Define Bombshell : What Happens When FBI Agents Blow The Whistle

Submitted for your consideration by Gabrielle Jones Price 
with permission from the author and copyright holder.

From Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil

Published in 2004

Chapter 12
Executing A Conspiracy: Shame And Honor In The FBI — An Air Force Colonel Blows The Whistle

by Michael C. Ruppert

[w/updated footnotes]

It doesn’t take many people to execute a conspiracy, especially when the people involved are accustomed to dealing with compartmentalized information. Few organizations are more familiar with compartmentalized information, and with what happens to whistleblowers who compromise intelligence operations, than the FBI. Indeed, the bureau is almost always the first place where people seek help when the inevitable retributions begin. It is the first place I went in 1978 after resigning from the LAPD with tape-recorded death threats when I knew that the CIA was dealing drugs. Who better to know and understand what whistleblowers face when they make their momentous decisions to come forward?

     But what happens when FBI agents blow the whistle? The truth of the matter is that many FBI agents, employees, and even military personnel did speak out, both before and after 9/11. What they said is damning. And what has happened to them remains a continued warning (though not an excuse) for those who still function within the system and keep it going. The main reason why these whistleblowers have been so thoroughly smashed is because they all threatened to expose direct US connections to the attacks of 9/11 and those who carried them out.

White House orders

In a watershed moment two months after the World Trade Center attacks, the BBC’s Greg Palast disclosed that shortly after taking office the Bush administration acted to prevent an FBI investigation into two of Osama bin Laden’s brothers, Abdullah and Omar, living in a DC suburb near CIA headquarters. With the cooperation of veteran investigative journalist Joe Trento, Palast was actually able to produce a classified FBI national security report disclosing the damning evidence. The subject of the investigation was the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), a charity that had been repeatedly documented as having funneled money to terrorists.1

     

     In the course of the broadcast Palast made these remarks:

I received a phone call from a high-placed member of a US intelligence agency. He tells me that while there’s [sic] always been constraints on investigating Saudis; under George Bush, it’s gotten much worse. After the elections, the agencies were told to ‘back off’ investigating the bin Ladens and Saudi royals, and that angered agents. I’m told that since September 11th the policy has been reversed. FBI headquarters told us they could not comment on our findings. A spokesman said: ‘There are lots of things that only the intelligence community knows and that no one else ought to know.’2 

     But the documents are more revealing, as Palast explains:

This document is marked “Secret.” Case ID — 199-Eye WF 213 589. 199 is FBI code for case type: 9 would be murder, 65 would be espionage, 199 means national security. WF indicates Washington field office special agents were investigating ABL — because of his relationship with the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, WAMY… ABL is Abdullah Bin Laden, president and treasurer of WAMY…
     The US Treasury has not frozen WAMY’s assets, and when we talked to them, they insisted they are a charity. Yet, just weeks ago, Pakistan expelled WAMY operatives. And India claimed that WAMY was funding an organisation linked to bombings in Kashmir. And the Philippine military has accused WAMY of funding Muslim insurgency. The FBI did look into WAMY, but, for some reason, agents were pulled off the trail.
     TRENTO: The FBI wanted to investigate these guys. This is not something that they didn’t want to do — they wanted to .… they weren’t permitted to…
     MICHAEL WILDES (LAWYER): I would never be surprised with that. They’re cut off at the hip sometimes by supervisors or given shots that are being called from Washington at the highest levels….3

Robert Wright

Twelve-year veteran FBI agent Robert Wright Jr. should be proud. Of all of the FBI “brick” agents who have come forward since 9/11 to describe the deliberate obstruction of investigations that could have prevented the attacks, no others have taken the risks or endured the punishment that Wright has. For good reason.

     Wright is the only agent in the FBI’s history to have conducted an investigation of terrorists that resulted in the seizure of financial assets. In 1998 he began an investigation — since terminated by the FBI — into terrorist money laundering in the United States. That investigation resulted in the seizure of bank accounts and other assets of Yassin Kadi, who has “since been identified as one of the ‘chief money launderers’ for Osama bin Laden.” Kadi is reported to have provided as much as $3 billion to al Qaeda before Wright shut him down.4 (Wright’s investigations also put a major crimp in the funding for Hamas, another Palestinian related support group that has been linked to terrorist activities in Israel).

     Based in Chicago, home of the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) where a great deal of 9/11-related insider trading was to take place, Wright was in one of the three most important financial centers of the United States. Nobody moves $3 billion without using exchanges such as the NYSE or CBOE. It’s just too much money and must move in financial streams where it would not stand out.

     In the only real coverage of Wright’s decision to come forward — which was coupled with a formal complaint against the FBI for its suppression of him — the Congressional News Service told a chilling tale as it reported on a press conference held by Wright and his legal team on May 30, 2002:

In a memorandum written 91 days before the September 11 terrorist attacks, an FBI agent warned that Americans would die as a result of the bureau’s failure to adequately pursue investigations of terrorists living in the country… Wright says that FBI management ‘intentionally and repeatedly thwarted and obstructed’ his attempts to expand the investigation to arrest other terrorists and seize their assets .…’ As a direct result of the incompetence and, at times, intentional obstruction of justice by FBI management to prevent me from bringing the terrorists to justice, Americans have unknowingly been exposed to potential terrorists attacks for years,’ he charged.5

     FBI Director Robert Mueller held a May 29, 2002, press conference where he stated, “It is critically important that I hear criticisms of the organization including criticisms of me in order to improve the organization.” Meanwhile the FBI was landing on Wright’s chest with both feet. It had issued Wright written orders not to discuss what he knew and not to disclose, either in speech or writing, the contents of an unpublished manuscript entitled Vulgar Betrayal that he had written for Congress. Wright was threatened in writing with disciplinary action, civil suits, revocation of security clearances, and even criminal prosecution if he talked. That letter was received by Wright’s attorney, David Schippers, at 5:00 pm on the same day Mueller lied to the American people about his pure intentions.6

     The next day, Wright concluded his own press conference in tears: “To the families and victims of September 11th,” he said, “on behalf of [FBI Special Agents] John Vincent, Barry Carmody, and myself — we’re sorry.”7 But the real truth of what was done to this ethical law enforcement officer is contained in a May 22 letter written by Schippers to the FBI and in the words spoken at the press conference itself.

     In writing to Wright’s superior, Chicago Special Agent in Charge (SAC) Thomas Kneir, Schippers described how Wright had voluntarily given a heads-up about a New York Times investigation into what had happened with his investigations. Wright was subsequently ordered not to talk to the press. He complied. Schippers wrote,

The FBI has failed seriously to address Robert Wright’s work-related concerns regarding the FBI’s terrorism responsibilities. In fact, we believe there has been a concerted effort by the FBI to discredit Agent Wright and minimize his concerns regarding the FBI’s failures in connection with international terrorism matters prior to September 11th, 2001. In part, this effort includes providing false and misleading information to the New York Times regarding Agent Wright and his Vulgar Betrayal investigation. Even more disturbing is the fact that the FBI has prevented Agent Wright and Special Agent John Vincent from providing written responses to the New York Times to counter that false and misleading information .... Agent Wright has also filed two complaints with the US Department of Justice (DOJ) in an attempt to have his concerns addressed .... To our astonishment, the DOJ employee advised that, although the allegations were extremely serious, the Inspector General’s Office did not have the resources to conduct an investigation of this anticipated size and scope.8

     The sheer vindictiveness of a system that seeks to silence whistleblowers was most fully revealed in the press conference itself, in which it was disclosed that Wright, Schippers, and attorney Larry Klayman of Judicial Watch (a Washington, DC-based legal watchdog group) had actually met months before 9/11. They also disclosed that Wright had written most of his manuscript and decided to speak out about the repression well before the first plane hit the World Trade Center. Repeating allegations that Wright had been threatened and intimidated by the Bureau, Klayman stated that Wright’s manuscript hits both Bush and Cheney “hard.” That leaves little doubt about where the orders to crush Wright were coming from. Shippers added that Wright had even been ordered not to talk to Congress. John Ashcroft was not spared in the scathing statements. Klayman said that “Ashcroft very likely had all of this information” and didn’t use Wright’s investigative work to pull the financial plug on al Qaeda before the attacks.

     The lawyers also described how Wright had, since voicing his concerns, been demoted to performing “innocuous tasks”; his office had been moved, computer equipment had been taken away from him, and he had been forced to purchase computers with his own money (which he did, out of sheer devotion to his work). Klayman stated that his office, aware of the direct connections between Wright’s work and Osama bin Laden, had called Attorney General Ashcroft immediately after the attacks. The response was terse: “We’re tired of conspiracy theories.”

     For a time C-SPAN carried a downloadable video file of the entire compelling press conference, which received no attention in the major media.9 It has since been removed.

Kenneth Williams and the Phoenix memo: a CIA connection 

On July 10, 2001, Kenneth Williams, the senior special agent from a Phoenix FBI terrorism task force, sent a memo to FBI headquarters. That memo, resulting from a seven-year investigation, alerted FBI headquarters that a number of Muslims, suspected of radical ties, were taking flight lessons in Arizona. It was later confirmed that Hani Hanjour, who was to be listed as the suspected pilot of the airliner the government says crashed into the Pentagon, had received his flight training in Arizona.

     The memo specifically mentioned Osama bin Laden and warned that terrorists were possibly going to hijack aircraft or penetrate airport security. Williams requested that the FBI institute a nationwide survey of aviation schools to ascertain if there were large numbers of Middle Eastern students enrolled in them. The request was denied, reportedly for lack of resources.10 The excuse seems weak. A list of flight schools is readily available through the Internet, and a telephone survey would have yielded fast results. 

     Williams was not the first FBI agent in Phoenix to complain about interference and obstruction by FBI headquarters. In 1994 Special Agent James Hauswirth complained about it after retiring and wrote a letter of complaint to FBI Director Mueller in December 2001. Hauswirth wrote, “The [international anti-terrorism] program ground to a halt a couple of years ago because of the micromanaging, constant indecision, and stonewalling.”11

     There was serious reason for the Phoenix “brick agents” to be concerned. They had watched some of their suspects who were taking flight training practicing at pistol ranges, and one of them was an associate of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, imprisoned for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.12

     After disclosure of the Phoenix memo’s existence in May of 2002, FBI Director Mueller took the same tack as in the Wright case: he classified it and refused to show it to members of the Senate panel investigating 9/11. This outraged Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, who threatened a subpoena and a fight.13 Unlike Wright, Williams — as a result of public pressure — was allowed to testify before the intelligence panel, and that panel has seen the memorandum that, however, remains classified. [...is it still? ~ GJP]

     Another person who saw the memo was Fortune reporter Richard Behar. This is the same Richard Behar who was instrumental in destroying the credibility of IranContra figure Terry Reed in the previous chapter. It seems Mr. Behar is a trusted asset of intelligence agencies, who should not have disclosed anything the government didn’t want known. But in his May 22 story on the Phoenix memo, he did. He described the Phoenix Field office’s interest in a man named Zakaria Soubra: “Soubra, the memo said, was a student at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona (according to the Los Angeles Times, he was questioned by FBI agents in 2000, after he was observed at a shooting range with another Muslim, who was a veteran of Islamic jihads in the Balkans and the Middle East…). The organization named in the memo’s title, the Islamic Army of the Caucasus, is based in Chechnya and was at one time headed by a man named Amir Khattab, who, according to news reports, is suspected of having ties to Osama bin Laden.”14

     We have previously documented that Chechen rebels were trained in camps funded and operated by the CIA, and that these operations were connected to Osama bin Laden, who was acting on behalf of the CIA in both the Balkans (Kosovo) and Chechnya. Khattab was one of the key players in those operations.

     As reported in a previous chapter, Michel Chossudovsky told us why the Williams memo was so dangerous:

With regard to Chechnya, the main rebel leaders Shamil Basayev and Al Khattab were trained and indoctrinated in CIA sponsored camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan. According to Yossef Bodansky, director of the US Congress’ Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, the war in Chechnya had been planned during a secret summit of HizbAllah International held in 1996 in Mogadishu, Somalia.15

     Williams’s memo was sent to the desk of Supervisory Special Agent Dave Frasca at FBI headquarters in Washington, where Frasca sat on it with an anvil. We may never know what is in the rest of that memo and what Richard Behar kept hidden for the interests he apparently serves. What has been documented here, however, is yet another case of senior FBI personnel deliberately suppressing information that might have prevented the attacks of 9/11 in order to protect CIA assets who were subsequently connected to those same attacks.

     Another major inconsistency in FBI operations is that, in 1995, after receiving warnings that al Qaeda operatives might be planning to crash hijacked airliners into CIA headquarters, the FBI “descended” immediately on flight schools all over the country.16 Yet in 2001 it was too busy.

Colleen Rowley

On May 22, 2002, Minneapolis FBI Special Agent Colleen Rowley hand-delivered a 13-page memorandum to FBI Director Robert Mueller. In keeping with his customary practices, Mueller immediately classified the memorandum from the Minneapolis Field Office’s top lawyer “Secret.” That didn’t help much, because Rowley, claiming protection under the federal whistleblower statute, had also delivered copies to the Senate Intelligence Committee and two of the Committee’s members, Republican Richard Shelby and Democrat Diane Feinstein.17

     The efforts of Rowley and her fellow brick agents in Minneapolis centered on the so-called twentieth hijacker, Zacarias Moussaoui, who had been in FBI custody since August 15 on immigration charges. It seems that for months before 9/11, FBI headquarters (FBIHQ) had systematically blocked every effort to investigate yet another case that — had it been supported — might have prevented the 9/11 attacks. Rowley was irritated. It wasn’t long before the memorandum — edited of course — was published by the likes of TIME, the Associated Press, and Newsweek. Rowley’s move was supremely well considered and executed in such a way that there was little else for Congress to do but embrace it. And the best thing to do with Colleen Rowley is to get out of the way and let her speak for herself.

May 21, 2002
FBI Director Robert Mueller
FBI Headquarters
Washington, D.C.

Dear Director Mueller:
I feel at this point that I have to put my concerns in writing concerning the important topic of the FBI’s response to evidence of terrorist activity in the United States prior to September 11th. The issues are fundamentally ones of INTEGRITY and go to the heart of the FBI’s law enforcement mission and mandate .…
     To get to the point, I have deep concerns that a delicate and subtle shading/skewing of facts by you and others at the highest levels of FBI management has occurred and is occurring. The term “cover up” would be too strong a characterization which is why I am attempting to carefully (and perhaps over laboriously) choose my words here. I base my concerns on my relatively small, peripheral but unique role in the Moussaoui investigation in the Minneapolis Division prior to, during and after September 11th .…
     I feel that certain facts, including the following, have, up to now, been omitted, downplayed, glossed over, and/or mis-characterized in an effort to avoid or minimize personal and/or institutional embarrassment on the part of the FBI and/or perhaps even for improper political reasons:…
2*) As the Minneapolis agents’ reasonable suspicions quickly ripened into probable cause, which, at the latest, occurred within days of Moussaoui’s arrest when the French Intelligence Service confirmed his affiliations with radical fundamentalist Islamic groups and activities connected to Osama Bin Laden, they became desperate to search the computer lap top that had been taken from Moussaoui as well as conduct a more thorough search of his personal effects. The agents in particular believed that Moussaoui signaled he had something to hide in the way he refused to allow them to search his computer….
3) The Minneapolis agents’ initial thought was to obtain a criminal search warrant, but in order to do so, they needed to get FBI Headquarters’ (FBIHQ’s) approval in order to ask for DOJ … approval to contact the United States Attorney’s Office in Minnesota. Prior to and even after receipt of information provided by the French, FBIHQ personnel disputed with the Minneapolis agents the existence of probable cause to believe that a criminal violation had occurred/was occurring. As such, FBIHQ personnel refused to contact [DoJ] to attempt to get the authority. While reasonable minds may differ as to whether probable cause existed prior to receipt of the French intelligence information, it was certainly established after that point and became even greater with successive, more detailed information from the French and other intelligence sources… [i.]
Notably also, the actual search warrant obtained on September 11th did not include the French intelligence information. Therefore, the only main difference between the information being submitted to FBIHQ from an early date which HQ personnel continued to deem insufficient and the actual criminal search warrant which a federal district judge signed and approved on September 11th, was the fact that, by the time the actual warrant was obtained, suspected terrorists were known to have highjacked [sic] planes which they then deliberately crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. To say then, as has been iterated numerous times, that probable cause did not exist until after the disastrous event occurred, is really to acknowledge that the missing piece of probable cause was only the FBI’s (FBIHQ’s) failure to appreciate that such an event could occur ....
It is obvious, from my firsthand knowledge of the events and the detailed documentation that exists, that the agents in Minneapolis who were closest to the action and in the best position to gauge the situation locally, did fully appreciate the terrorist risk/danger posed by Moussaoui and his possible co-conspirators even prior to September 11th. Even without knowledge of the Phoenix communication (and any number of other additional intelligence communications that FBIHQ personnel were privy to in their central coordination roles), the Minneapolis agents appreciated the risk. So I think it’s very hard for the FBI to offer the “20-20 hindsight” justification for its failure to act! Also intertwined with my reluctance in this case to accept the “20-20 hindsight” rationale is first-hand knowledge that I have of statements made on September 11th, after the first attacks on the World Trade Center had already occurred, made telephonically by the FBI Supervisory Special Agent (SSA) who was the one most involved in the Moussaoui matter and who, up to that point, seemed to have been consistently, almost deliberately thwarting the Minneapolis FBI agents’ efforts (see number 5). Even after the attacks had begun, the SSA in question was still attempting to block the search of Moussaoui’s computer, characterizing the World Trade Center attacks as a mere coincidence with Minneapolis’ prior suspicions about Moussaoui. [ii.] …
5) The fact is that key FBIHQ personnel whose job it was to assist and coordinate with field division agents on terrorism investigations and the obtaining and use of FISA searches (and who theoretically were privy to many more sources of intelligence information than field division agents), continued to, almost inexplicably [v.] throw up roadblocks and undermine Minneapolis’ by-now desperate efforts to obtain a FISA search warrant…. HQ personnel brought up almost ridiculous questions in their apparent efforts to undermine the probable cause. [vi.] In all of their conversations and correspondence, HQ personnel never disclosed to the Minneapolis agents that the Phoenix Division had, only approximately three weeks earlier, warned of al Qaeda operatives in flight schools seeking flight training for terrorist purposes! Nor did FBIHQ personnel do much to disseminate the information about Moussaoui to other appropriate intelligence/law enforcement authorities. When, in a desperate 11th hour measure to bypass the FBIHQ roadblock, the Minneapolis Division undertook to directly notify the CIA’s Counter Terrorist Center (CTC), FBIHQ personnel actually chastised the Minneapolis agents for making the direct notification without their approval!
6) Eventually on August 28, 2001, after a series of e-mails between Minneapolis and FBIHQ, which suggest that the FBIHQ SSA deliberately further undercut the FISA effort by not adding the further intelligence information which he had promised to add that supported Moussaoui’s foreign power connection and making several changes in the wording of the information that had been provided by the Minneapolis Agent, the Minneapolis agents were notified that the NSLU [National Security Law Unit] Unit Chief did not think there was sufficient evidence of Moussaoui’s connection to a foreign power....
The e-mail communications between Minneapolis and FBIHQ, however, speak for themselves and there are far better witnesses than me who can provide their first hand knowledge of these events characterized in one Minneapolis agent’s e-mail as FBIHQ is “setting this up for failure.” My only comment is that the process of allowing the FBI supervisors to make changes in affidavits is itself fundamentally wrong .… understand that the failures of the FBIHQ personnel involved in the Moussaoui matter are also being officially excused because they were too busy with other investigations, the Cole bombing and other important terrorism matters, but the Supervisor’s taking of the time to read each word of the information submitted by Minneapolis and then substitute his own choice of wording belies to some extent the notion that he was too busy. As an FBI division legal advisor for 12 years (and an FBI agent for over 21 years), I can state that an affidavit is better and will tend to be more accurate when the affiant has first hand information of all the information he/she must attest to…. but changes of some substance as apparently occurred with the Moussaoui information which had to be, for lack of a better term, “filtered” through FBIHQ before any action, whether to seek a criminal or a FISA warrant, could be taken .... Even after September 11th, the fear was great on the part of Minneapolis Division personnel that the same FBIHQ personnel would continue their “filtering” with respect to the Moussaoui investigation, and now with the added incentive of preventing their prior mistakes from coming to light. For this reason, for weeks, Minneapolis prefaced all outgoing communications (ECs) in the PENTTBOM investigation with a summary of the information about Moussaoui. We just wanted to make sure the information got to the proper prosecutive authorities and was not further suppressed!…
7) Although the last thing the FBI or the country needs now is a witch hunt, I do find it odd that (to my knowledge) no inquiry whatsoever was launched of the relevant FBIHQ personnel’s actions a long time ago. Despite FBI leaders’ full knowledge of all the items mentioned herein (and probably more that I’m unaware of), the SSA, his unit chief, and other involved HQ personnel were allowed to stay in their positions and, what’s worse, occupy critical positions in the FBI’s SIOC Command Center post September 11th. (The SSA in question actually received a promotion some months afterward!)…
8) The last official “fact” that I take issue with is not really a fact, but an opinion, and a completely unsupported opinion at that. In the day or two following September 11th, you, Director Mueller, made the statement to the effect that if the FBI had only had any advance warning of the attacks, we (meaning the FBI), may have been able to take some action to prevent the tragedy .…
The official statement is now to the effect that even if the FBI had followed up on the Phoenix lead to conduct checks of flight schools and the Minneapolis request to search Moussaoui’s personal effects and laptop, nothing would have changed and such actions certainly could not have prevented the terrorist attacks and resulting loss of life. With all due respect, this statement is as bad as the first! Mr. Director… I think you have also not been completely honest about some of the true reasons for the FBI’s pre-September 11th failures....
NOTES
…[v.] During the early aftermath of September 11th, when I happened to be recounting the pre-September 11th events concerning the Moussaoui investigation to other FBI personnel in other divisions or in FBIHQ, almost everyone’s first question was “Why? — Why would an FBI agent(s) deliberately sabotage a case?” (I know I shouldn’t be flippant about this, but jokes were actually made that the key FBIHQ personnel had to be spies or moles, like Robert Hansen, who were actually working for Osama bin Laden to have so undercut Minneapolis’ effort.)… Along these lines, let me ask the question, why has it suddenly become necessary for the Director to “handpick” the FBI management? It’s quite conceivable that many of the HQ personnel who so vigorously disputed Moussaoui’s ability/predisposition to fly a plane into a building were simply unaware of all the various incidents and reports worldwide of al Qaeda terrorists attempting or plotting to do so....
[vi.] ...for the SSA continued to find new reasons to stall…
[viii.] For starters, if prevention rather than prosecution is to be our new main goal, (an objective I totally agree with), we need more guidance on when we can apply the Quarles “public safety” exception to Miranda’s 5th Amendment requirements. We were prevented from even attempting to question Moussaoui on the day of the attacks when, in theory, he could have possessed further information about other coconspirators. (Apparently no government attorney believes there is a “public safety” exception in a situation like this?!)18
[*order as shown appearing in the book]

     Thus Moussaoui, who had paid the $7,000 for his flight lessons in cash; who was, according to press reports, not interested in learning how to take off or land; who wanted to know if the doors of an airliner could be opened in flight; and who was particularly interested in air traffic patterns around New York City, remained totally protected until after the attacks of 9/11 had taken place. And it was subsequently revealed that Zacarias Moussaoui had also fought in Chechnya where some of the players had been connected to CIA training camps.

The French had been following Moussaoui for years. In the 1990s they tracked him to London where he learned militant Islam from radical clerics including Abu Qatada. French intelligence has linked Qatada to Osama bin Laden. Qatada preaches a particularly violent brand of Islam and encourages Muslims to take up jihad wherever they can. So Moussaoui took that advice and went to Chechnya to join Muslims in their fight against Russian troops. French intelligence was aware of that move and his later trip to Afghanistan.19 

     Zacaria Soubra from the Phoenix investigation and Zacarias Moussaoui in Minneapolis had something in common, other than allegiance to Osama bin Laden, which other members of al Qaeda did not. They had both fought in Chechnya and both had met Amir al-Khattab who had been trained at CIA-operated and sponsored camps. Conveniently, Khattab was reported killed in action in Chechnya in April 2002, just before the Williams and Rowley memos became news. Khattab’s death was denied by Chechen rebel leaders.20 Was a key witness being placed out of reach?

     During my time as an LAPD officer and in the years since, I have met several FBI agents, including one former assistant director, who bragged about the FBI’s ability to conduct “black bag” burglaries (surreptitious entries) during the 1960s and 1970s. Search warrants were never even a consideration. Keep this in mind as you reread the Rowley memo on the amazing refusal of FBI leadership to grant the field agents a FISA warrant. With Moussaoui’s laptop in their possession for weeks before the attacks, it is very probable that they had already examined all of its contents. The reason why they needed the warrant was to make the evidence they had found admissible. Numerous press stories since 9/11 have indicated that the contents of that laptop will be used to convict Moussaoui of complicity in the attacks and most probably sentence him to death. I can only imagine the “off-the-record” conversations that took place between the brick agents in Minnesota and Washington as the brick agents — knowing of a certainty what was coming — tried in vain to get their search warrant.

     And who was the supervisory special agent in Washington who brutalized the Minneapolis agents; who rewrote search warrants; who lied, obstructed, roadblocked, chastised, and suppressed? It was the same agent who received the Phoenix memo and sat on it: one Dave Frasca.

Carnivore

In March 2000 Denver FBI agents and other reviewing agents were “furious” after other agents in the bin Laden unit and at the International Terrorism Operations Center destroyed significant quantities of e-mail intercepts (received under authorization of a warrant) for a case connected to al Qaeda. The explanation given for the destruction of material of both evidentiary and intelligence value was that an e-mail surveillance system called Carnivore had errantly intercepted emails from additional innocent parties whose privacy had been violated. As a result, “‘The FBI technical person was apparently so upset that he destroyed all the e-mail take, including the take on the suspect ....” 21 “Take” means raw intelligence that has been collected but not yet analyzed.

     This explanation is absurd, transparent, laughable, and offensive. It plainly contravenes 80 years of known FBI practice. Not only does it not make sense that the FBI wouldn’t segregate the sought-after intelligence from that which was inadvertently collected; there was, in fact, a legal requirement that they not destroy anything at all. The Associated Press quoted Henry Perritt, the head of a review panel: “The collection is supposed to be retained for judicial review .… If an agent simply deleted a whole bunch of files without the court instructing, that’s not the way it’s supposed to work.”22

     Indeed, since a FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) warrant was involved in this case, the destruction of anything collected or seized as a result of that warrant is one of the most serious legal violations known. This would be true with any warrant. And yet it was confirmed that the decision to do so had been made within the UBL (bin Laden) unit, the same unit involved in the preceding cases. Here again we find Dave Frasca.

     A Washington Post story confirmed the above details but did not ask the obvious questions about why the entire take had been destroyed in direct violation of legal requirements calling for judicial review. It blamed the inappropriate collections on a problem with an Internet service provider. But even the Post story acknowledged — quoting an internal FBI memo — “To state that she [the memo’s author] is unhappy with [the International Terrorist Operations Section] and the UBL Unit would be an understatement of incredible proportions.”23

     What was described here was not some frustrated, untrained agent knowingly destroying material out of an offended sense of dignity over a loss of privacy by victims who never even knew about it. What more likely happened was a deliberate destruction of intelligence information leading to Osama bin Laden that someone could not afford to have in any files where a dedicated agent might find it and start asking questions or putting people in jail. The use of the Carnivore program also suggests that whoever was running the unit had led field agents to believe that whatever they collected in this manner was legally admissible — and therefore protected from deletion. But in reality, both stories suggested that the program was still under evaluation and open to challenge. The field agents didn’t know this. The result would be a built-in ability to destroy any prosecution using this material and allow the al Qaeda suspects to go free as a result of tainted evidence, while allowing gatekeepers at FBI headquarters to know how close agents were actually getting to sensitive covert operations. 

Dave Frasca

Before concluding that Supervisory Special Agent Dave Frasca of the Radical Fundamentalist Unit at FBI headquarters was the primary agent responsible for the deliberate, willful, and arguably harmful suppression of evidence and of investigations that could well have prevented 9/11, a couple of key questions need to be addressed. Various press reports have described FBI units with oversight in these cases as the UBL (Osama bin Laden) Unit and as the Radical Fundamentalist Unit. Are they referring to the same thing? Secondly, is there any indication that any member of Congress or of any other oversight body has noticed at least some of these connections?

     Dave Frasca was, until early 2002, the chief of the Radical Fundamentalist Unit within the FBI’s Counterterrorism/Counterespionage branch. In that capacity, according to press reports, he oversaw the operations of several subunits, one of which apparently was the bin Laden or UBL unit. One ABC report said, “The Bureau’s Radical Fundamentalist Unit, headed by Supervisory Special Agent Dave Frasca, and its Osama bin Laden Unit first got a memo that Phoenix FBI agent Ken Williams sent in early July.”24 The UBL unit was created, according to a statement by an FBI official, in 1999.25

     A description of the duties of the RFU and its chief was found on the website of the high-technology, intelligence-connected SAIC Corporation, based in San Diego, which recently hired Frasca’s predecessor, retired Supervisory Special Agent Robert Blitzer. SAIC’s website gave a telling description of Frasca’s duties, as he followed in Blitzer’s footsteps. 

From 1993 to 1996, Blitzer served as chief of the Radical Fundamentalist Unit, Counterterrorism and Middle East Section at FBI Headquarters. As the leader of this unit, he was responsible for overall national coordination, oversight, and direction of all criminal and intelligence operations against the international terrorists who bombed the World Trade Center and who attempted to conduct a wave of bombings in and around New York City in early 1993.26

     According to FBI spokesman Neal Schiff, Frasca’s tenure in the RFU position lasted from 1999 until he was promoted in 2002. Frasca is currently the Assistant Section Chief of the International Terrorism Operations Section I. Schiff was ambiguous, at best, in describing the relationship between the RFU and the UBL units. While maintaining that the two were completely separate units, Schiff refused to confirm or deny that Frasca had supervisory responsibility for the UBL unit. At the same time he would not deny numerous press reports indicating that Frasca did work both units. The Phoenix memorandum was sent to the UBL unit, and Frasca apparently had a role in the decision not to follow up on it. As to the Wright case, and in contrast to statements given by Department of Justice officials on condition of anonymity confirming the RFU’s role in squashing the Wright investigation, Schiff declined to confirm or deny any relationship. “That case is still pending and I can’t comment,” he said.

     But the link between Robert Wright’s oppressors and FBI headquarters was established only days after my office received the official statements from Schiff. On December 19, 2002, ABC News investigative reporter Brian Ross aired an interview with Wright and his partner John Vincent in which Wright stated, “The supervisor who was there from headquarters was right across from me and started yelling at me: ‘You will not open criminal investigations. I forbid any of you. You will not open criminal investigations against any of these intelligence subjects.’”27

     It was made clear in the story that the Wright/Vincent investigations had stemmed from the 1998 African embassy bombings and that the money trail led to Osama bin Laden. This would have placed the investigation within the UBL, Radical Fundamentalist Unit, and under the direct control of Dave Frasca. Schiff’s assertion that the two units are separate and distinct entities is belied by Senate documents, press stories, and Frasca’s own conduct post-9/11. A May 24, 2002, letter from Senator Patrick Leahy to FBI Director Mueller said: 

A press account on May 22 states that the Radical Fundamentalist Unit at FBI headquarters had decided not to pursue the recommendations in the Phoenix memorandum before September 11, 2001, since according to “officials… the FBI counterterrorism division was swamped with urgent matters.” Another press account on May 23 contains a correction by “a senior FBI official” and [stated] that the FBI’s “Osama bin Laden Unit was responsible” for the decision rejecting the recommendations ....28

     Leahy’s letter, in conformity with press stories, shows the interconnectedness of the two units, and Frasca’s roles in cases involving both units is underscored by the fact that he was the agent (and in some cases, the only agent) who provided congressional testimony on all of these matters, whether they involved the RFU or the UBL unit. Schiff was unable to resolve these contradictions and went into “no comment” mode about press stories or congressional correspondence.

     Knowing all this, it is now possible to state that Frasca almost certainly had direct oversight responsibility for all five of the previously described incidents. FBI sources I contacted confirmed, on condition of anonymity, that the RFU was the control point for all of these cases and that Frasca issued the orders thwarting investigations that could have prevented the 9/11 attacks. Looking at Frasca’s actions, both in terms of their frequency and in terms of their consistency, it stretches the imagination to accept press accounts attributing FBI “screw-ups” relevant to 9/11 to incompetence, lack of resources, or overwork. There is a pattern here, rationally explained in only one way. Someone at the FBI, or elsewhere in government, needed to make sure that al Qaeda members were left in place — either to perpetrate the attacks or to take the blame for them afterwards. And the Frasca connections — at least insofar as Minneapolis and Phoenix are concerned — were noticed. Frasca testified before both the Senate Judiciary and Intelligence committees, and many problems followed. First, Frasca told the Judiciary committee that he didn’t see the Phoenix memo until after the 9/11 attacks. Later his statement was corrected to indicate that had seen the Phoenix memo before 9/11, but that the UBL unit had rejected the request for a survey of flight schools. His statement was different from press accounts which indicated that because the memo was marked routine, the deadline for response to it was 60 days, which would have been after 9/11 — so Frasca had taken no action.

     Senators Patrick Leahy, Charles Grassley, and Arlen Specter were understandably miffed, especially when Leahy disclosed that he had acquiesced to a special request from Mueller to hold the secret hearing where Frasca testified without a stenographer or a transcript. Mueller didn’t seem to have minded, however, when the Intelligence Committee was allowed to make a transcript of Frasca’s statements for its members.

     On May 24, 2002, Leahy closed a terse and eloquent letter to Mueller on the subject, signed also by Grassley and Specter:

Finally, it has been noted that Supervisory Special Agent Dave Frasca in the Radical Fundamentalist Unit (RFU) may have been involved in handling the Phoenix memorandum and the Moussaoui investigation at FBI headquarters. [This had been previously confirmed in a number of press stories. The FBI only started changing their position after people started asking questions. - MCR] Please explain his role and the role of the RFU in evaluating the requests from the Minneapolis field office in the Moussaoui case; what connection, if any, he or others drew between the two ongoing investigations; and whether he or others brought such a connection to the attention of higher level FBI officials. If a briefing rather than a written answer would facilitate your response to the questions regarding agent Frasca, please let us know ....29 

     Some senators were a bit less polite in their remarks. Senator Richard Shelby, the Republican ranking member of the intelligence committee, was quoted as saying, “The information coming from Phoenix and the information coming from Minneapolis was stifled here at FBI headquarters.” Senator Grassley of Iowa decried “sabotage” by FBI officials.30

A secret team

To understand how someone like Dave Frasca functioned inside the FBI, one needs to understand how the CIA and other intelligence agencies place their people throughout the government. Frasca fits that pattern perfectly. For those unfamiliar with the way covert operations function within the United States government, I cannot emphasize enough the importance of two books: The Secret Team by the late Air Force Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty (the Pentagon’s liaison with the CIA during the 1960s), and CIA Diary by former CIA Case Officer Philip Agee. Other excellent case studies in this area are found in The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence by Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks. Operational patterns described by all of these men are confirmed by hundreds of declassified documents that have surfaced in investigations like those conducted by the Senate’s Church committee in the 1970s.

     To sum up the lessons clearly explained in both books, all one needs to understand is that the CIA routinely places its deep cover agents in every branch of the US government, especially within the FBI, the DEA, and federal law enforcement agencies. They even do it with municipal police departments such as LAPD, NYPD, or the Chicago PD. The CIA attempted to recruit me in 1973 as a college senior, and the proposition was made that I become a case officer with CIA and then return to LAPD, go through their Academy, and use the LAPD position as a cover. Although I declined that offer and have never taken a penny from the CIA, I was able to find out years later that the CIA, because of my family connections to the Agency and the NSA*, had actually steered several of my assignments as an LAPD intern while I was an undergraduate at UCLA. When the CIA places its agents inside the US military, the process is routinely called “sheep dipping.” [*For the unfamiliar, it may interest readers to know Mike had Q clearance due to his parent's intelligence positions. ~ GJP]

     Why would the CIA do this? Frasca’s behavior is right out of the textbook. At LAPD I saw CIA assets and contractors with access to narcotics investigations making deliberate decisions as to who got arrested and who got away. Gary Webb documented one such instance in Dark Alliance: The CIA, The Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion when he looked at massive CIA-connected cocaine shipments into Los Angeles. CIA assets doing CIA’s bidding are always protected. There is no way to conclusively state that Dave Frasca either worked or works for the CIA, either as a case officer or as an asset. But the role he played before 9/11 clearly served interests other than those of the FBI or the innocent Americans killed or bereaved by the attacks. The power of this secret team is that they are always able to protect their assets, no matter how badly they are exposed. And, as Colleen Rowley noted, Frasca was actually promoted right after 9/11.

Tyrone Powers 

On May 19, 2002, retired FBI Special Agent Tyrone Powers, currently the director of the Institute of Criminal Justice/Legal Studies and Public Service, also an assistant professor of law enforcement and criminal justice, was a guest on New York City’s radio station 98.7 KIIS. He had some interesting things to say about 9/11. According to an Internet report by Dennis Shipman based upon a transcript of the broadcast, Powers made statements that are consistent with what we have just described.

Tyrone Powers, a former African American FBI special agent, announced on NYC’s … 98.7 KIIS FM … hosted by news director and morning personality Bob Slade, that he had credible evidence strongly suggesting the Bush administration did in fact allow the September 11th attacks to further a hidden agenda .…
     Like [sic] Pearl Harbor, the US government needed a substantive excuse to enter World War II and end German hegemony over Europe generally and England particularly .… So an environment had to be created causing an anticipated furor enabling the Roosevelt administration to declare war against this “axis of evil ....”
     Does this scenario sound familiar? It ought to, because Powers argues persuasively that the Bush administration has taken a page from history in its endeavor to maintain control over rapidly dwindling oil reserves in the world generally and in the Middle East particularly ....
     Powers claims that the Bush administration superciliously perceives itself to be the last world super power; an Empire and, by some misguided albeit self-serving divine right, has to sometimes make appalling decisions to further its imperialistic aim, which is the total, unequivocal domination of the world and, more tellingly, its mineral resources.31

     During my post-9/11 investigations I verified that Powers had indeed appeared on the broadcast. I also verified his credentials, both as former FBI agent and current professor at Anne Arundel Community College in Maryland. He did not return several calls asking for further comment.

Sibel Edmonds

Initially it was bureaucratic infighting for more funding that derailed important security investigations and questions about contacts of a co-worker with targets of an FBI anti-terror investigation that prompted 33-year-old Sibel Edmonds to blow the whistle inside the FBI in 2002. Hired on an emergency basis and given a Top Secret clearance immediately after 9/11 because of her ability to speak fluent Turkish, Farsi, and Azerbaijani, Edmonds was promptly put to work translating mountains of audio recordings, videotapes, and written communications. By 2004 her complaints were to become much more serious.

     At first she heard her supervisors telling her to slow down and not rush important translations. The ostensible purpose for this foot-dragging at a time of great danger was to allow FBI managers to ask for additional funding because they were so far behind. Then she saw civilian translators leaving FBI headquarters with classified material against regulations. The last straw was when a Turkish-American colleague, married to a Major in the US Air Force, disclosed that she had ongoing relationships with a Turkish organization that was an active FBI target. The colleague, Melek Dickerson, suggested that Edmonds should meet people in the organization and get involved. It got worse when Edmonds allegedly discovered that Dickerson had attempted to arrange it so that all translations concerning the Turkish organization would be done by Dickerson exclusively. However, it was also an organization covered in the “take” given to Edmonds, and she became suspicious.

     Acting on those suspicions, Edmonds ordered files previously translated by Dickerson, checked them, and found that material information relating to terrorist investigations and espionage had been deleted, left un-translated, or marked as irrelevant.32

     Edmonds — a neophyte with no prior intelligence training — assumed the worst but failed to comprehend the possibility that she was being “pitched” to spy on an organization that may have already been penetrated. In that eventuality an intelligence operation could be used to plant false information or perhaps even to manipulate other assets who might believe they were receiving orders from Islamic fundamentalist terrorists. Sanitized translations would prevent FBI agents from compromising a CIA operation in Turkey.

     Published photos depict Edmonds as strikingly attractive; people like her are often prime subjects for recruitment as intelligence assets while being given as little information as possible as to how they are being used. In very sensitive operations if the “asset” has no knowledge that he or she is being “run,” so much the better. One term used to refer to such assets in the intelligence community is “Dixie cups” because they are often used once and thrown away. Such “assets” are expendable.

     The likelihood that Edmonds was being “pitched” was confirmed by a Senate intelligence staffer.33 Yet if she was being pitched over an operation that had to do with identifying real terrorist threats, whoever was doing it was going about it the wrong way. Following the rulebook she had been given, Edmonds did exactly what would have been expected of a loyal employee. She complained first to her immediate supervisors and finally, in March of 2002, to the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) and then to the FBI’s Inspector General.34

     Her contract was terminated for the convenience of the government in March 2002 but not until after she had received threats, both direct and implied, from FBI supervisors and from Dickerson.35 Her next stops were Congress and 60 Minutes where she got a much better reception as she sought to find out what had happened and correct what she felt were genuine problems. Senator Charles Grassley found her convincing and credible.36 In stories throughout 2002 Edmonds’ plight was discussed in the press but there was no discussion of advance warnings of attacks known to the FBI or the White House. Edmonds filed suit against the FBI over its refusal to respond to her Freedom of Information Act request and against the Department of Justice for an improper termination. She was followed routinely, especially to court appearances. Attorney General John Ashcroft, in response to a request from FBI Director Mueller, sought and obtained a gag order restricting what Edmonds could say about her case. The authority invoked to secure the order was the rarely used “State Secrets” privilege.37 The same privilege was invoked again by the Justice Department in April 2004 as Edmonds was subpoenaed to give a deposition in a $100 trillion civil suit against Saudi interests for their alleged connections to the 9/11 attacks. A massive public response, including activist challenges to US Marshals and the clerk in US District court over an attempt to hold a closed hearing on the motion to quash Edmonds’s subpoena, apparently caught the government by surprise. One of those who challenged the Marshal’s move to close the hearing was African-American former 26-year CIA counterterror case officer Leutrell Osborne. Osborne is also the source from whom I received the unedited Izvestia story which went into great detail about an explicit warning sent (including targets and dates) directly from Russian President Vladimir Putin just days before the attacks.38

     After the confrontation and an apparent huddle in chambers, Judge Reggie Walton decided to open the hearing. It was decided that he would issue a temporary order to quash the subpoena but would not render a final decision until sometime in June. As this book goes to press, the issue has not been decided.

     As Edmonds’s various legal matters continued into 2004 the 9/11 Commission chaired by former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean came in to the spotlight as pressure from victim families, activists, and the mounting pile of documentation flatly contradicting the Bush administration’s statements collided with the scheduled testimony of many key witnesses including Richard Clarke, John Ashcroft, Robert Mueller, George Tenet, Donald Rumsfeld, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice.

     At the same time that pressure was building for Rice to testify in public, Edmonds gave testimony to the commission. According to Salon, she told the commissioners that “the FBI had detailed information prior to September 11, 2001, that a terrorist attack involving airplanes was being plotted.”39 In a number of press interviews after Rice’s testimony, and after the publication of an op-ed in which Rice stated that the administration had no specific information of a domestic threat or that airplanes might be used as weapons, Edmonds said, “That’s an outrageous lie. And documents can prove it’s a lie.”40

     Unfortunately in the same interview, Edmonds also expressed the view that when George W. Bush said that “they had” no specific information about September 11, he was telling the truth. Perhaps if Edmonds had been permitted to speak with some of her other colleagues she might feel differently; the system does an equally good job of isolating whistleblowers from the media and from each other. Alternatively, she may have been confining her criticism to the FBI out of a desire to choose her battles, or perhaps to protect some ally elsewhere in the administration whose responsibility included alerting the president. But all this is far less likely than a genuine ignorance on Edmonds’s part; she knew enough to discredit Rice, then gave Bush the benefit of the doubt in the absence of better information about the president’s knowledge — information other whistleblowers had.

Steve Butler 

Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Steve Butler was yet another person with inside knowledge who spilled the beans about US government complicity in the attacks of 9/11. While Vice Chancellor of the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, Butler wrote a chilling May 26 letter to his local paper. It read:

A contemptible offense
It’s about time conservative idiots like Steve Kelly and Rod Musgrove got a dose of reality. Of course President Bush knew about the impending attacks on America. He did nothing to warn the American people because he needed this war on terrorism. His daddy had Saddam and he needed Osama.
His presidency was going nowhere. He wasn’t elected by the American people, but placed into the Oval Office by the conservative Supreme Court. The economy was sliding into the usual Republican pits and he needed something on which to hang his presidency.
For them to accuse Democrats of being “sleazy” is laughable. Isn’t it ironic that Kelly begins his inane babble with a reference to Monica Lewinsky? How many people died because of Monica Lewinsky? And for Musgrove to call the assertions “contemptible” is another joke. Funny how he manages to make disparaging remarks about President Clinton, as well.
Face it people, Bill Clinton was a great president. This guy is a joke.
What is sleazy and contemptible is the President of the United States not telling the American people what he knows for political gain. The Democrats asking pertinent questions is their duty as public servants.
Steve Butler
Monterey.41

     Butler’s letter was startling when I learned of it by reading mainstream stories that Butler had been suspended for it — and was facing a court martial.42 In fact a multitude of press reports, including stories from the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Newsweek, all published between September 15 and 17, 2001, disclosed that at least five of the hijackers had received US military training at bases in the US, including flight lessons. Among the latter was Mohammed Atta, who apparently received his training while wanted for terrorist activities. Atta’s US military training was confirmed by a separate story published by Knight Ridder at a time when many of the military training connections were causing the military to engage in some disingenuous doubletalk. Several subsequent stories indicated that while the five names matched up with 9/11 hijackers, it was apparently a case of more than one person having the same name. Yet the Department of Defense has not to this date disclosed the identities of the five people whose names matched those of 9/11 hijackers. Even more compelling is the fact that Newsweek reported three of the hijackers had received flight training at the Pensacola Naval Air Station.43

     All told, 14 of the 19 9/11 hijackers lived and studied for a considerable period in southern Florida. No one has done a better job of investigating the connections of these hijackers to military and intelligence operations than investigative journalist Dan Hopsicker. His investigations have also produced compelling evidence linking Rudi Dekkers, the operator of the flight school attended by Atta and others, to US intelligence operations and the destruction and/or immediate confiscation of incriminating records immediately after the attacks with the hands-on involvement of Florida Governor Jeb Bush.44  Hopsicker, a former broadcast news producer for MS-NBC, has produced a compelling video called Mohammed Atta and the Venice Flying Circus that details many of these links. He maintains a detailed website at: http://www.madcowprod.com/ [inexplicably, in the summer of 2004, Hopsicker performed a startling flip-flop by choosing to agree with most of the Kean Commission’s highly questionable findings.]

     How did Steve Butler fare? In June the Air Force announced that it had concluded its investigation and that Butler was going to face nonjudicial punishment likely to consist of a letter of reprimand. Had he chosen, Butler could have insisted on a court martial and public trial wherein he could have, and most likely would have, exposed direct links between the military and the hijackers. I finally located Butler in the summer of 2004. He confirmed having written the letter, but denied any contact with or knowledge of the hijackers. His school, the DLI, was only responsible for foreign language training. English language training was conducted at other facilities.

     In spite of the US government’s position that there was no compelling case that an attack on the US by al Qaeda was imminent, there was apparently one person who was paying very close attention to the information coming in from the brick agents in the field. In July 2001 Attorney General John Ashcroft stopped flying on commercial airlines altogether, opting instead for a chartered government jet. This, according to one story, was because of threat assessments from the FBI.45

*******

Footnotes below

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CHAPTER 12 FOOTNOTES: 1 Greg Palast, “Has Someone Been Sittingon the FBI?” BBC Newsnight, November 11, 2001, . 

2 Ibid. 

3 Jeff Johnson, “Tearful FBI Agent ApologizesTo September 11 Families and Victims,” Congressional News Service, May 30, 2002, . 

4 Ibid. 

5 Ibid
6 Ibid. 

7 Ibid. 

8 David Schippers, Letter to Thomas J. Kneir, SAC Chicago, May 22, 2002. 

9 http://video.c-span.org:8080/ramgen/idrive/ter053002_judicial.rm [Original link not available on C-Span but a websearch found it linked in many articles. Full video: https://youtu.be/vALc-oU3Hqg

10 Rich Connell, “Response to Terror: FBI Brass Accused of Apathy; Investigations:

Former agent wrote that Phoenix officials failed to make anti-terrorism a priority,”

L.A. Times, May 25, 2002, http://articles.latimes.com/2002/may/25/nation/na-phoenix25;

David Johnston, “Pre-Attack Memo Cited bin Laden,” New York Times, May 14, 2002, www.nytimes.com/2002/05/15/national/15INQU.html

11 Connell, op. cit.

12 Ibid.

13 Anyone familiar with Mr. Specter’s role in the Warren Commission will appreciate the irony of his new position: outside the cover-up, shouting to be let in.

14 “FBI’s ‘Phoenix’ Memo Unmasked,” Fortune.com, May 22, 2002. Archived

at www.unansweredquestions.net/timeline/2002/fortune052202.html [Original link not found. Fortune.com archived it, to its credit: http://fortune.com/2011/10/12/fbis-phoenix-memo-unmasked/]

15 Michel Chossudovsky, “Who is Osama bin Laden?” Centre for Research on Globalisation (CRG), Montréal, September 12, 2001, www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO109C.html

16 Maria Ressa, “U.S. warned in 1995 of plot to hijack planes, attack buildings,” CNN.com, September 18, 2001, http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/09/18/inv.hijacking.philippines/index.html

17 Patrick Martin, “New evidence that U.S. government suppressed September 11 warnings,” World Socialist Web Site, May 27, 2002, www.wsws.org/articles/2002/may2002/sept-m27.shtml

18 “The Bombshell Memo: Colleen Rowley’s Memo to FBI Director Robert Mueller.

An edited version of the agent’s 13-page letter.” Time.com, May 21, 2002: www.time.com/time/

covers/1101020603/memo.htm [Orig. link not found, TIME link archived here: http://www.apfn.org/apfn/WTC_whistleblower1.htm]

19 CBS News, May 8, 2002, www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/05/08/60II/main508362.shtml

20 “Chechen warlord reported killed,” CNN, April 25, 2002

21 D. Ian Hopper, “Memo: FBI Destroyed Evidence in Bin Laden Case After Glitch With E-mail Surveillance System,” Associated Press, May 28, 2002, http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/

news/archive/2002/05/28/national1704EDT0711.DTL [AP and SFgate links not found. More info here: https://epic.org/privacy/carnivore/5_02_release.html]

22 Ibid.

23 Dan Eggen, “Carnivore Glitches Blamed for FBI Woes,” Washington Post, May 29, 2002, https://www.policeone.com/terrorism/articles/52032-Carnivore-Glitches-Blamed-For-FBI-Woes/

24 “HQ Unit Accused of Quashing Pre-9-11 Probes,” ABCNews.com, May 24, 2002, http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=91617&page=1

25 Statement for the Record of Dale L. Watson, Executive Assistant Director, Counterterrorism and

Counterintelligence, Federal Bureau of Investigation — on Joint Intelligence Committee Inquiry, September 26, 2002, www.fas.org/irp/congress/2002_hr/092602watson.html

26 “Robert M. Blitzer Joins SAIC’s Center for Counterterrorism Technology and Analysis as Associate Director”, News Release, www.saic.com/news/dec98/news12-17-98.html [No record of press release except on Zoominfo under Robert M. Blitzer: https://www.zoominfo.com/p/Robert-Blitzer/1091980 || More on SAIC: http://www.takeoverworld.info/saic.html]

27 Brian Ross and Vic Walter, “Called Off the Trail?” ABC News, December 19, 2002, http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/Story?id=131907&page=1

28 Letter from Patrick Leahy, Charles Grassley, and Arlen Specter to FBI Director Mueller dated May 24, 2002, http://leahy.senate.gov/press/200205/05402a.html [Letter was not found on Leahy's site but was located on Grassley's: https://www.grassley.senate.gov/news/news-releases/grassley-leahy-and-specter-request-fbi-follow-moussaoui, another relevant link: https://spectator.org/52442_j-edgar-mueller/]

29 Ibid.

30 Martin, op. cit.

31 Dennis Shipman, “Another Spook Who Sat Behind The Door: A Modern Day Tale,” Black World Today, http://dennisshipman.blogspot.com/2010/09/spook-who-sat-behind-door-modern-day.html

32 CBS News, 60 Minutes, July 13, 2003, “Lost in Translation”; Gail Sheehy, “WhistleblowerComing In Cold From the FBI,” New York Observer, April 27, 2004.

33 Ibid. 

34 S.D. EDMONDS, Plaintiff, v. FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION, Defendant., Civil Action No. 02-1294 (ESH), UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA. [Docket info: https://dockets.justia.com/docket/district-of-columbia/dcdce/1:2011cv01329/149301 w/PACER access available. PDF: https://fas.org/sgp/jud/edmonds072303.pdf]

35 Op. cit., Sheehy. 

36 Letter from Senators Patrick Leahy and Charles Grassley to the Department of Justice Inspector General, June 19, 2002. [http://www.justacitizen.com/articles_documents/Leahy_Grassley_Letter_to_Fine_6-19-02.pdf]

37 Andrew Buncombe, “‘I saw papers that show U.S. knew al-Qa’ida would attack cities with aeroplanes’: Whistleblower the White House wants to silence speaks to the Independent,” Independent, April 2, 2004 [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/i-saw-papers-that-show-us-knew-al-qaida-would-attack-cities-with-aeroplanes-558612.html]

38 Eric Boehlert, “We should have had orange or red-type of alert in June or July in 2001,” Salon, March 26, 2004 [https://www.salon.com/2004/03/27/translator/]

39 Ibid.

40 www.fromthewilderness.net/free/ww3/042604_edmunds_alert.html. I learned details of Osborne’s participation in a telephone conversation with him on April 27.

41 “A copy of Lt. Col. Butler’s letter,” the Monterey County Herald, June 5, 2002,

www.bayarea.com/mld/mcherald/3406502.htm [Orig. letter not found. Article here: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2002/06/offi-j21.html]

42 “Air Force Officer Suspended for Criticizing Bush,” Reuters, June 4, 2002, www.truthout.org/docs_02/06.06E.butler.bush.htm [Link broken. His name is listed among many other patriots here: http://patriotsquestion911.com/military]

43 George Wehrfritz, Catharine Skipp, and John Barry, “Alleged Hijackers May Have Trained at U.S. Bases. The Pentagon has turned over military records on five men to the FBI,” Newsweek, September 15, 2001, https://www.wanttoknow.info/010915newsweek

44 Daniel Hopsicker, “Mohamed Atta and Rudi Dekkers Seen Together in Venice in Weeks Before September 11 Attack,” Mad Cow Morning News, February 17, 2003, www.madcowprod.com [http://www.madcowprod.com/2003/02/17/atta-and-dekkers-together-in-venice-before-sept-11-attack/] 

45 Jim Stewart, “Ashcroft Flying High,” CBS News, July 26, 2001, www.cbsnews.com/stories/2001/07/26/national/main303601.shtml

Please find links to previously released excerpts below with footnotes, which are the bulk of the work for this project. Crossing the Rubicon is over 700 pages long with upwards of 1,000 footnotes requiring updating since its 2004 release. From The Wilderness web links are estimated at double or triple that amount. Mike's administrative team sincerely appreciates your support of his legacy. TRC does not receive commission from sales of Crossing the Rubicon. Book sales help the administrator who granted permission to TRC to share excerpts and official web hosting duties.

Semper fi 🗽 

Jan. 8, 2012: Petroleum Man

Jan. 9, 2012: A Simple Exercise

Jan. 20, 2012: Unholy Trinity / Part One

Jan. 21, 2012: Unholy Trinity / Part Two

Jan. 22, 2012: Unholy Trinity / Part Three

Nov. 13, 2017: Why Is US So Russiaphobic? Inconvenient Truths About Foreign Policy

Dec. 14, 2017: Business With The Bin Ladens: The Real Saudi Arabia || Part One

Dec. 20, 2017: Business With The Bin Ladens: The Real Saudi Arabia || Part Two

Jan. 1, 2018: Define Bombshell: What Happens When FBI Agents Blow The Whistle