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No evidence? It must be conspiracy
2005-11-20, Sydney Morning Herald (Australia's leading newspaper)
http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/no-evidence-it-must-be-conspiracy/2005/11/20...

The twin towers did not fall because aircraft hit them. Demolition explosive charges made them collapse. If you look at close-up video you see puffs of explosives coming out the sides of the buildings as they topple. An advertisement that makes this allegation has been airing in New York for months. It ends with a voice saying: "Reopen the investigation and address the unanswered questions of 9/11." If you go to the website reopen911.org you find a series of even more startling claims. Did a plane actually hit the Pentagon? Photos taken on September 11, 2001, show no cabin, no tail and no engines. What about the phone calls by passengers from the hijacked planes? "You can't make calls from aircraft."

Note: Though this article pokes fun at people who challenge the 9/11 story, yet it also raises serious questions. We are thankful for any media attention, even that which refutes the 9/11 movement, as any press brings the subject more fully into public awareness. See our 9/11 Information Center for more.

More than half of the U.S. House of Representatives wants open hearings on Able Danger
2005-11-18, US House of Representatives Website of Curt Weldon (R-Pa)
http://curtweldon.house.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=37076

U.S. Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), vice chairman of the House Armed Services and Homeland Security Committees, has sent a letter to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld signed by over half of the House of Representatives requesting that he allow "former participants in the intelligence program known as ABLE DANGER to testify in an open hearing before the United States Congress." The letter has 246 signatures (144 Republicans, 101 Democrats, and one Independent), including senior members and leadership on both sides of the isle. "The full story of ABLE DANGER deserves to be heard by the American people," said Weldon. "Secretary Rumsfeld must understand that the will of Congress is behind allowing members of the ABLE DANGER effort to testify in an open hearing about the work they were doing prior to 9-11 to track the linkages and relationships of al-Qaeda worldwide. Congressional efforts to investigate ABLE DANGER have been obstructed by Department of Defense insistence that certain individuals with knowledge of ABLE DANGER be prevented from freely and frankly testifying in an open hearing.

Note: Why did no media found this key story worth covering? The request was never granted, while the investigation was eventually declared closed by the military without any significant outside investigation.

Why did the 9/11 Commission ignore 'Able Danger'
2005-11-17, Wall Street Journal Article by Former FBI Director Louis Freeh
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110007559

The Able Danger intelligence, if confirmed, is undoubtedly the most relevant fact of the entire post-9/11 inquiry. Even the most junior investigator would immediately know that the name and photo ID of Atta in 2000 is precisely the kind of tactical intelligence the FBI has many times employed to prevent attacks. Yet the 9/11 Commission inexplicably concluded that it "was not historically significant." This astounding conclusion -- in combination with the failure to investigate Able Danger and incorporate it into its findings -- raises serious challenges to the commission's credibility and, if the facts prove out, might just render the commission historically insignificant itself. The Able Danger team had identified Atta and three other 9/11 hijackers by mid-2000 but were prevented by military lawyers from giving this information to the FBI. The Pentagon...blocked several military officers from testifying...about the Able Danger program. The chairman of the 9/11 Commission reacted to Able Danger with the standard Washington PR approach. [He] demanded that the Pentagon conduct an "investigation" to evaluate the "credibility" of Col. Shaffer and Capt. Phillpott. The final 9/11 Commission report...concluded that "American intelligence agencies were unaware of Mr. Atta until the day of the attacks." This now looks to be embarrassingly wrong. The Joint Intelligence Committees should reconvene and, in addition to Able Danger team members, we should have the 9/11 commissioners appear as witnesses so the families can hear their explanation why this doesn't matter.

Note: If the above link fails, click here.

BYU Professor Has Theory About 9/11 Attacks
2005-11-10, CBS Affiliate KUTV
http://kutv.com/topstories/local_story_314234334.html

A BYU [Brigham Young University] professor has developed a new theory about the terrorist attack in New York on September 11, 2001. Both towers collapsed in place after the attacks, and later that day, 7 World Trade Center, which was never hit by a plane, fell in less than seven seconds. Professor Steven E. Jones says that planes alone did not bring down the towers. Jones is a 20-year physics professor at BYU, who's penned an academic paper raising another hypothesis – explosives may have been pre-positioned in the buildings. “Notice how it's straight down,” Jones says referring to the fall of one of the buildings. Especially intriguing to Jones was the destruction of 7 World Trade Center, damaged and ablaze from tower debris but never hit by a plane. "Symmetrically now, it doesn't topple over, as you might expect. It comes straight down. This is the goal of prepositioned explosives in a controlled demolition,” says Jones. He wants a fresh new independent investigation.

Note: For other media coverage of Prof. Jones' claims, click here. For his paper describing how he came to these conclusions, click here. For a short video clip of the collapse of WTC 7, click here.

Supreme Court Denies FBI Translator's Case
2005-10-28, CBS/Associated Press
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/11/28/ap/national/mainD8E5IMD00.shtml

A former FBI translator failed Monday to persuade the Supreme Court to revive her lawsuit alleging she was fired for reporting possible wrongdoing by other linguists involved in counterterrorism investigations. Edmonds...argued that a trial court judge was wrong to accept the Justice Department's claim that allowing her lawsuit to go forward would threaten "state secrets," or national security. Edmonds' firing was controversial among some lawmakers in Congress, especially after the Justice Department's inspector general found that the FBI had not taken her complaints seriously enough and had fired her for lodging complaints about the translation unit.

Note: The article fails to mention Edmonds' allegations of the criminal involvement in 9/11-related matters of top government officials. For more on this, see http://www.wanttoknow.info/sibeledmonds To sign Congressman Weldon's petition for open testimony on the Able Danger program, click here.

Dick Cheney's Song of America
2005-10-26, Harpers Magazine
http://www.harpers.org/DickCheneysSongOfAmerica.html

Drafting a plan for global dominance. Few writers are more ambitious than the writers of government policy papers, and few policy papers are more ambitious than Dick Cheney's masterwork. It has taken several forms over the last decade and is in fact the product of several ghostwriters (notably Paul Wolfowitz and Colin Powell), but Cheney has been consistent in his dedication to the ideas in the documents that bear his name, and he has maintained a close association with the ideologues behind them. Let us, therefore, call Cheney the author, and this series of documents the Plan. The Plan was published in unclassified form most recently under the title of Defense Strategy for the 1990s, as Cheney ended his term as secretary of defense under the elder George Bush in early 1993. The Plan is for the United States to rule the world. The overt theme is unilateralism, but it is ultimately a story of domination. It calls for the United States to maintain its overwhelming military superiority and prevent new rivals from rising up to challenge it on the world stage. It calls for dominion over friends and enemies alike. It says not that the United States must be more powerful, or most powerful, but that it must be absolutely powerful. The Plan is disturbing in many ways, and ultimately unworkable. Yet it is being sold now as an answer to the 'new realities' of the post-September 11 world, even as it was sold previously as the answer to the new realities of the post-Cold War world. For Cheney, the Plan has always been the right answer, no matter how different the questions.

Bush team sought to snuff CIA doubts
2005-10-26, San Francisco ChronicleCongressional Quarterly
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/10/26/MNG62FDUGL1.DTL

In the 1970s, when President Richard Nixon's policy of détente was under attack by some former military officials and conservative policy intellectuals, Ford administration officials Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were among those challenging as too soft the CIA's estimate of Moscow's military power. Rumsfeld and Cheney wanted to create a "Team B." CIA Director William Colby rejected the Team B idea and was fired. Colby's successor as head of the spy agency, George H.W. Bush, the current president's father, accepted it. Rumsfeld was reprising Team B by creating his own intelligence shop. The Chalabi organization's alarmist reports on Hussein's nuclear weapons, which later proved to be false, bypassed the CIA and went directly to the White House. "In retrospect, and with the Team B report and records now largely declassified, it is possible to see that virtually all of Team B's criticisms ... proved to be wrong," Raymond Garthoff, a former U.S. ambassador to Bulgaria, wrote in a paper for the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence three years ago. "On several important specific points it wrongly criticized and 'corrected' the official estimates, always in the direction of enlarging the impression of danger and threat." When Reagan's Secretary of State George Schultz wanted to secretly back Saddam Hussein against the Iranians, Schultz bypassed the CIA and sent Rumsfeld, then a businessman, to Baghdad to seal the deal.

Congressman Curt Weldon's Speech to Congress
2005-10-19, Official Website of Congressman Weldon (R-Pa)
http://curtweldon.house.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=35792

"I have been in this institution 19 years. I am the vice chairman of [the Committee on Armed Services] and chairman of the subcommittee that oversees the purchase of our weapons systems. I am a strong supporter of our military. I am a strong supporter of President Bush. I campaigned for him. I am a strong supporter of Secretary Rumsfeld. I say all of that, Mr. Speaker, because...there is something desperately wrong here. There is a bureaucracy in the Defense Intelligence Agency that is out of control. They want to destroy the reputation of a 23-year military officer, Bronze Star recipient, hero of our country, with two kids because people in defense intelligence are embarrassed at what is going to come out. I have met with at least 10 people who fully corroborate what Tony Shaffer says. This is not [about] Republicans or Democrats. It is about what is fundamental to this country. I would ask our constituents across America [who] we represent to join us, to express their outrage, to e-mail, make phone calls, write letters to the Secretary of Defense, the President of the United States, to Members of Congress to...let the Able Danger story finally come out to the American people. Let them understand what really happened. Let Scott Philpott talk. Let Tony Shaffer talk. Let the others who have been silenced have a chance to tell their story to Congress and openly to the American people. In the end, the country will be stronger.

Note: For lots more reliable, verifiable information specifically on Able Danger:
http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=complete_911_timeline&before_9/11=ableDanger

The President's 'Pit Bull'
2005-10-04, Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-profile4oct04,0,7005879....

After they left Texas for Washington following the 2000 presidential election, Miers assumed such an insider role that in 2001 it was she who handed Bush the crucial "presidential daily briefing" hinting at terrorist plots against America just a month before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Note: No other major media reported this significant fact on the topic of U.S. Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers. The respected Editor and Publisher had this to say: "On its front page Tuesday, The New York Times published a photo of new U.S. Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers going over a briefing paper with President George W. Bush at his Crawford ranch 'in August 2001,' the caption reads. USA Today and the Boston Globe carried the photo labeled simply '2001,' but many other newspapers ran the picture in print or on the Web with a more precise date: Aug. 6, 2001. The PDB [Presidential Daily Briefing] was headed 'Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,' and notes, among other things, FBI information indicating 'patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks.' " For the entire article, click here.

Pentagon Revokes 9/11 Officer's Clearance
2005-09-30, ABC/Associated Press
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=1173334

An officer who has claimed that a classified military unit identified four Sept. 11 hijackers before the 2001 attacks is facing Pentagon accusations of breaking numerous rules, charges his lawyer suggests are aimed at undermining his credibility. The alleged infractions by Army Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, 42, include obtaining a service medal under false pretenses, improperly flashing military identification while drunk and stealing pens, according to military paperwork shown by his attorney to The Associated Press. Shaffer was one of the first to publicly link Sept. 11 leader Mohamed Atta to the unit code-named Able Danger. Shaffer was one of five witnesses the Pentagon ordered not to appear Sept. 21 before the Senate Judiciary Committee to discuss the unit's findings. The military revoked Shaffer's top security clearance this month, a day before he was supposed to testify to a congressional committee.

Atta known to Pentagon before 9/11
2005-09-28, Chicago Tribune
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0509280150sep28,1,3686073....

Four years after the nation's deadliest terror attack, evidence is accumulating that a super-secret Pentagon intelligence unit identified the organizer of the Sept. 11 hijackings, Mohamed Atta, as an Al Qaeda operative months before he entered the U.S. Had the FBI been alerted to what the Pentagon purportedly knew in early 2000, Atta's name could have been put on a list that would have tagged him as someone to be watched the moment he stepped off a plane in Newark, N.J., in June of that year. Physical and electronic surveillance of Atta, who lived openly in Florida for more than a year, and who acquired a driver's license and even an FAA pilot's license in his true name, might well have made it possible for the FBI to expose the Sept. 11 plot before the fact. Anthony Shaffer, a civilian Pentagon employee, says he was asked in the summer of 2000 by a Navy captain, Scott Phillpott, to arrange a meeting between the FBI and representatives of the Pentagon intelligence program, code-named Able/Danger. But he said the meeting was canceled after Pentagon lawyers concluded that information on suspected Al Qaeda operatives with ties to the U.S. might violate Pentagon prohibitions on retaining information on "U.S. persons," a term that includes U.S. citizens and permanent resident aliens. Asked by Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, at a hearing last week whether Atta...was a "U.S. person," a senior Pentagon official answered, "No, he was not."

Note: If the above link fails, click here.

Sibel Edmonds v. Department of Justice: A Patriot Silenced
2005-09-26, ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union)
http://www.aclu.org/court/court.cfm?ID=19163&c=317

The American Civil Liberties Union is urging the U.S. Supreme Court to review a lower court's dismissal of the case of Sibel Edmonds, a former FBI translator who was fired in retaliation for reporting security breaches and possible espionage within the Bureau. Lower courts dismissed the case when former Attorney General John Ashcroft invoked the rarely used "state secrets" privilege. An unclassified summary of a report by the DOJ's Inspector General, released in January 2005, corroborates Edmonds' allegations. The IG report concludes that the FBI had retaliated against Edmonds for reporting serious security breaches, stating that “...her allegations were, in fact, the most significant factor in the FBI's decision to terminate her services.” Fourteen 9/11 family member advocacy groups and public interest organizations filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of Edmonds case before the District Court. Edmonds' ordeal is highlighted in a 10-page article in the September 2005 issue of Vanity Fair titled “An Inconvenient Patriot.” The article, which chronicles FBI wrongdoing and possible corruption charges involving a high-level member of Congress, further undercuts the government's claim that the case can't be litigated because certain information is secret.

Pentagon, Senate committee bicker over 9/11 probe
2005-09-23, ABC/Reuters
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=1154206

The Pentagon and the Senate Judiciary Committee squabbled publicly on Friday about whether lawmakers could question five key witnesses in public about their claims the U.S. military identified four September 11 hijackers long before the 20001 attacks. The panel's chairman, Republican Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, said at Wednesday's hearing the Pentagon could be guilty of obstructing congressional proceedings. Other lawmakers accused the Defense Department of orchestrating a cover-up. On Friday, the Senate committee announced the Pentagon had reversed its position and would allow the five witnesses to testify at a new public hearing scheduled for October 5. The five witnesses in question were all involved with Able Danger and contend the team identified September 11 ringleader Mohamed Atta and three other hijackers as members of an al Qaeda cell in early 2000. One prospective witness, Army Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, has said publicly that Able Danger members tried to pass the information about Atta along to the FBI three times in September 2000 but were forced by Pentagon lawyers to cancel the meetings. Much of the information related to Able Danger was destroyed in 2000.

Senators Accuse Pentagon of Obstructing Inquiry on Sept. 11 Plot
2005-09-22, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/22/politics/22intel.html?ex=1285041600&en=be75...

Senators from both parties accused the Defense Department on Wednesday of obstructing an investigation into whether a highly classified intelligence program known as Able Danger did indeed identify Mohamed Atta and other future hijackers as potential threats well before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The complaints came after the Pentagon blocked several witnesses from testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee at a public hearing on Wednesday. The only testimony provided by the Defense Department came from a senior official who would say only that he did not know whether the claims were true. But members of the panel, led by Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, said they regarded as credible assertions by current and former officers in the program. The officers have said they were prevented by the Pentagon from sharing information about Mr. Atta and others with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Pentagon has acknowledged that at least five members of Able Danger have said they recall a chart produced in 2000 that identified Mr. Atta, who became the lead hijacker in the Sept. 11 plot, as a potential terrorist.

Military Bars 9/11 Intel Testimony
2005-09-21, CBS/Associated Press
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/09/21/terror/main871800.shtml

The Department of Defense forbade a military intelligence officer to testify Wednesday about a secret military unit that the officer says identified four Sept. 11 hijackers as terrorists more than a year before the attacks, according to the man's attorney. The Judiciary Committee was hearing testimony about the work of a classified unit code named "Able Danger." Zaid, appearing on behalf of Shaffer and contractor John Smith [stated] that Able Danger, using data mining techniques, identified four of the terrorists who struck on Sept. 11, 2001 - including mastermind Mohamed Atta. "At least one chart, and possibly more, featured a photograph of Mohamed Atta," Zaid said. Maj. Paul Swiergosz, a Defense Department spokesman, said Wednesday that open testimony would not be appropriate. "There's nothing more to say than that," Swiergosz said. "It's not possible to discuss the Able Danger program because there are security concerns." Zaid also charged that records associated with the unit were destroyed during 2000 and March 2001, and copies were destroyed in spring 2004. Former members of the Sept. 11 commission have dismissed the "Able Danger" assertions.

Panel rejects assertion US knew of Atta before Sept. 11
2005-09-15, Boston Globe/Associated Press
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2005/09/15/panel_reject...

Former members of the Sept. 11 commission on Wednesday dismissed assertions that a Pentagon intelligence unit identified lead hijacker Mohamed Atta as an member of al-Qaida long before the 2001 attacks. Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., had accused the commission of ignoring intelligence about Atta while it investigated the attacks. The commission's former chairman, Thomas Kean, said there was no evidence anyone in the government knew about Atta before Sept. 11, 2001. Two military officers, Army Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer and Navy Capt. Scott Phillpott, claimed a classified military intelligence unit, known as 'Able Danger,' identified Atta before the attacks. Shaffer has said three other hijackers were identified, too. Kean said the recollections of the intelligence officers cannot be verified by any document. 'Bluntly, it just didn't happen and that's the conclusion of all 10 of us,' said a former commissioner, ex-Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash. Weldon's spokesman, John Tomaszewski, said no commissioners have met with anyone from Able Danger 'yet they choose to speak with some form of certainty without firsthand knowledge.'

Note: If you read the New York Times article from Aug. 11th, commission officials clearly stated that they were warned by a uniformed military officer 10 days before issuing the commission's final report that the account would be incomplete without reference Able Danger and Atta, as confirmed by the commission's own chief spokesperson. Is this more recent article a rewriting of the facts?

Pentagon Employee Was Ordered to Destroy Data Identifying Atta As a Terrorist
2005-09-15, ABC/Associated Press
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=1131137

A Pentagon employee was ordered to destroy documents that identified Mohamed Atta as a terrorist two years before the 2001 attacks, a congressman said Thursday. The employee is prepared to testify next week before the Senate Judiciary Committee and was expected to identify the person who ordered him to destroy the large volume of documents, said Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa. Weldon declined to identify the employee, citing confidentiality matters. Weldon described the documents as "2.5 terabytes" as much as one-fourth of all the printed materials in the Library of Congress, he added.

F.A.A. Alerted on Qaeda in '98, 9/11 Panel Said
2005-09-14, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/14/politics/14terror.html?ex=1284350400&en=de7...

American aviation officials were warned as early as 1998 that Al Qaeda could "seek to hijack a commercial jet and slam it into a U.S. landmark," according to previously secret portions of a report prepared last year by the Sept. 11 commission. The officials also realized months before the Sept. 11 attacks that two of the three airports used in the hijackings had suffered repeated security lapses. Federal Aviation Administration officials were also warned in 2001 in a report prepared for the agency that airport screeners' ability to detect possible weapons had "declined significantly" in recent years, but little was done to remedy the problem. The White House and many members of the commission...have been battling for more than a year over the release of the commission's report on aviation failures. A footnote that was originally deleted from the report showed that a quarter of the security screeners used in 2001 by Argenbright Security for United Airlines flights at Dulles Airport had not completed required criminal background checks. Much of the material now restored in the public version of the commission's report centered on the warnings the F.A.A. received about the threat of hijackings, including 52 intelligence documents in the months before the Sept. 11 attacks that mentioned Al Qaeda or Osama bin Laden. Richard Ben-Veniste, a former member of the Sept. 11 commission, said the release of the material more than a year after it was completed underscored the over-classification of federal material. "It's outrageous that it has taken the administration a year since this monograph was submitted for it to be released," he said.

Britain now faces its own blowback
2005-09-10, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,9115,1566919,00.html

Omar Sheikh...at the behest of General Mahmood Ahmed, head of the ISI [Pakistan's secret service], wired $100,000 to Mohammed Atta, the leading 9/11 hijacker, before the New York attacks, as confirmed by Dennis Lormel, director of FBI's financial crimes unit. Yet neither Ahmed nor Omar appears to have been sought for questioning by the US about 9/11. Indeed, the official 9/11 Commission Report of July 2004 sought to downplay the role of Pakistan with the comment: "To date, the US government has not been able to determine the origin of the money used for the 9/11 attacks. Ultimately the question is of little practical significance" - a statement of breathtaking disingenuousness. All this highlights the resistance to getting at the truth about the 9/11 attacks and to an effective crackdown on the forces fomenting terrorist bombings in the west.

Bush Renews Sept. 11 Emergency Declaration
2005-09-08, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/08/AR20050908015...

President Bush on Thursday renewed the national emergency he declared after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. In a letter to Congress, Bush said the nation is still under the terrorist threat that led him to declare a national emergency three days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The president's declaration allows for the mobilization of reserve military forces and other steps. By law, a national emergency declaration automatically expires on the anniversary date of its declaration unless the president renews it. Bush's action will renew the declaration for another year.

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