Needed: A “New War” Against The Homegrown Villain

Americans are hot to retaliate for September 11 as soon as the responsible parties are known. Not knowing whom to bomb makes us feel impotent. Americans crave the catharsis of payback.

But, alas, many of the responsible parties cannot be bombed, because they are right here at home. Let me tell you who they are.

U.S. defenses against terrorist attacks rely on the sophisticated satellite and surveillance technology of the National Security Agency to intercept communications. We foil terrorist plots by listening to their plans in advance of their actions.

President Bush wants to know why U.S. intelligence agencies provided no warning. How did the large volume of terrorist communications go undetected over the many months necessary for planning and coordinating the events of September 11?

The National Security Agency was deaf to the voluminous terrorist communications, because the Clinton administration provided the terrorists with computer networks that cannot be monitored, with spread-spectrum radios that change frequency constantly and are impossible to break into, with fiber optics and a high level of encryption for their telephones.

As Defense Department official Peter M. Leitner told World Net Daily, “The technology that would allow these terrorists to mask their communications was given away, hand over fist, by the Clinton administration.”

The Clinton administration permitted the delivery of top-end military communications equipment to Syria, a country officially listed as a threat to U.S. security.

“Syria,” Leitner said, “is a terrorist-supporting nation. They provide communications capabilities to terrorist cells.”

For the Clinton administration everything was a question of campaign contributions. The corporations lobbied and contributed and, with the approval of Clinton and the U.S. Department of Commerce, sold out our security for terrorist blood money.

The corporations that sold Syria communications equipment capable of evading detection by the National Security Agency should be publicly identified and pilloried. They are prime defendants for class action suits brought by relatives of the thousands of Americans killed by the transferred American technology that protected the terrorists from detection.

Clinton should be vilified. Perjury is one thing. Rendering inoperable our country’s defenses against terrorism is high treason.

Before he attacks Afghanistan, President Bush best clean up his own act. According to Leitner, the Commerce Department is trying today to export high level telecom equipment to Syria. He fingers Commerce official Karen Vogel [Send her email at KVOGEL@bxa.doc.gov ] for repeatedly pressuring the Pentagon to approve the export of more top-end equipment.

Now that Leitner has blown the whistle, it will be interesting to see what happens to him. Will the government protect itself and distract the public by bombing abroad?

There are other home-grown villains in the story. Our immigration policy is one. The terrorists who crashed the airliners did not sneak into the U.S. from some dark corner of the Middle East. They lived in America and were trained as pilots in American flight schools. They may even have benefited from federal education money.

U.S. immigration policy makes it easy for members of every terrorist group in the world to hang out in America, and they do. There are far more Islamic terrorists living in America and Canada than there are with bin Laden in Afghanistan. Knowingly or unknowingly, religious and civil rights organizations provide terrorist cells with support groups.

Other villains in the story are the American political left and multiculturalists. In the 1970s the political left used committee hearings conducted by Senator Frank Church (D, Idaho) to protect Fidel Castro by emasculating the CIA, depriving the agency of ability to eliminate foreigners who pose a threat to our security.

The FBI has not infiltrated Muslim groups in the U.S. because under the civil rights laws Muslims are a “protected minority.”

Terrorists in the U.S. are able to build their networks undeterred and to raise money under a variety of guises from a large Muslim community.

Multiculturalists in American universities champion Third World people and denigrate America, thus helping to fashion a moral atmosphere in which Muslims are championed as “oppressed people” and America is challenged as the white hegemon, the oppressor of women and minorities.

Perhaps it was this moral atmosphere that deterred jurors from giving the death penalty to the Muslims who blew up the US Embassy in Nairobi in 1998. Despite the death of 213 Americans in the blast, brainwashed jurors spared the terrorists’ lives on the grounds that the bombing was culturally determined. [For a report on these sensitive American jurors and their rationales, click here Don’t count on your “culture” and “sincere religious beliefs” – we’re not kidding - saving you if you’re from the Bible Belt.]

September 11 proved that some Muslims are a danger to us, but we can’t tell one from another. Civil rights laws require airports to employ them in security positions and airlines to employ them in flight crews and airliner servicing.

The media that has reported a "backlash" against Arab-americans from the Bridgeview, Ill. Mosque isn't telling you the whole truth.

Bridgeview is a suburb Southwest of Chicago that has the area's largest mosque. Demostrations there have been reported nationwide. But the reports only show one side of the street - the evil, white, patriotic side.

I have it on excellent authority (i.e. someone I know personally who is in a position to know, NOT a Web site or an email that's been forwarded around more times one can count, or some other spurious source) that there's more to the story than what you are hearing - and which is drawing condemnation of the USA from the Islamic world.

One one side of the street - angry suburbanites shouting "Die Arabs Die!" That part you know about.

On the other side, protected by cops, are hundreds of Arab teens shouting taunts, cheering, high-fiving, and burning American flags.

And they started it. The flags burned first and the angry mob followed.

Officials denied it, and the media dismissed it as a "rumor" because no one wants a riot. No one wants violence, including me. I just want the truth to be told by the media. I want the world to know Americans are not vengeful thugs.

The Bridgeview Menards, located behind the mosque, has pulled its flags from the shelves so that arab teens wouldn't buy them and burn them.

Bet you didn't know that did you?

Instead, we are drawing the anger of the world unjustifiably, because, according to someone at WMAQ-TV (a.k.a. NBC), "we don't want to incite other parts of the city."

Apparently, there is a Bridgeview fireman out there somewhere who has film of Arabs burning flags and taunting Real Americans in Bridgeview, but the media has suppressed it. They've refused to run it.

These buttheads in the media are lying about Americans, making us out to be little more than a raging, racist lynch mob. The world and the rest of the nation is operating under a mistaken impression. It's a dangerous one as well.

CAN SOMEONE TELL THE TRUTH?

This just isn't right.

Source

Clinton Exported NSA-ducking Phone, High-tech Encryption Devices to Syria

By Paul Sperry

WASHINGTON -- The dozen or so Islamic terrorists who pulled off the plot to strike at America's nerve centers in New York and Washington spent months, if not years, researching, planning and coordinating the surprise attacks, U.S. security officials say. And they did it completely in secret, using the world's most sophisticated telecommunications equipment, some secured by advanced encryption technology that most armies don't have.

Where did they get such state-of-the-art, military-related gear?

First, you have to appreciate the high degree of communications activity their mission required at each stage.

In researching their targets, the terrorists picked ones relatively easy to hit at high air speeds, yet ones that would produce big casualties and provide symbolic blows to American morale. They had to pick airports close by, with weak security. They had to find jets with enough heft and wingspan and fuel to cause major damage, yet not so large that they required extra crew.

The Boeing 757s and 767s they hijacked were big, but all had just two pilots and no flight engineers, making it easier for terrorists to take the cockpits. And the heisted jets were from the same family of aircraft, obviating additional cockpit training.

They also apparently studied passenger traffic patterns of airlines in order to pick flights with relatively few people aboard. All four flights had light passenger loads. The Boeing jets have roughly 160-seat capacities, yet American Flight 11 carried 81 passengers; American Flight 77, only 58; United Flight 175, 56; and United Flight 93, a skeletal 38.

Fewer passengers, fewer heroes to worry about.

More key, the terrorists needed to select transcontinental flights with big fuel loads to turn the planes into giant petro-bombs. All four flights were bound for California. They also had to know flight patterns, and how to blind air-traffic controllers to the hijackings by turning off the planes' transponders, which send such warning signals, among other aviation information.

In planning the attack, they had to fashion weapons that they could sneak past airport security. Transportation Department officials think that they may have hedged their bets and even planted security people on the inside at Logan and Dulles airports, so that guards would look the other way when they came through metal detectors at the terminals.

The kamikaze pilots also had to log many hours on computer flight simulators with high-level graphics capability, to practice hitting their targets at full throttle. A Continental Airlines captain, who's flown both 757s and 767s, told WorldNetDaily he thinks they may have even added the World Trade Center and Pentagon to the simulator's visual database.

"At the airspeed of those strikes, which hit their targets dead on, the hand-eye coordination demands would be too high for casual flying skill -- with, or without, an autopilot engaged," he said.

They had to practice, moreover, navigating the jets to abruptly change their course, by as much as 180 degrees in some cases, after take-off. Flying them at low altitudes was also something they had to work on.

Synchronized terrorists

Finally, in executing their murderous missions, the 12 or so terrorists had to coordinate their activities, flawlessly, within a roughly two-hour stretch. And, for the most part, they did. They all got to the airport on time, they all got through security, they all boarded their flights, they all hijacked their flights and, with the exception of one group, they all hit their targets.

Pulling off such a complex plot would have generated an inordinate volume of communications -- whether by radio, cell phone, land line, fax or modem -- among the terrorists, among their Middle-Eastern sponsors and among commercial contacts here and abroad.

But somehow eavesdroppers at the super-secret National Security Agency -- with their billion-dollar satellite "birds" and other surveillance technology -- were deaf, dumb and blind to the wicked plot.

"The real issue in this tragedy is how the hell were these people able to plan and coordinate such a strike over a period of months without the NSA intercepting their signals?" demanded Peter M. Leitner, a senior strategic trade adviser at the Defense Department.

Leitner, who reviews commercial license applications for exports of some of the most sophisticated military-related technology, thinks he knows the answer.

"The technology that would allow these terrorists to mask their communications was given away, hand over fist, by the Clinton administration," he said in an interview with WorldNetDaily.

Leitner says the previous administration rubber-stamped the shipment of top-end military-related telecommunications equipment to Syria, which is on the FBI's list of sensitive countries that pose a threat to U.S. security.

"Syria is a terrorist-supporting nation," he said. "They provide infrastructure to bastards like [Osama] bin Laden. They provide backup and support and communications abilities to these terrorist cells."

So what kind of gear has Syria -- and likely bin Laden, by way of Syria -- gotten from America?

Spread-spectrum radios

"We're giving them spread-spectrum radios, which are almost impossible to break into. We're giving them fiber optics. We're giving them a high level of encryption. We're giving them computer networks that can't be tapped," Leitner said.

Spread-spectrum radios, originally designed for military use only, change their frequency constantly.

"Bin Laden's cells aren't having any trouble communicating anymore," Leitner said.

Bin Laden, the world's No. 1 terrorist and the Pentagon's chief suspect in Tuesday's attacks, is known to use portable satellite telephones, advanced encryption cell phones and other encrypted telephony equipment, as well as secure computer networks -- all compliments of U.S. technology, Leitner says.

"If people are worried about how these people were able to coordinate and communicate something like this -- which had to be pretty extensively coordinated -- without it being intercepted, it's because of the crap we've been selling these people," he said.

"How can you penetrate their networks when you can't even eavesdrop on their conversations?" he said.

"You can't stop them when they're coming right at your building," he said. "But, damn it, you should be able to stop them months in advance by breaking up their networks."

Leitner posits that the NSA wasn't able to detect the Islamic terrorists' plot because of the "high quality of the communications gear that they've been acquiring over the last couple of years, thanks to the Clinton administration's decontrols on advanced telecommunications equipment."

Terrorists' secured telecom gear "makes it infinitely more difficult to get even early warning signs" about their activities, he said.

Tuesday's attacks took the entire U.S. government, including the intelligence community, by surprise.

"We had no specific warning of the U.S. attacks," said Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., ranking minority member of the Intelligence Committee.

Complete surprise

The Pentagon issued an alert of "Threat Con Alpha" the day before the attack, which meant that no threats were on the horizon. The same alert was issued the morning of the attack.

"We got no word of anything," Leitner said.

"We weren't warned of anything," another Pentagon official told WorldNetDaily.

Asked Tuesday if he had any inkling of the plot, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld dodged the question: "We don't discuss intelligence matters."

Three weeks ago, some overseas papers quoted bin Laden saying that a major strike against the U.S. was coming soon. But there were no specifics. And bin Laden reportedly sent an e-mail to unknown government sources three days ago warning holy hell would break out. But again, he didn't say how, when or where.

Still, it's baffling that the U.S. intelligence community didn't pick up, early on, any specifics of the complex and long-planned plot through electronic intercepts and signals intelligence.

But it's actually not that baffling, Leitner asserts, against the backdrop of loose government controls on dual-use telecom exports.

"I've testified to Congress that it will take serious numbers of body bags before we wake up to the need to tighten dual-use export controls," he said. "Unfortunately, we've got them now."

"This is so tragic and yet so preventable," he said. "Now we're going to have to knock out their [terrorist] camps, just like we had to bomb the Iraqi's several times now to try to take out the fiber-optics network that the Chinese are installing in Iraq's air-defense systems."

"Yet, it was the Clinton administration that gave the Chinese the technology to give to Iraq," he noted.

The Bush administration apparently hasn't woken up, either.

Wake-up call

In June, Leitner was asked by the Commerce Department to OK a new round of exports of dual-use telecom equipment to Syria. He denied the request, and was asked to reconsider. He denied it again, arguing in a letter to Karen Vogel, the Commerce export licensing officer who requested the approval, that:

"Doing so vastly upgrades the C3 and C41 systems of the Syrian military and Intelligence Services. My concerns are also obviously compounded by the fact that Syria is one of the foremost state sponsors of terrorism."

Leitner continued: "Since an 'upgraded telecom infrastructure' will also greatly facilitate Syrian planning, coordination, secrecy and execution of terrorist acts, as well as direct military communications, I see absolutely no basis for any position other than a denial."

Vogel argued in an earlier letter that her request came on the heels of eight previous approvals of licenses for similar exports to Syria.

"There's still a lot of things inside the government involving national security that have just got to be changed," Leitner said.

Another senior Pentagon official who specializes in counterterrorism says his own faith in the U.S. intelligence community has been shattered.

"This full-court press by terrorists blows the hell out of the line that we've been hearing for years from the intelligence community that if they try anything big, we'll know about it and warn you. Anything bigger than a couple of people, don't worry, we'll know about it," he said. "Well, I guess they didn't."

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Needed: A “New War” Against The Homegrown Villains