the blasts, it has until now been impossible to verify that suspicion.”
A separate article from Reutersreported this suspicious surge in transactions: “The suspicion is that inside information about the attack was used to send financial transaction commands and authorizations in the belief that amid all the chaos the criminals would have, at the very least, a good head start. Of course, it is also possible that there were perfectly legitimate reasons for the unusual rise in business volume. It could turn out that Americans went on an absolute shopping binge on that Tuesday morning. But at this point there are many transactions that cannot be accounted for. Not only the volume but the size of the transactions was far higher than usual for a day like that. There is a suspicion that these were possibly planned to take advantage of the chaos.”
One of Convar’s data retrieval experts said, “There is a suspicion that some people had advance knowledge of the approximate time of the plane crashes in order to move out amounts exceeding $100 million. They thought that the records of their transactions could not be traced after the mainframes were destroyed.”
Some have speculated that this technology connecting Marsh to their clients via Silverstream was used to carry out these transactions.
Former LAPD officer and investigative journalist Michael Ruppert said that one of Marsh’s e-clients, Deutsche Bank, had its computer systems externally taken control of immediately prior to the attacks, “Within, I would guess — I’d have to go back and look at the book, but it was no more than a week of the attacks — I was being contacted by a lot of people, from inside official sources who were raising a lot of questions. This one particular person was extremely credible. They absolutely convinced me they had been an employee of Deutsche Bank in the Twin Towers, and they told me very clearly that in the moments right before the attacks and during the attack — there was a 40-minute window between the time the first plane struck the World Trade Center and the second plane — that Deutsche Bank’s computers in New York City had been ‘taken over.’ Absolutely co-opted and run. There was a massive data purge, a massive data download, and all kinds of stuff was moving. And what this person said very clearly was that no one in the Deutsche Bank offices in the towers at the time had the ability to prevent what was going on from any of their terminals.”
Convar never confirmed whether or not Marsh’s unique Silverstream software was the mechanism through which these large transactions immediately preceding the attacks were cleared through.
Kevin Ryan points out that Gordon would have worked closely with A. B. Krongard, the Executive Director of the CIA. Krongard has been suspected by some of insider trading in relation to 9/11 due to the firm he headed until 1998, Alex Brown Inc., buying many of the suspicious put options on United Airlines before the 9/11 attacks.
In 1996, Washington Group International acquired Morrison Knudsen Co., a civil engineering and construction company with a history of building demolition, with The Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce Reporting that the company was hired by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to demolish over 200 buildings.
Inside the Pentagon, the comptroller at the time of 9/11, Dov Zakheim, had previously worked for SPC International, a subsidiary of Systems Planning Corporation. SPC developed a “flight termination system” for the US military, which claims on its website to provide “a fully redundant turnkey range safety and test system for remote control and flight termination of airborne test vehicles.”
As Comptroller of the Pentagon, Zakheim was responsible for overseeing the $2.3 trillion, which Donald Rumsfeld announced could not be accounted for prior to a plane striking the Pentagon’s Budget Analyst Office.
The Final Act
The public was told immediately after the attacks what beliefs were within the narrowly prescribed parameters of safe opinion by people like Ehud Barak, Jerome Hauer, and Paul Bremer.
We were told the attacks were a failure of imagination despite the people responsible for the WTC complex’s security envisioning such an incident.
We were told that no explosives were used by Jerome Hauer, who worked in the World Trade Center and previously held a position with a company that holds patents related to thermite and developed protocols for handling anthrax letters.
There was no systemic failure of imagination.
On 9/11, the system functioned exactly the way it was designed to.
And to be clear, the name of any given individual or group here does not necessarily imply direct involvement in 9/11. I’m not trying to present some kind of cartoonish view of the attacks where every single individual mentioned was brought into a smoke-filled room and debriefed on what their role would be in the conspiracy. Power doesn’t work that way and neither do intelligence operations. At least for the most part. What we are looking at here is a network—an ecosystem of intelligence operatives, private interests, Zionist operatives, and legal fixers with shared interests, institutional alignments, and ideologies. On 9/11, those with direct involvement knew that they could count on this system to operate the way it was designed to. The point of detailing this network’s ties to the WTC, airports, and the larger system at play is to show how such a conspiracy could have functionally taken place without making the execution of the 9/11 attacks seem like something one would have watched in a poorly written 80’s crime thriller.
The outside layer of Israeli-intelligence-aligned assets secured ownership of the World Trade Center Complex and the security of the airports, kept tabs on the men who supposedly hijacked the planes, had people amenable to the cause in place for damage control, and delivered the narrative that suited their purposes on the BBC.
The inside layer, through shady tenants like Kroll and Stratesec, was in the position to make sure that all the logistics inside the buildings took place without a hitch once the environment was made safe by the outside layer.
The 9/11 Truth Movement largely ignores the material, on-the-ground, documentary evidence involving suspicious tenants, financial crimes, intelligence operatives, and legal chicanery in favor of focusing on debates revolving around fringe physics or low-brow conspiracies with vague perpetrators instead of naming names.
The mainstream narrative that maintains that 9/11 was all a failure of imagination and that the truth is too difficult to parse out ignores the fact that the blueprint is out in the open for anyone to see. It lives in corporate filings, lease termination dates, archived articles, and leaked FBI documents.
There will unavoidably be a lot of speculation about CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s brief visit to Moscow due to the secrecy surrounding it, and media stories must conform to the war narratives. We are told that this was a routine visit and nothing out of the ordinary, although in reality, this was the first visit by a CIA director since November 2021. Given the deteriorating situation between NATO and Russia, we can draw some conclusions about the likely purpose of the visit.
The visit was likely intended to deliver a message and a threat to Moscow as desperation grows in Washington. NATO and Russia are now in the most dangerous period ever in their history of conflict. The CIA has been in charge of the Ukraine proxy war against Russia since the coup in 2014, and massive escalations can be expected as it all falls apart.
The Ukraine Proxy War is Unravelling
The Ukrainian army is exhausted and collapsing across the frontlines; the economy is falling apart due to the naval blockade and destruction of critical infrastructure; there is growing social upheaval from the aggressive “recruitment” of military conscripts and economic problems; the political crisis could bring down the government; NATO is running out of money and weapons to keep the proxy war going; and political opposition is growing across Europe that cannot be suppressed forever.
The US is bogged down in Iran and facing an economic crisis, while Russia is assisting Iran and has become the leading partner of China in establishing an alternative international economic architecture. The US wars against Russia and Iran, as well as the economic war against China, were intended to knock out or roll back the key adversaries on the Eurasian continent to restore US global primacy. Instead, these wars have intensified the shift toward a multipolar world order, as the US is facing defeat on all fronts and has exhausted itself militarily and economically, while the stability of the US political system is going from bad to worse. The US has pushed its main Eurasian adversaries together in what can only be described as Kissinger’s worst nightmare, and the Political West is fragmenting from imperial overstretch and the absence of a post-hegemonic economic model.
Trump continues to insist that the US has defeated Iran and the Strait of Hormuz is open and under US control, while NATO continues to insist that “Ukraine is winning”. As NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine begins to falter, NATO will likely escalate, as seen by Britain’s reckless actions. Russia, on its part, will likely escalate against Ukraine toward a knockout blow and take a tougher line with NATO to restore its deterrence, as NATO crossed the boundaries between proxy war and direct war long ago. Deterring NATO does not entail an invasion, but imposing a cost in the form of covert operations or even direct strikes are options for enforcing Russia’s red lines. Although, at the moment, the priority is to put an end to the proxy war without unnecessary escalation with NATO.
Reviving Diplomacy?
So what was Ratcliffe doing in Moscow? How can the US use diplomacy to improve its situation? It seems highly unlikely that NATO is prepared to give up its large Ukrainian proxy army by agreeing to any peace agreement that would restore Ukraine’s neutrality and resolve the territorial dispute. Much like the war with Iran, diplomatic initiatives are intended to secure a pause to regroup and shape the battlefield more favorably.
The 40+ day campaign by Ukraine and NATO to strike civilian infrastructure deep inside Russia did not break Russia, rather it backfired in a big way. Ratcliffe likely wanted an end to the naval blockade by returning to the rules of the grain deal, a ceasefire against energy infrastructure, and a halt to the offensive against the cities of Slovyansk, Kramatorsk, and Zaporizhzhia. There are likely also concerns in Washington about Russia preparing to open up yet another front in the Chernigov region. Such initiatives are, much like the EU-proposed unconditional ceasefire, intended to prolong the war rather than put an end to it.
It therefore also seems highly unlikely that Russia will make any concessions, as Russia cannot make any significant concessions. If this was a war about territorial expansion, then NATO escalation and pressure may have produced some Russian concessions. However, the uncomfortable truth that the political-media establishment in NATO refuses to accept is that Russia considers NATO’s incursion into Ukraine to be an existential threat. Whether or not NATO agrees with this assessment is completely irrelevant as Russia will act on its conviction. This suggests Russia has very little room for concessions.
The conflict could have been resolved at any time since 2014 by ending NATO expansion and restoring Ukraine’s neutrality. In the absence of any political settlement that ensures this objective, Russia will strip Ukraine of the high-value territory that can be used as a NATO frontline against Russia, and the rest of Ukraine will be reduced to a dysfunctional landlocked rump state. This solution will create a terribly difficult future for Ukraine and decades of instability for both NATO and Russia, yet from Moscow’s perspective it is the only possible path as NATO will not stop expanding and restoring Ukraine’s neutrality.
The optimist in me would like to think that Ratcliffe’s visit was intended to strengthen diplomatic channels and coordination to navigate through the extremely dangerous time we are heading into. Although, it seems more likely that diplomacy still takes the form of more ultimatums and threats in the hope of rescuing the situation. Predictably, this will not be received well in Moscow where the anger is boiling over
The Americans have their man for the Lockerbie bombing and are close now to a trial which in any democracy wouldn’t be allowed to happen due to the legal irregularities and malfeasance. But before we ask ourselves whether even the U.S. is a real democracy – or one that has all the auspices of one without the heart – we should never forget the farce of the original trial which found two Libyan spooks guilty of making and planting the bomb on Pan Am 103, with barely a grain of solid evidence to even link them to the crime. A travesty of justice on an epic scale was the theme established in the Netherlands at Camp Zeist, and we can hardly blame the Americans for continuing the theme with remarkable fortitude, impervious to any ignominy which exposes their first efforts as perfidious evidence-tampering and witness intimidation on a grand scale.
The madness continues at an even greater pace, though.
Soon, a Libyan suspect called Abu Agila Mohammad Masud will stand trial, accused by the Americans of being the bomb-maker. Yet the details around his arrest and interview (read: ‘torture’) are louche at best, and most insiders believe he is a patsy. In recent months, U.S. investigators have unearthed impressive amounts of documents, data, testimonies and even the accused Masud himself – building their case that ‘The Libyans did it’ – but none of it really stands up to assiduous scrutiny, legal or otherwise. Even a U.S. judge recently commented that the prosecutor’s case risked going to appeal in the event of Masud being found guilty, as most of the evidence hadn’t been ‘legalised’ by a number of countries’ authorities around the world. “Proceed at your peril,” the judge recently warned the prosecutor. One has to wonder: if U.S. prosecutors cannot even perform such a remedial task as getting stamps from the various judicial authorities, then how convincing can their case be in the first place – and who is behind the initiative?
The Lockerbie case breaks all the records for precedents. Within the borders of the UK, it is the greatest terror act there has been – but also the greatest cover-up by the British and Scottish governments, particularly the latter. We should not judge the investigations, though, by what they have uncovered – or covered up – but more by their omission to look at key facts, interview star witnesses, and not be distracted by political agendas. The two camps, which offer only the binary options of, on the one side Gaddafi, and on the other a Palestinian group who were experts in bringing down planes, is juvenile and not at all serious. There are nuances there which need to be unpacked, and if investigators are unable or unwilling to examine them, then we can only conclude that a massive miscarriage of justice is still being carried out today.
It is perhaps also an oversimplification to imagine that state actors could have played a role in the bombing of Pan Am 103 while operating on their own initiative. The camp which concludes the PFLP-GC were culpable – led by Dr Jim Swire – perhaps don’t go far enough in their own investigation before drawing conclusions that this group carried it out. Even the Saudi press just in recent days pointed the finger at its chief bomb-maker Marwan Khreesat as being the likeliest candidate, but still miss the point entirely. Regardless of whether you are in the Gaddafi camp or the PFLP one, everyone seems to be missing the bigger story and failing to look for bigger pieces of the jigsaw. The thought process seems to be that if we can nail the bomber, then we will work out who commissioned him. And so in the meantime, any investigation into who was the architect of Lockerbie will always be overlooked. This perverse dichotomy of logic is what has made the case unsolvable for nearly 40 years – which suits a number of Western governments who knew about Pan Am 103 beforehand and remained silent.
And yet there is evidence out there in the domain of intelligence circles which confirm that Khreesat was indeed the bomb-maker, but he was not working for the PFLP – he had gone freelance. While it is hard to imagine that the CIA allowed the bomb on board so as to kill three rogue officers who were on the flight, hell-bent on blowing the whistle when they got back to the U.S. about the program which effectively helped Shia groups in Lebanon become drug-runners – it is likely to be true. But what is much harder to imagine is that it was CIA officers themselves who had been planning to bring down a U.S. plane in Scotland for at least two years, with the express purpose of cranking up the pressure on President Reagan to bomb Libya and overthrow Gaddafi. Framing the Libyan leader so as to muster an enormous outcry in the U.S. was the plot, when two CIA officers met Safia Gaddafi’s wife – the financier of the plot – in a south London mosque in June 1987 to hammer out a strategy. For obvious legal reasons, I cannot publish their names, but it has been confirmed to me by a British agent who was there on other business that Khreesat was the bomb-maker. Gaddafi’s ex-wife wanted badly to seek revenge for her divorce and losing a child, according to the MI6 agent, who listened to the whole meeting and was shocked by what they were hearing.
Yet none of this is being examined or verified. The MI6 officer in question has presented themselves to the U.S. prosecutor and was only too aware that in 1988 one of the many weekly ‘controlled flights’ from Lebanon en route to the U.S. had drugs on board, but were an easy way of not simply getting a bomb on board, but were ripe for being used to deflect blame towards Gaddafi – and so the two accused at Camp Zeist were used by Gaddafi’s wife as stooges for the bombing. Among a coterie of DIA, CIA and MI6 officers in Lebanon at that time, all knew of the CIA plot and all knew it was only a matter of time before a Pan Am flight came down over Scotland. It was simply a question of timing before all of the elements lined up – and the three renegade officers on board completed the last piece of the puzzle.
The Libyans had to fake the evidence, though, which was essential for Safia Gaddafi to agree to finance the whole thing – and by Christmas 1988 everything was in place.
It was critical that the two Libyans accused – one being somewhat of an expert with explosives – were framed, and so they were set to task to set up the Malta link which was crucial for the FBI and CIA – and now for the prosecutor in the Masud case. Perhaps they knew they were being set up, and in the case of Meghrahi, sent someone else to go to “Mary’s shop” to buy the clothes. There are still many questions left wide open, but a rogue CIA operation which involved killing U.S. citizens would certainly explain the extraordinary lengths the Americans are going to presently to cover up what really happened to Pan Am 103. But who was the poor soul tricked into carrying the bomb onto the plane in his luggage? Not the young Lebanese man Khaled Nazir Jafaar, who was already working for the DEA drug-running program and thought that his cassette recorder – or at least his suitcase – was packed full of heroin, making him nervous when he stood in line to check in at Frankfurt’s Pan Am desk. The real ‘bomber’ whom the CIA used was a white, powerful key figure of international politics who was happy to take his own life. Lockerbie is a movie which can’t be made, as Hollywood producers would argue that no one would believe the real story – and Americans certainly aren’t ready to find out the truth, a point that Erik Kenerson, the U.S. prosecutor of the Masud case, is probably banking on.
Imagine you are a Chilean who’s lived in America – the so-called “Land of the Free” – for decades in peace and tranquility. Suddenly, one humid day in late October 2025, in your adopted home of Fort Myers, Florida, you are snatched in broad daylight then imprisoned by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.
Your capture remains completely unknown to the outside world until January the next year, when the US Department of Homeland Security names you among the “worst of worst criminal aliens” arrested by ICE to date. You are accused of committing “homicide” almost 50 years ago. Your incarceration makes international headlines, and comes as a personal shock. But not because you’re innocent.
You are no ordinary Chilean. You are Armando Fernandez Larios, a 76-year-old fascist intelligence veteran who in September 1976 helped assassinate former Chilean Defense Minister Orlando Letelier using a car bomb. An outspoken opponent of dictator Augusto Pinochet, Letelier fled Santiago a year after the September 1973 CIA coup that installed Pinochet in power.
What role precisely Fernandez Larios played in Letelier’s murder, which also took the life of his colleague Ronni Karpen Moffitt, is still not fully clear. He has told a variety of stories about what he knew, when he knew it, and what he did and did not do regarding the event. But Fernandez Larios was a key operative.
It seemed in 2025 ICE had gotten their man, in a huge win for immigration enforcement and international justice. But this March, Fernandez Larios was released from jail. Court documents obtained by the National Security Archive show he launched a legal action, accusing the US government of “breach of contract” by violating a plea deal he cut in 1987.
That agreement saw Fernandez Larios provide information to US prosecutors on Letelier’s assassination, in return for an extremely light prison sentence and promise the government “would neither seek to deport [him] to Chile nor to cooperate in his extradition to Chile.” Rather than let Fernandez Larios’ action go to court, ICE freed him. Presumably, he’s sunning himself in Fort Myers right now.
A huge archive of declassified documents related to Letelier’s assassination analyzed by RT Investigates, including secret statements made to US officials by Fernandez Larios, sheds shocking light on the case. They show that in mid-1976, Fernandez Larios was tasked by Pinochet’s regime with obtaining fake passports and US visas to fly to Washington DC.
Fernandez Larios was joined by Michael Townley, Pinochet’s US-born lead hitman and CIA double agent. They secured visas from Chile’s US embassy, after claiming to be on a secret mission to meet with CIA deputy director Vernon Walters at Langley headquarters in Virginia. Fernandez Larios traveled to Washington first, to conduct surveillance on Letelier’s movements in advance of his assassination.
On September 9, 1976, 12 days before Letelier’s murder, Fernandez Larios met Townley in the lavatory of New York’s John F. Kennedy airport to provide him with a surveillance map, notes on Letelier’s home and office addresses, as well as cash for the operation. Townley then recruited members of the Cuban National Movement, to assist him in building, placing, and detonating the car bomb.
A militant anti-Fidel Castro Cuban exile group, CNM was founded by veterans of the CIA’s failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, and worked closely with the CIA. Experts at explosives, the bomb was planted without detection then detonated as Letelier, Moffitt and her husband Michael were driving to work in downtown DC. Michael was sole survivor of the bombing.
In April 2010, it was revealed that only days before Letelier was killed, a State Department warning due to be sent to Chile, against carrying out “the assassination of subversives, politicians and prominent figures,” was cancelled at the behest of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. His department had been extremely worried about Pinochet carrying out killings outside Chile.
“We are trying to head off a series of international murders that could do serious damage to the international status and reputation of the countries involved,” Kissinger had been informed by aides, but he was unmoved. A close confidante of Pinochet who’d personally assisted his bloodstained rise to power, did Kissinger know Letelier was due to be killed?
The coverup and polygraph test
In the aftermath of the assassination, Fernandez Larios participated in an extensive cover-up orchestrated by Chilean officials, including Pinochet himself. After being identified by the US media along with Townley as a lead suspect in Letelier’s murder, he deceived military investigators, gave false testimony to the Chilean Supreme Court, and lied to FBI and Justice Department investigators.
By 1985 though, Fernandez Larios was open to talking, having back-channel discussions with the US about testifying on Letelier’s assassination. In return for defecting and providing what he knew – or claimed to know – about the killing, and Pinochet’s intelligence operations generally, Fernandez Larios would receive extreme leniency, then be allowed to stay in the US, safe from extradition.
Fernandez Larios was debriefed by US officials in Santiago in mid-January 1987, then subjected to polygraph tests in Brazil. He consistently denied knowing his 1976 mission to Washington DC was an assassination plot. The lie detector results showed “consistent signs of deception in Fernandez’ disclaimers.” Under further debriefing, he finally admitted “his surveillance contributed to the death of Letelier and Moffitt.”
A late January 1987 State Department cable on what to do with Fernandez Larios however disregarded the polygraph tests, shockingly stating he was “not a murderer or party to a conspiracy to murder.” The memo judged his information on the Letelier-Moffitt case to be of “limited value”, but stated “foreign policy benefits” to providing him a generous plea deal were “substantial.”
In February 1987, Fernandez Larios pleaded guilty to being an “accessory after the fact” to Letelier’s assassination. Within just five months, a State Department legal advisor wrote to the US Parole Commission, praising Fernandez Larios’ “character” and “his willingness to come forward and pay his debt” over his role in the crime. He was paroled in autumn 1987.
The “Caravan of Death”
In keeping with “consistent signs of deception” when discussing his foreknowledge of Letelier’s assassination, Fernandez Larios also did not tell US officials about many violent atrocities he personally committed as a member of Pinochet’s elite military unit, the “Caravan of Death.”
Following Pinochet’s seizure of power this deadly Caravan flew around Chile kidnapping local officials who remained loyal to Salvador Allende, who died in contested circumstances during the coup. Approximately 72 dissidents were executed or “disappeared.” Fernandez Larios was identified by multiple witnesses as one of the most ruthless members of the military death squad.
After Pinochet’s fall in 1990, investigations into his regime’s many atrocities were opened in Chile. In several cases, substantial evidence against Fernandez Larios as a personal perpetrator of appalling crimes was found, leading to Santiago launching legal proceedings. In accordance with his plea deal though, Fernandez Larios remained at liberty in Florida.
It took until March 1999 for a civil suit to be launched against him in the US. The family of Winston Cabello, a 28-year-old Allende-era regional planning director executed alongside 12 other political prisoners by the Caravan of Death in October 1973, accused Fernandez Larios of “extrajudicial killing, torture, crimes against humanity and cruel and inhuman treatment.”
Numerous Chileans identified Fernandez Larios as a participant in the torture and executions of prisoners in multiple municipalities. One witnessed him personally slashing Cabello to death with a knife. The three-week trial ended in October 2003, Fernandez Larios found liable for extrajudicial killings, torture and crimes against humanity. Cabello’s family was awarded $4 million in damages.
That sum remains uncollected, and Fernandez Larios is once again a free man after his recent spell in prison, despite him truly being the “worst of the worst” captured by ICE. A strong case for his deportation to a country other than Chile remains. He has not been granted a special “snitch” visa protecting foreign informants from deportation.
Last month, “intelligence” was relayed by Israel that Iran was supposedly planning on assassinating Trump, which resulted in him “secretly flying out of Turkey in an alternate military aircraft”.
But the claims of an Iranian assassination attempt against Trump relayed by Israel were deemed to be bogus even by U.S. intelligence.
The Washington Post reported that “The assassination threat was relayed by the Israeli government to the CIA, where analysts did not view the intelligence as compelling and conveyed that skepticism to Trump administration officials”.
The article added, “Another official called the reports of threats against Trump’s life ‘Israeli-derived, not U.S.-generated, and viewed as low confidence.’”
The article added, “Some U.S. intelligence officials saw Israel’s sharing of the warning about threats to Trump’s life as designed less to inform than to influence the president’s decision-making and U.S. policy in the region, a current and a former U.S. official said” with the report quoting one official saying it “fit a broader pattern of Israeli intelligence reporting that some officials see as designed as much to shape presidential decision-making as to inform it”.
Indeed, fabricated claims of Iran planning to assassinate Donald Trump seem to have been Israel’s most successful deception deployed to get Trump to carry out its preferred policy on Iran.
Journalists Max Blumenthal and Ken Silva have documented how the FBI recruited Pakistani national Asif Merchant to take part in a sting operation supposedly surrounding an Iranian plot to assassinate Donald Trump, in what Ken Silvia called “at the very least… a highly controlled FBI sting operation that never posed a threat to Trump” if not “a case totally fabricated by the undercover agents”.
Since then, Benjamin Netanyahu has repeated baseless claims of Iran trying to assassinate Trump in an attempt to get him to go to war with Iran.
In June of 2025, Benjamin Netanyahu baselessly claimed that Iran was behind the assassination attempts against Trump by Thomas Crooks in Butler, Pennsylvania, and by Ryan Routh at Mar-a-Lago, claiming that Iran “tried to assassinate President Trump twice”.
This deception seems to have influenced Trump’s decision to bomb Iran for Israel in June of last year, with the White House tweeting “I was the hunted- now I’m the hunter” in reference to the bombing.
Fabricated claims of Iran trying to assassinate Trump were also a large part of Israel’s campaign to get Trump to enter a full-scale war on Iran this year.
According to Reuters, before the bombing, “Netanyahu, determined to move forward with an operation he had urged for decades, argued that there might never be a better chance to kill Khamenei and to avenge previous Iranian efforts to assassinate Trump”.
It was also a key talking point of the late Neo-con Zionist senator Lindsay Graham, who joined Benjamin Netanyahu is lobbying Trump for the war.
According to the Wall Street Journal, “Graham likened Iran’s leader to Adolf Hitler and told Trump that Iran was in a historically weak position. They talked about the regime’s efforts to assassinate Trump in 2024. ‘If you think Trump forgets stuff, you’d be mistaken,’ Graham said.”
Yet again, Israel has fabricated claims of Iran trying to assassinate Trump in an attempt to get him to ramp up the Iran war.
Tales of the American Empire produces short historical videos about the American empire, like “The Sordid History of the CIA” series that are linked in the description. Most viewers are interested in the American CIA, so this is another episode about videos detailing the evils of the CIA. Some CIA officers work with murderous dictators and criminal organizations involved in the drug trade, arms dealing, and government contract fraud. These evil deeds are sometimes uncovered by the media but receive little attention.
There are great documentaries that provide insight into covert CIA operations. This is far too much material to condense into a short video. Here is a quick review of more great stories about the sordid CIA with a link to them in the description. If the link no longer works, the content has been removed. Two videos from the first part of this series have since disappeared from YouTube. They may be found on smaller hosting websites like Rumble, Bitchute, or Odyssey.
A Ukrainian woman identified by Interpol as the main suspect in last week’s bomb attack on millionaire Vadim Ermolaev in Monaco has been found dead, Ukrainian police have confirmed. A serving foreign intelligence officer may have been involved in her killing.
Anastasia Berezovskaya, 39, was placed on an international wanted list on suspicion of planting the explosive device that seriously injured the Ukrainian-born businessman and members of his family in the European principality. Her death was first reported on Tuesday by Ukrainskaya Pravda, with an official statement corroborating the details.
Ukrainian investigators said they checked Berezovskaya’s contacts after she returned to the country on July 1. Among them were two men, a former law enforcement officer and a serving officer of the Ukrainian military intelligence agency (HUR). Both made crypto payment to the woman’s account, which made them suspects in the Monaco bombing.
When confronted, the HUR operative confessed that he and his partner murdered Berezovskaya. Her body with multiple gunshot wounds to the head and shell casings were discovered at the location one of the alleged killers revealed.
The police said one of the suspects in the murder had a basement room that “resembled a torture dungeon.” The authorities claim the HUR officer went rogue and did not report his payments to Berezovskaya to his superiors.
Ukrainskaya Pravda said Berezovskaya last left Ukraine in March 2025. She reportedly had residency in Germany, where she obtained protection as a refugee several years ago, according to media reports. Interpol said she was fluent in German.
French media said investigators in Monaco suspected that the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) could have been involved in the bombing. The police statement identified the agency as a partner in its investigation and said the HUR collaborated with it as well.
The CIA reportedly invested millions of dollars following the 2015 armed coup in Kiev to rebuild the HUR from scratch, overhaul the SBU, and turn them into intelligence agencies focused on Russia.
Envision the following scenario: it is the 2008 U.S. presidential election between Senator John McCain (R-AR) and Senator Barack Obama (D-IL). As the results begin pouring in, a senator from another country writes to The New York Times and warns that if the elections don’t go a certain way, there could be “profound implications.”
We don’t have to imagine this scenario for long, because something very similar actually happened during Ukraine’s 2004 election. After the first round of voting, McCain released a statement to The Ukrainian Weekly, describing the election as “marred by widespread balloting irregularities.” He argued Ukraine’s November 21 run-off represented “a final opportunity to choose democracy,” that the world was watching closely, and that the outcome could carry “profound implications.”
This publication alone highlighted a running theme during regime changes during the 2000s. American politicians, NGOs, and media organizations consistently played an active role in the domestic politics of countries thousands of miles from the Mainland.
Ukraine provided an early example. Through the International Renaissance Foundation, approximately $300,000 was secured to fund Ukraine’s first independent radio station focused on social and political issues. The foundation also supported journalists connected to former Soviet-Georgia’s opposition press. This included reporters from 24 Hours and Rezonance, who produced articles ahead of Ukraine’s elections.
Grants to journalists and independent media outlets don’t, on their own, stand out as especially significant. But in the early 2000s, these were rarely isolated acts, and perhaps no example illustrates this better than Kyrgyzstan.
In a 2005 Wall Street Journalarticle, as well as the documentary from Manon Loizeau entitled USA: The Conquest of the East, Freedom House official Mike Stone voiced his support for opposition media. During this time, Stone had provided assistance for the opposition newspaper Moya Stolitsa Novosti(MSN) and had distributed copies of Gene Sharp’s From Dictatorship to Democracy, a handbook on nonviolent resistance that became influential among Twenty First Century protest movements starting in Serbia during the 2000 Bulldozer Revolution.
The effort extended beyond newspapers themselves. Freedom House established an independent printing press designed to provide opposition and independent publications with an alternative to state-controlled printing facilities. Not everyone welcomed the project. Some newspaper managers complained about the high costs and poor print quality, with one editor describing the bill as “astounding” and the printing as “very mediocre.” Stone dismissed the criticism, arguing that editors were merely attempting to negotiate lower rates.
Loizeau’s documentary details the level of American power behind Freedom House and Mike Stone’s activities. Days before Kyrgyzstan’s parliamentary elections in 2005, the state cut off power to the biggest independent (and Freedom House-funded) printing press. Subsequently, Stone hosted a meeting with Kyrgyz Foreign Minister Askar Aitmatov. During that discussion, McCain phoned in to express outrage over the shutdown, and Aitmatov apologized for the situation.
Kyrgyzstan was also subjected to the propaganda cartoon Beshtentek. Broadcast weekly on national television, the show placed a heavy focus on corruption and political accountability. Promotional materialshared by the U.S. Embassy in Bishkek prominently featured USAID branding alongside the program.
Former Soviet Georgia received similar treatment. Throughout the 2000s, organizations such as the International Research & Exchanges Board funded investigative journalism and local reporting. The Soros Foundation supported media outlets such as the independent weekly Liberali. During its early years, the television station Rustavi-2 received assistance from the Open Society Foundations, which later described the station as having received “significant financial and moral support from international donors including OSF and the U.S. government.”
Rustavi-2 would become one of the country’s most influential stations. Widely viewed as favorable to Mikheil Saakashvili, the channel repeatedly aired Bringing Down a Dictator, a documentary about the overthrow of Slobodan Milošević during Serbia’s Bulldozer Revolution. It also broadcast exit polling data during Georgia’s disputed 2003 election, helping shape public perceptions during an escalating political crisis.
None of this is to suggest that the political grievances in Ukraine, Georgia, or Kyrgyzstan weren’t real. Accusations of corruption, contested elections, economic instability, and frustration with ruling elites all played a major role in driving events on the ground. But as Libertarian Institute Director Scott Horton would put it, the people had more than agency. They had The Agency; America’s CIA.
Likewise, opposition media in itself is not an issue. The question is what it means when foreign governments and organizations begin to play a significant role in the media environment during moments of political turmoil—through funding, infrastructure, and messaging?
As McCain put it at the time, there remained “a final opportunity to choose democracy”—a line directed abroad but rarely reflected toward U.S. foreign policy itself.
In October 1962, the United States and the Soviet Union (i.e., Russia) came within an inch of all-out nuclear war with each other. To resolve the crisis, President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev entered into an agreement in which the United States agreed not to invade Cuba in return for Russia’s decision to withdraw nuclear missiles it had installed in Cuba.
For more than 50 years, both Russia and the United States have complied with that agreement. Russia has never re-installed nuclear missiles into Cuba. In turn, the United States has never re-invaded Cuba.
Given President Trump’s recent acts of aggression against Cuba, the question naturally arises: Will Trump and the US national-security establishment break the commitment that President Kennedy made by initiating another military invasion of Cuba?
Soon after Kennedy was inaugurated in 1961, the US national-security branch of the federal government, which, by this time, had become the most powerful branch, employed deception, subterfuge, lies, and manipulation to induce the new president into authorizing a US invasion of Cuba. The plan called for using a contingent of CIA-trained Cuban exiles to invade the island, with the aim of ousting the communist regime that had come into power with the Cuban revolution in 1959.
The CIA told Kennedy that no US air support would be needed. They also told him that the Cuban people hated Cuban leader Fidel Castro and would rise to the assistance of the US invaders.
Both were lies, and the CIA knew it was lying to Kennedy. The CIA figured that once its invasion got underway and was going to go down to defeat at the hands of the communists, JFK would have no other effective choice but to authorize the air support — as a way to “save face.”
But JFK stood his ground, and the US invasion of Cuba went down to defeat. This was, of course, the beginning of the vicious and ruthless war between JFK and the US national-security establishment that would end in JKF’s defeat on November 22, 1963. See FFF’s book JFK’s War with the National-Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated by Douglas P. Horne, who served on the staff of the Assassination Records Review Board in the 1990s.
After the disaster of the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Pentagon continued to pressure Kennedy into ordering an invasion of Cuba. As part of this pressure, the Joint Chiefs of Staff presented JFK with one of the most shameful and immoral plans in US history — Operation Northwoods. It called for terrorist attacks on American soil in which innocent Americans would be intentionally sacrificed at the hands of US agents who would be falsely portraying themselves as Cuban communists. The terrorist attacks would then be used as a justification for invading Cuba and violently achieving regime change.
To Kennedy’s everlasting credit, he rejected Operation Northwoods, much to the deep anger and rage of the national-security branch against which he was at war.
Why was the national-security branch so obsessed with invading Cuba? Their mindset was part of their old Cold War racket, which came into existence after World War II to justify the conversion of the federal government from a limited-government republic to a national-security state, which is a totalitarian-like governmental structure with omnipotent powers, including the power of assassination.
The Cold War racket involved inculcating the American people with a deep fear that the Reds were coming to get them. Central to this racket was the notion that the Reds in Cuba were only 90 miles away from American shores and, therefore, needed to be taken out before they invaded Miami, fought their way up the Eastern seaboard, and captured Washington, D.C. Never mind that Cuba was an impoverished Third World Country that lacked the remotest capability of even crossing that little stretch of water and successfully conquering the well-armed citizens of Miami. Never mind also that Cuba has never initiated any act of aggression against the United States and that it simply has always wanted to be left alone by the US national-security branch, which has always steadfastly and obsessively refused to leave Cuba alone.
Castro knew that the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA were pressuring Kennedy into ordering another invasion of Cuba. That’s when the Russians came to his assistance. They installed nuclear missiles in Cuba to hopefully deter the US from invading again. Alternatively, the missiles were to serve as a means of self-defense if the US were to initiate another war of aggression against Cuba.
It’s important to recognize something important here: The Cubans had every right in the world to have those nuclear missiles installed in Cuba. After all, Cuba is a sovereign and independent country. It is also worth noting that Cuba, like every other nation, has the right to defend itself from invasions and wars of aggression, including those initiated by the United States.
But no one (including Russia), likes to have nuclear missiles pointed at it from just a short distance away. The US certainly didn’t like it (just as Russia wouldn’t like it if US or NATO nuclear missiles were installed in Ukraine). And so, JFK demanded that the Russians withdraw their missiles from Cuba. If Russia had refused to do so, it is a virtual certainty that JFK would have ordered an attack on the missiles and an invasion of Cuba, both of which the Pentagon and the CIA were demanding. The result would have been World War III.
To resolve the crisis, Russia agreed to withdraw its missiles, and the US committed to not invade Cuba again. It’s an agreement that has been honored for more than 60 years.
Of course, Trump, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA can argue that the agreement, which they considered was a betrayal of America and a grave threat to US “national security” was not a treaty. That’s true. It was simply an oral agreement — a handshake, if you will. Nonetheless, an agreement is an agreement. There was no time limit on the agreement, which meant that it would exist into perpetuity. The Russians would not reinstall their nuclear missiles and the United States would not invade Cuba again.
If Trump and US national-security establishment decide to break JFK’s agreement, undoubtedly the Russians will not retaliate. But it will be another reason why people around the world understand that the United States can never be trusted to keep its word.
When the House of Commons was debating how much to increase the time limit for detention without trial the question of torture came up. Officially this was limited to the nice considerations of whether it was all right to send people to places where torture is used and whether Britain can use information collected by the use of torture in other countries. This discussion gave an impression of democratic Britain as the home of civilised behaviour where the very idea of torture is repugnant to our legislators – unlike, say, the US with its secret CIA jails… In reality, the British state has a long history of using and developing a whole range of torture techniques. … continue
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