Posted on 06/01/2002 2:30:16 AM PDT by kattracks
"The Firms
A number of British firms are engaged in the contract military business. These include Saladin Security, Control Risks Group, Defence Systems Limited, Integrated Security Systems, and Defence Systems Limited (DSL). According to its promotional brochures the 'core business' for DSL, which was founded in 1981 by a team of ex-SAS officers, 'is devising and implementing solutions to complex problems through the provision of highly-qualified specialists with extensive international experience in practical security'. DSL has joint-venture arrangements with British construction companies Tarmac-Wimpy and Hunting, as well as some more surprising contracts; the us embassy in the former Zaire was guarded not by us Marines but by DSL personnel.
It is two United States firms which have set the highest standards in military commercial ventures for the New World Order. Braddock, Dunn and McDonald Inc. (BDM), which has its headquarters in McLean, Virginia, is chaired by former us Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci. Chief Executive of the company is Philip Odeen, who worked for Henry Kissinger on the White House National Security Council in the early 1970s and ran the Pentagon's Future Years Defense Plan study for the Bush administration. The company counts former us Secretary of State James Baker and former White House budget chief Richard Darman among its directors and consultants.
In 1995 BDM employed 8,ooo people and maintained over eighty offices world-wide. Listing its key business areas as 'systems and software integration; computer and technical services; enterprise management and operations', BDM's annual revenue in 1995 was US$890 million. 37 per cent of that revenue was earned in services to us Defense contracts; 25 per cent was earned in defence contracts overseas. One of BDM's four subsidiary companies is the Vinnell Corporation, a construction company founded in 1931. Through experience gained in managing military assignments during the Second World War, Vinnell expanded into a booming construction business in Asia. It won hundreds of millions of dollars worth of contracts and employment for 5,000 personnel during the war in Vietnam. Among its activities there were covert military operations. A Pentagon source described Vinnell as 'our own little mercenary army in Vietnam ... we used them to do things we either didn't have the manpower to do ourselves, or because of legal problems'.
In February 1975 Vinnell secured a US$77 million contract with King Fahd to train the Saudi Arabian National Guard (SANG), the military arm of the House of at-Saud. Today, Vinnell's advertising depicts the firm as 'providing a broad spectrum of professional and technical services to government clients in multiple areas of management and training. Client requirements have led Vinnell to a vast array of challenges, from Malaysia to Mexico to the Middle East, often to the very heart of international conflict areas'. Vinnell has subsidiary operations in Egypt, Oman, and Turkey, but the key area of responsibility remains with SANG. The contract for its one thousand-plus-strong team of advisors was extended in January 1994 to the year 2000 at a cost of US$819 million.
Other US military firms working in Saudi Arabia include Booz-Allen & Hamilton, which drills the Saudi marine corps and maintains the Saudi Armed Forces Staff College; Science Applications International Corp (SAIC), which provides guidance for the Saudi navy; and O'Gara Protective Services, directly hired by the Saudi Defence Minister to provide security for the Saudi royal family.
Military Professional Resources Incorporated (MPRI), of Alexandria, Virginia, was founded in i 987 by former special forces personnel 'to perform world-wide corporate contractual functions requiring skills developed from military service'. MPRI has over 350 employees and can draw on a database of more than 6,ooo former servicemen of the United States armed forces. MPRI is currently engaged in twenty contracts (seventeen domestic, three international) worth more than US$90 million in total. 17 Twenty-two corporate officers Of MPRI are former high-ranking military officers. These include General Carl Vuono, us Army Chief of Staff during the ig8g invasion of Panama and the Gulf War; Ed Soyster, former head of the Defence Intelligence Agency; and General Frederick Kroensen, former commander of the us Army in Europe.
Its mission statement claims that 'MPRI can perform any task or accomplish any mission requiring military skills (or generalized skills acquired through military service), short of combat operations'. MPRI picked up the contract to train the Angolan Army after EO pulled out in January 1996. Its main focus of operations today is in the Balkans. MPRI training prepared the Croat Army for its successful counter-offensive against the Serbs in 1995. The head of Croat Army Headquarters, Zvonimir Cervenko, stated 'We can create by ourselves a new and efficient army. But why lose time if there are in the world institutions which can be paid so that they can transfer very quickly their maximum know-how'? Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke, who brokered the Dayton peace accord, spoke favourably of MPRI in testimony to the US Congress. In March 1996 James Perdew, the Pentagon's point man at Dayton, flew to Sarajevo to urge the Bosnian government to contract MPRI or one of its competitors for the training of the Bosnian armed forces. In May MPRI Won the contract over rivals Vinnell and SAIC. Its $400 million programme is being paid for largely by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Brunei and Malaysia."
http://www.totse.com/en/politics/corporatarchy/nwotime.html
True or not, I don't know.
I’ve been following the articles written on John O’Neill, for two reasons. As head of the FBI’s New York Joint Terrorism Task Force, he was central to the FBI’s terrorism investigations, and because the articles written posthumously tend to quote a variety of sources, and give relationships within the Bureau at the time in question (1998 to the summer of 2001).
The downside of researching O’Neill is that he has become the poster boy, posthumously, for the McKinney-like conspiracy theorists, due to the book “Ben Laden: La Verite Interdite” ("Bin Laden: the Forbidden Truth") by Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie, printed earlier this year, that quotes O’Neill, allegedly interviewed by the authors in July 2001, as saying "every answer, every key to dismantling the Osama bin Laden organizations are in Saudi Arabia."." Since O’Neill is dead, there’s (conveniently) no way of verifying the interview, or the exact quotes, but it is widely documented, in stories quoting sources by name, that he clashed with the Clinton State Department as the lead investigator in Yemen after the bombing of the Cole in 2000. He was also instrumental in gathering evidence upon which NY Federal Prosecutor Mary Jo White obtained convictions in the trials of the African Embassy bombers and collaborators.
In an article entitled “O'Neill Versus Osama” at NewYorkMetro.com, by Robert Kolker:
In this wildly altered political landscape, all sides are trying to lay claim to John O'Neill's legacy; he's a Rorschach test. If you lean toward the right, like some of his New York friends, you believe O'Neill quit in a fury when the diplomats neutered him. David Cornstein, who ran Finlay jewelers and now is chairman of the New York Olympic Games commission, used to tailgate with O'Neill at Giants and Jets games. "We concurred," he says, "that the country after the Cold War had really fallen a bit asleep, and there was a liberal movement toward more and more civil rights, and the country wasn't observant enough to realize that the world had changed and our view of the way security should be should change, too."
But if you lean to the left, like the French authors Guillaume Dasquié and Jean-Charles Brisard, who feature a July interview with O'Neill in their new book, Ben Laden, La Vérité Interdite, you've outed O'Neill as a sort of smoking gun -- a man who they say all but confirmed in his final months that George W. Bush's oil-industry-bred administration was so worried about alienating Saudi Arabia that it decided to negotiate with the Taliban rather than go after it.”
O’Neill wound up quitting the FBI and taking the job as Security chief at the World Trade Center for two reasons, it seems: because it paid much better than the FBI (and the NSC position he was allegedly offered by Richard Clarke (see Post #71 ), and because his record had been blemished by an investigation into the fact that his briefcase, containing (inappropriate) classified documents, had been stolen at a meeting in Orlando in July 2000. The NewYork Metro story infers that the charges regarding the briefcase originated from Louis Freeh's No. 2, Tom Pickard, who “retired” from the FBI in November 2001.
The New Yorker story is a bit more blunt: “The leak seemed to be timed to destroy O'Neill's chance of being confirmed for the N.S.C. job. He decided to retire. O'Neill suspected that the source of the information was either Tom Pickard or Dale Watson. The antagonism between him and Pickard was well known.
Now comes the most interesting item in the posthumous O’Neill saga: a 5/20/02 story in the New York Times, by David Johnston and Don Van Natta Jr., entitled
“ASHCROFT LEARNED OF AGENT'S ALERT JUST AFTER 9/11 BUT BUSH WAS NOT TOLD” :
WASHINGTON, May 20 — Attorney General John Ashcroft and the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, were told a few days after the Sept. 11 attacks that the F.B.I. had received a memorandum from its Phoenix office the previous July warning that Osama bin Laden's followers could be training at American flight schools, government officials said today.But senior Bush administration officials said neither Mr. Ashcroft nor Mr. Mueller briefed President Bush and his national security staff until recently about the Phoenix memorandum. Nor did they tell Congressional leaders.
The disclosure is certain to magnify criticism of the F.B.I.'s performance, including its failure to act on the memorandum before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The two men have not said publicly when they learned of the July 10 memorandum, but the officials said that within days of the attacks senior law enforcement officials grasped the document's significance as a potentially important missed signal.
Today, several F.B.I. and Justice Department officials said that in the chaotic days after the attacks, discussions between Mr. Ashcroft and Mr. Mueller were hurried and that their recollection of events were somewhat blurred by the frenetic pace of activity. Some officials said they recalled high-level discussions about how the hijackers had attended American flight schools, but one Justice Department official did not recall a briefing about the memorandum.
Spokesmen for Mr. Mueller and Mr. Ashcroft would not discuss the issue today. A senior Justice Department official said, "The attorney general was not briefed in any detail or with any specificity about the document known as the Phoenix memo until about a month ago."
Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary, who was traveling today with the president in Miami, said, "We have nothing that indicates the president had seen or even heard about this memo prior to a few weeks ago."
Mr. Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said last Thursday that the president had not heard about the memorandum before the hijackings and had only recently learned of it. "I personally became aware of it just recently," Ms. Rice said, adding that she had asked Mr. Mueller and George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, to review the matter.
The Phoenix memorandum, written by Kenneth Williams, an agent in Phoenix, was sent to F.B.I. headquarters as an electronic computer message on July 10. It was reviewed by midlevel supervisors, who headed the agency's bin Laden and Islamic extremist counterterrorism units.
But the officials said the memorandum was never sent to top F.B.I. managers, including Thomas J. Pickard, who was acting director in the summer of 2001 before Mr. Mueller took over early in September. Other senior officials were unaware of the memorandum before Sept. 11, including Michael Rolince, who managed the bureau's international terrorism unit, and Dale Watson his superior, the officials said.
The issue of when top officials knew of the Phoenix memorandum is emerging as a main focus in Congressional inquiries getting under way. Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has asked the F.B.I. to identify anyone at the agency who knew about the memorandum before the attacks.
But lawmakers also want to know when Bush administration officials learned about the memorandum after the attacks. Some lawmakers have asked whether administration officials were told about it soon after the attacks, but were slow to disclose it.
Several lawmakers, including Richard C. Shelby, a senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, have already singled out the F.B.I. for blunt criticism after Mr. Williams's memorandum came to light several weeks ago.
The Phoenix memorandum is one of two documents under heavy scrutiny by Congressional investigators. The other is a daily intelligence report, shown to Mr. Bush on Aug. 6. The report mentions the threat of Qaeda members' carrying out hijackings in the United States. The White House has refused to produce the document, and administration officials have said that the information was too vague to act on.
Mr. Mueller has acknowledged that the bureau's failure to evaluate the Phoenix memorandum fully was an analytical failure that the F.B.I. has tried to correct.
"It is a very worthwhile process and a process we are undertaking to change what we do in response to that instance and others where perhaps we did not have the analytical capability," Mr. Mueller said at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on May 8.
"We did not have the people who were looking at the broader picture to put the pieces in place," he said, adding that nothing in the memorandum would have enabled the F.B.I. to thwart the attacks.
The memorandum remains classified, and much of its contents are unknown. But officials have confirmed that it expressed concern that Mr. bin Laden and other groups could be using the flight schools to prepare for terror attacks. It urged F.B.I. officials to check the visas of foreigners at American aviation academies. But no action was taken before Sept. 11.
The memorandum was sent to counterterrorism offices in two cities — one copy went to John O'Neill, then the top counterterrorism agent in the F.B.I.'s New York office. Mr. O'Neill retired from the F.B.I. in late August. He had just begun a job as the security chief of the World Trade Center when he was killed in the attacks. .
Usually, internal investigative proposals that involve agencywide resources are reviewed by high F.B.I. officials. But in this case F.B.I. officials have said that officials who read the memorandum were distracted by other cases, a plot against American interests in France and the investigation of the attack in October 2000 on the destroyer Cole.
Two or three days after the attacks, Dale Watson, who was then assistant director for counterterrorism, brought the memorandum to the attention of Mr. Pickard, who had returned to his job as deputy director after a stint as acting director, officials said.
Mr. Pickard and several other agents then briefed Mr. Mueller and Mr. Ashcroft on its existence, the officials said.
The Phoenix agent's memorandum was not based on intelligence but on concerns and recommendations based on "conjecture and assumptions," said a senior official who has read it.
"There appeared to be a lot of Middle Eastern guys taking flying lessons in the Phoenix area," the official said. "This was just a good investigator taking a look at something. It was pure hunch."
For that reason, the official speculated that the memorandum had not set off strong alarms among other law enforcement officials who had reviewed it at the bureau.
Officials at the Central Intelligence Agency have said that they did not receive a copy of the memorandum until several weeks ago. But F.B.I. officials have said that the names of Middle Eastern men in the Phoenix area who were identified in the memorandum, were referred to the C.I.A. in the summer of 2001.
F.B.I. officials have said that the C.I.A. reported back that none of the men appeared to be connected to Al Qaeda.
Intelligence officials, however, have said that two or three of the men have recently been linked to the Qaeda network. These men remain at large, the officials said. (End of story)
This article is really an amazing piece of writing. In the tenth paragraph, we are told:
”officials said the memorandum was never sent to top F.B.I. managers, including Thomas J. Pickard, who was acting director in the summer of 2001 before Mr. Mueller took over early in September. Other senior officials were unaware of the memorandum before Sept. 11, including Michael Rolince, who managed the bureau's international terrorism unit, and Dale Watson, his superior, the officials said.”
Nine paragraphs later, we are told:
”The memorandum was sent to counterterrorism offices in two cities — one copy went to John O'Neill, then the top counterterrorism agent in the F.B.I.'s New York office. Mr. O'Neill retired from the F.B.I. in late August. He had just begun a job as the security chief of the World Trade Center when he was killed in the attacks.
Of the two cities to whom the Phoenix memo was supposedly addressed – Washington, D.C. and New York – the Times neglects to mention D.C., but makes quite sure it fingers a dead man – John O’Neill – as explicitly receiving the memo in New York, while neglecting to even mention the other of the “two cities” is Washington, D.C.
Either Tom Pickard, as acting director, or Dale Watson, as “superior” of the agent who managed the international terrorism unit, should logically be mentioned as the other person besides O’Neill to whom the memo was sent. Instead, they are described as “top F.B.I. managers,” and not as the ones who would be the logical target of the memo in D.C. BUT they write that O’Neill, as director of the unit in N.Y. definitely got the memo. (Dead men can’t talk.)
Then we learn that “Two or three days after the attacks, Dale Watson, who was then assistant director for counterterrorism, brought the memorandum to the attention of Mr. Pickard, who had returned to his job as deputy director after a stint as acting director, officials said.”
How very clever – the memo suddenly materialized out of nowhere, after 9/11, but now Pickard is “deputy director,” so the implication is that he’s (conveniently) no longer responsible. And Watson, who a few paragraphs before is described as the “superior” of the man “who managed the bureau's international terrorism unit,” has now suddenly become “the assistant director for counterterrorism.” So, of course, he’s not to blame either.
Pickard is out, but Dale Watson was fingered by Time.com : “Smart money says Mueller will elevate Assistant Director Dale Watson, currently head of counter-terrorism, to the counterterrorism/national security slot.”
If Watson gets the job, I guess he can thank John O’Neill’s ghost. As far as who will be blamed for missing the Phoenix memo, I’m betting it will be the man who can’t respond – John O’Neill.
Its so irresponsible to be blaming Bush for anything.
Long before I came here,FR was posting happily away on BCCI,Bin Mahfouz,Al-Amoudi,Bath,Harken,Arbusto,etc.
Ah yes, the whako, six-degrees of separation, everyone who's ever associated with anyone in the oil industry is a terrorist theory. Let me guess: it's all about the pipeline, right? As if we needed a ground war against Trashcanistan to clear the way for this pipeline in the first place.
Let's put your moronic theory to the test here, just for fun on a late Saturday night. Osama bin Laden declares war on the U.S. a decade ago. George W. Bush, not yet a governor, let alone a Presidential candidate, receives a phone call: "We've got a master plan. You're going to be President in 10 or so years. We're going to knock down the World Trade Center and kill thousands of Americans. There's this pipeline, see..."
Okay, so bin Laden goes about the business of attacking American interests, including an intentionally failed attempt on the WTC in '93 (it can only come down when there's a "big oil man" in office, dont'cha know). He attacks American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, bombs the USS Cole, and organizes worldwide Islamic Jihad to lay the foundation for these attack that will turn the focus of the US military might on Afghanistan in the next millenium...
Wait, that doesn't work. The concept of Islamic Jihad was around long before bin Laden ever came into the picture. It's in the Koran. Mohammed must've been in big oil's deep pockets...
Okay, so Mohammed's marching through the desert, slaying infidels with the Exxon sword, hoping to provide the inspiration for a "bin Laden" type who will eventually knock down some "World Trade Center type" buildings in an "America type" country to be run by a "George W. Bush type" president with the "big oil type's" interest at heart.
Mohammed had it all worked out, long before oil even had a purpose. No wonder the cat's got his own religion.
Unless they have been yanked off, just type in any of the names, and you'll find the $$$$$.
A compelling argument, indeed. One question: how do you type with a straight-jacket on?
The 9/11 intelligence investigation going on in Congress right now will dredge up all these relationships.
Of course, the same Congress that couldn't get a whiff of this diabolical scheme 2000 years in the making is suddenly going to figure it all out.
Do you have any idea how many bugs are crawling within your walls this very second? Bugs that can eat your family, steal your food, reset your clocks and change the message on your answering machine.
The world is a terrifying place, Betty Jo. Better check out before it eats you alive.
Bring on the hearings!
Or the men in the white coats. Whichever comes first.
"AT THE TIME, the men had no idea that they were being closely watched—or that the CIA already knew some of their names. A few days earlier, U.S. intelligence had gotten wind of the Qaeda gathering. Special Branch, Malaysia’s security service, agreed to follow and photograph the suspected terrorists. They snapped pictures of the men sightseeing and ducking into cyber-cafes to check Arabic Web sites. What happened next, some U.S. counter-terrorism officials say, may be the most puzzling, and devastating, intelligence failure in the critical months before September 11. A few days after the Kuala Lumpur meeting, NEWSWEEK has learned, the CIA tracked one of the terrorists, Nawaf Alhazmi, as he flew from the meeting to Los Angeles. Agents discovered that another of the men, Khalid Almihdhar, had already obtained a multiple-entry visa that allowed him to enter and leave the United States as he pleased. (They later learned that he had in fact arrived in the United States on the same flight as Alhazmi.)
Yet astonishingly, the CIA did nothing with this information. Agency officials didn’t tell the INS, which could have turned them away at the border, nor did they notify the FBI, which could have covertly tracked them to find out their mission. Instead, during the year and nine months after the CIA identified them as terrorists, Alhazmi and Almihdhar lived openly in the United States, using their real names, obtaining driver’s licenses, opening bank accounts and enrolling in flight schools—until the morning of September 11, when they walked aboard American Airlines Flight 77 and crashed it into the Pentagon."
From ------NewsWeek
I just read most of the material you've meticulously gathered, and I must say, it's facinating. I agree with you -- John O'Neill will make a good fall guy. The next few weeks will be most interesting to watch to see how this saga plays out. You've got these top-level career guys in CYA mode to protect their retirement, which is understandable, but I just hope they don't do it at the expense of covering for any Al Qeada mole who may be there.
Have to run now, but all your material needs a reread just to soak it all in. Great job! Be back later.
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