victorgm@webtv.net;
Subject: 9/11
Bombshell: Four in 9/11 Plot Were Tied to al-Qaeda Cell in'00!
 www.nytimes.com/
9/11 BOMBSHELL: FOUR
TERRORISTS IN 9/11 PLOT WERE IDENTIFIED NEARLY 1
YEAR EARLIER IN 2000
AS A TERRORIST CELL BY A SPECIAL ABOVE-TOP-SECRET
MILITARY INTELLIGENCE
UNIT CALLED 'ABLE DANGER' / INFORMATION WAS
IGNORED BECAUSE INS
HAD GRANTED ALL 4 HIJACKERS VALID VISAS! / HELPS
FUEL CONSPIRACY
THEORIES THAT BUSH's NEOCONS "PURPOSELY ALLOWED 9/11 TO
HAPPEN" AS AN EXCUSE
TO WAGE A 2-FRONT WAR IN AFGHANISTAN [for their
natural gas pipeline]
AND IRAQ [to secure the world's 2nd largest oil
reserves] AND POUR
$$$ INTO BUSH's MILITARY DEFENSE CONTRACTOR/CAMPAIGN
DONOR FRIENDS! –
By Douglas Jehl, N Y
Times Staff Writer, Tuesday, August 9, 2005 / Front
Page Splash, all
edtions
WASHINGTON, Aug. 9 –
More than a year before the Sept. 11 attacks, a
small, HIGHLY
CLASSIFIED MILITARY INTELLIGENCE UNIT identified Mohammed Atta and
three other future hijackers as LIKELY MEMBERS OF A CELL of Al Qaeda
operating in the United States, according to a former defense
Intelligence official and a Republican member of Congress.
In the summer of
2000, the military team, known as Able Danger, prepared a chart that
included visa photographs of the four men and recommended to the
military's Special Operations Command that the information be shared
with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the congressman,
Representative Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania, and the former
intelligence official said Monday.
The recommendation
was rejected and the information was not shared, they said,
apparently at least in part because Mr. Atta, and the others were in
the United States ON VALID ENTRY VISAS. Under American law, United
States citizens and green-card holders may not be singled out in
intelligence-collection operations by the military or intelligence
agencies. That
protection does not extend to visa holders, but Mr.
Weldon and the former
intelligence official said it might have
reinforced a sense of
discomfort common before Sept. 11 about sharing
intelligence
information with a law enforcement agency.
A former spokesman
for the Sept. 11 commission, Al Felzenberg, confirmed that members
of its staff, including Philip Zelikow, the executive director, were
told about the program on an overseas trip in October 2003 that
included stops in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But Mr. Felzenberg said
the briefers did not mention Mr. Atta's name.
The report produced
by the commission last year does not mention the
episode. Mr. Weldon
first spoke publicly about the episode in June, in a
little-noticed speech
on the House floor and in an interview with The
Times-Herald in
Norristown, Pa. The matter resurfaced on Monday in a
report by GSN:
Government Security News, which is published every two weeks and
covers domestic-security issues. The GSN report was based on
accounts provided by Mr. Weldon and the same former intelligence
official, who was interviewed on Monday by The New York Times in Mr.
Weldon's office.
In a telephone
interview from his home in Pennsylvania, Mr. Weldon said
he was basing his
assertions on similar ones by at least three other
former intelligence
officers with direct knowledge of the project, and
said that some had
first called the episode to his attention shortly
after the attacks of
Sept. 11, 2001.
The account is the
first assertion that Mr. Atta, an Egyptian who became
the lead hijacker in
the plot, was identified by any American government
agency as a potential
threat before the Sept. 11 attacks. Among the 19
hijackers, only
Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi had been identified as
potential threats by the Central Intelligence Agency before the
summer of 2000, and information about them was not provided to the
F.B.I. until the
spring of 2001.
Mr. Weldon has long
been a champion of the kind of data-mining analysis that was the
basis for the work of the Able Danger team.
The former
intelligence official spoke on the condition of anonymity,
saying he did not
want to jeopardize political support and the possible
financing for future
data-mining operations by speaking publicly. He
said the team had
been established by the Special Operations Command in 1999, under a
classified directive issued by Gen. Hugh Shelton, then the chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to assemble information about Al Qaeda
networks around the world.
"Ultimately, Able
Danger was going to give decision makers options for
taking out Al Qaeda
targets," the former defense intelligence official
said.
He said that he
delivered the chart in summer 2000 to the Special
Operations Command
headquarters in Tampa, Fla., and said that it had
been based on
information from unclassified sources and government
records, including
those of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
"We knew these were
bad guys, and we wanted to do something about them, "the former
intelligence official said. The unit, which relied heavily on
data-mining techniques, was modeled after those first established by
Army intelligence at the Land Information Warfare Assessment Center,
now known as the Information Dominance Center, at Fort Belvoir, Va.,
the official said.
Mr. Weldon is an
outspoken figure who is a vice chairman of both the
House Armed Services
Committee and the House Homeland Security
Committee. He said he
had recognized the significance of the episode
only recently, when
he contacted members of the military intelligence
team as part of
research for his book, "Countdown to Terror: The
Top-Secret
Information That Could Prevent the Next Terrorist Attack on America
and How the C.I.A. Has Ignored It."
Mr. Weldon's book
prompted one veteran C.I.A. case officer to strongly
dispute the
reliability of one Iranian source cited in the book, saying
the Iranian "was a
waste of my time and resources."
Mr. Weldon said that
he had discussed the Able Danger episode with
Representative Peter
Hoekstra, the Michigan Republican who is chairman
of the House
Intelligence Committee, and that at least two Congressional
committees were
looking into the episode.
In the interview on
Monday, Mr. Weldon said he had been aware of the
episode since shortly
after the Sept. 11 attack, when members of the
team first brought it
to his attention. He said he had told Stephen J.
Hadley, then the
deputy national security adviser, about it in a
conversation in
September or October 2001, and had been surprised when the Sept. 11
commission report made no mention of the operation.
Col. Samuel Taylor, a
spokesman for the military's Special Operations
Command, said no one
at the command now had any knowledge of the Able Danger program, its
mission or its findings. If the program existed,
Colonel Taylor said,
it was probably a highly classified "special access
program" on which
only a few military personnel would have been briefed.
During the interview
in Mr. Weldon's office, the former defense
intelligence official
showed a floor-sized chart depicting Al Qaeda
networks around the
world that he said was a larger, more detailed
version similar to
the one prepared by the Able Danger team in the
summer of 2000.
He said the original
chart, like the new one, had included the names and
photographs of Mr.
Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, as well as Mr. Mihdhar and Mr. Hazmi, who
were identified as members of what was described as an
American-based "Brooklyn" cell, as one of five such Al Qaeda cells
around the world. The
official said the link to Brooklyn was meant as a term of art rather
than to be interpreted literally, saying that the unit had produced
no firm evidence linking the men to the borough of New York City but
that a computer analysis seeking to establish patterns in links
between the four men had found that "the software put them all
together in Brooklyn."
According to the
commission report, Mr. Mihdhar and Mr. Hazmi were first identified
in late 1999 or 2000 by the C.I.A. as Qaeda members who might be
involved in a terrorist operation. They were tracked from Yemen to
Malaysia before their trail was lost in Thailand. Neither man was
put on a State Department watch list before they flew to Los Angeles
in early 2000. The F.B.I. was not warned about them until the spring
of 2001, and no efforts to track them were made until August 2001.
Neither Mr. Shehhi
nor Mr. Atta was identified by the American
intelligence agencies
as a potential threat, the commission report said.
Mr. Shehhi arrived in
Newark on a flight from Brussels on May 29, 2000,
and Mr. Atta arrived
in Newark from Prague on June 3 that year.
The former
intelligence official said the first Able Danger report
identified all four
men as members of a "Brooklyn" cell, and was
produced within two
months after Mr. Atta arrived in the United States.
The former
intelligence official said he was among a group that briefed
Mr. Zelikow and at
least three other members of the Sept. 11 commission staff about
Able Danger when they visited the Afghanistan-Pakistan region in
October 2003.
The official said he
had explicitly mentioned Mr. Atta as a member of a
Qaeda cell in the
United States. He said the staff encouraged him to
call the commission
when he returned to Washington at the end of the
year. When he did so,
the ex-official said, the calls were not returned.
Mr. Felzenberg, the
former Sept. 11 commission spokesman, said on Monday that he had
talked with some of the former staff members who
participated in the
briefing.
"They all say that
they were not told anything about a Brooklyn cell,"
Mr. Felzenberg said.
"They were told about the Pentagon operation. They were not told
about the Brooklyn cell. They said that if the briefers
had mentioned
anything that startling, it would have gotten their
attention."
As a result of the
briefing, he said, the commission staff filed
document requests
with the Pentagon for information about the program.
The Pentagon
complied, he said, adding that the staff had not hidden
anything from the
commissioners.
"The commissioners
were certainly told of the document requests and what the findings
were," Mr. Felzenberg said.
Philip Shenon and
Eric Schmitt contributed reporting for this article.
© Copyright 2005 The
New York Times Company
**
FAMED AND HATED UFO
DEBUNKER AND SKEPTIC PHILIP J KLASS PASSES AWAY,....
joberg@houston.rr.com
Date: Wednesday, 10
August 2005, at 1:06 p.m.
From NADYA (Klass'
wife):
"I regret to inform
you that my husband, Philip J. Klass, passed away on
August 9 in Merritt
Island, Florida."
Phil was a friend and
colleague for more than thirty years, an
award-winning
technical journalist specializing in avionics, for
'Aviation Week'
magazine. His iron will carried him through his last
difficult years
against physical hardships brought on by age and medical
errors.
He had a bulldog
persistence in digging into stories most journalists
considered too
technical, too difficult, or even too un-researchable,
both in military and
civilian aviation and space systems,
and in his pastime of
'UFO stories.'
He aroused fierce
enmity in many circles, most of it a credit to his
piercing intellect
and acerbic wit, and if one is best measured by the
enemies one makes,
Phil had even more reason to be proud. I was proud of
him and proud to be
his friend.
------------------------------------------
http://www.destinationspace.net/ufo/ufomag/ufomag1008.asp
EDITORIAL: SKEPTICS
OR DEBUNKERS?
By Don Ecker,
Director of Research
From The Desk of UFO
MAGAZINE
Dateline: October 7,
2000
[Excerpt]
Philip J. Klass is
today considered to be the premier UFO skeptic alive.
Klass, now fast
approaching 80 years of age, has slashed and burned his
way across the
landscape for about 35 years. Over the now almost 15
years I have been
chasing the phenomenon, I have had a number of
encounters with
"kindly old Phil."
Now please, do not
get the idea that I am billing myself as the "know
all and seen it all"
guy, but I have been around the block with a bunch
of skeptics in all
those years. In my encounters with Klass, Oberg,
Sheaffer, Shermer and
others I have found that *without exception they
*all have taken a
page from Robert Low, Project Coordinator of the
Condon Committee, and
instead of attacking the cases -- they will attack
the witnesses.
Slashing and burning
the word, reputations and character of people
reporting on the UFO
phenomenon. (In a humorous moment when I was on
Larry King Live
debating Jim Oberg on the STS-48 shuttle UFO, Oberg
accused me of coming
on the program to sell magazines when I asked him
if he was operating
under any security restrictions.
(The "ad hominem
attack!)
I do not have either
the time or space to give you a litany of each
skeptic I have named,
so this month I will simply zero in on one, Phil
Klass.
Klass entered the UFO
scene around 1966. A former editor with Aviation
Week & Space
Technology, he would seem to be an excellent choice to
examine the UFO
subject and present an honest and critical eye on some
of the more difficult
UFO cases. Alas, that was not to be. After Klass
wrote his first UFO
book
"UFOs-Identified"
where he claimed UFOs were anomalous, but not alien,
Klass theorized that
UFOs were caused by ball lighting and free floating
plasmas. Even the
University of Colorado study (Condon) found this
theory to be
scientifically unsustainable. Dr. James McDonald, an
atmospheric physicist
and proponent of legitimate UFO study, tore
Klass's arguments
apart using scientific reasoning and facts.
Klass then decided
McDonald must be dangerous and dealt with, after all
he was "pro-UFO."
McDonald was working for the Office of Naval Research
who funded his trip
to Australia to conduct cloud-physics studies, and
Klass went on a
rampage at ONR writing letters demanding to know who
funded McDonald to
conduct UFO research in Australia, and later trips
McDonald was to take
to Europe and the USSR. Klass also enlisted other
sympathetic
journalists to assist him in a campaign that lasted 1 and
one half years.
The ONR conducted an
audit of McDonald that cleared him, but then cut
McDonald off from any
further grants. They were afraid of further bad
press. At this point
I would ask the Skeptical Inquirer about rational
and scientific open
mindedness.
Klass's position is
such that if anyone is willing to propose that some
cases might possibly
be explained as off world technology, then they are
only seeking
celebrity status or attempting to make money. At this
point, Klass then
zeroes in on the character of the researcher. In 1983,
Klass began an attack
directed against the University of Nebraska
because they were
sponsoring a UFO conference.
In a conversation
with the university's administrator Klass charged that
"ufologists `seek
what the Soviet Union does, to convey to the public
that our government
can not be trusted, and I resent it as an American
citizen." He equated
UFO research with communism, as un-patriotic and
anti-American.
Klass went on to
phone faculty and further claimed that for the
university to sponsor
such a conference (UFOs) was comparable to the
dilemma they would
face if the American Nazi Party wanted to hold a
conference there.
Later CSICOP spokesman Mark Plummer wrote that he
found nothing
excessive in Klass´s claims.
I had personal
experience with Klass on two different occasions when he
displayed his fanatic
anti-UFO sentiments.
In 1992, I was
invited to debate Klass
in Denver, sponsored
by ParaNet and MICAP. During the debate we began to
discuss the Frederick
Valentich case. This was a case of a young
Australian pilot who
disappeared in 1978 after radioing that he was
being approached by a
huge UFO. (The RAAF became involved in this case,
but no aircraft or
body was ever located.) Klass began by calling
Valentich a "drug
smuggler."
I was not about to
allow him to get away with that and demanded he prove
his assertion. His
proof? Valentich had four life preservers in his
aircraft. Klass has
operated on the assumption that if the case cannot
be discarded because
the claims can't be disproved, then it *must be a
hoax because UFOs
simply cannot be real!
The next run in with
Klass happened near the end of January 1995. I had
invited Klass on my
two hour, weekly radio program UFOs Tonite!. During
the program Klass had
threatened to hang up when I challenged him about
his assertion that
Major Jesse Marcel, when picking up debris from the
Roswell Incident, was
trying to claim a $3,000 reward offered by a
newspaper for proof
of a flying saucer.
Klass got very testy
when I challenged him on the statement that Marcel,
the intelligence
officer of the most elite military group in the world,
would attempt collect
a reward. (By the way, there is no proof of such a
reward being offered
that I was ever able to locate.) He threatened to
hang up at that
point. Later during the program we were discussing the
1952 overflights of
Washington DC, when Klass tried to suggest the Air
Force was not worried
because they took over an hour to send up jet
interceptors.
I informed Klass the
reason was that the local Air Force bases were
repairing runways and
the jets had to be flown in from Delaware. (I had
the proof including a
statement by Al Chop who was then the Air Force
liaison with its Blue
Book operation) Klass became enraged and began
"screaming bullshit"
over the air. When I expressed my indignation to
him, he became
embarrassed and hung up his telephone mid show!
(Another time Klass
"lost it" and began screaming profanities to a
national audience
occurred about 1993 on the Larry King show. Klass
appeared with Travis
Walton and Mike Rogers, and Rogers accused Klass of
being a government
agent. Klass in a "klassic display" of temper
screamed, `MIKE
ROGERS!, YOU´RE A GODDAMNED LIAR!")
This is the rational
thought demonstrated by the likes of the Skeptical
Inquirer and CSICOP
that I have encountered.
***************************
Subject:
"Alien abductees" provide clues to repressed, recovered memories
Part 1: UFO author
and researcher Paul Stonehill makes a response to the
attached article,
"Alien abductees provide clues to repressed, recovered
memories," in the
Oct 31, '02 issue of the Harvard Gazette.
Part 2: Dr Susan A
Clancy, a post doctoral research fellow at Harvard
University, makes her
position known – in her own words – in an
eye-opening interview
with the campus newspaper, "The Harvard Gazette"
on Halloween 2002 in
their October 31 edition.
Dr Clancy's book on
alien abductions entitled, ABDUCTED: HOW PEOPLE COME
TO BELIEVE THEY WERE
KIDNAPPED BY ALIENS is due out October 2005.
-----------------------------------------
From: PAUL STONEHILL
rurcla@hotmail.com
Date: Sunday, Aug 14,
2005, 9:38 p.m.
(PDT+7)
To: VICTOR MARTINEZ
Subject: Rebuttal to:
"ABDUCTED: HOW PEOPLE COME TO BELIEVE THEY WERE
KIDNAPPED BY ALIENS."
Thank you, Victor. I
stand by my previous comments, unless Dr. Clancy's
book explains UFO
abduction experiences of those who have not been
exposed to the
American pop culture. Perhaps she would be interested in
conducting a truly
comprehensive, world-wide research.
Throughout my
research I have found a number of similarities regarding
UFO sightings and
related experiences in Russian (as in
pre-revolutionary
Russian Empire), Soviet and Western reports. Yet the
populations had been
separated by more than the Iron Curtain; there have
been tremendous
cultural differences.
But what of similar
reports that come from Japan and Spain? It is
important to look at
all the angles when it comes to the research of the
UFO Phenomenon; it is
truly a world-wide phenomenon. Some day I hope a
way will be found to
juxtapose UFO reports from Brazil, Australia,
Nepal, Ukraine,
China, Mongolia, and the United States.
We will start seeing
PATTERNS, as I have begun to discover when reading
and researching
Soviet/Russian cases. I could quickly do so due to my
knowledge of Russian
and Ukrainian languages. But nowadays, its much
easier for serious
researchers to contact those who conduct similar
research in other
countries; finding those who speak English, the
primary language of
modern communications, is not a problem.
Perhaps the review of
Dr. Clancy's book by Benedict Carey has generated
something more than
just critcism; perhaps people now realize that
gullible attempts to
"explain away" this very complex UFO phenomenon are
futile.
What is NEEDED IS A
TRUE INTERNATIONAL EFFORT. At some levels, there has
been an exchange of
data and information; I could point to Ukraine's
RIAP; Dr. Haines's
Federation undertaking; MUFON's international
outreach; the Russian
version of NEXUS Magazine; FATE Magazine's
coverage of
paranormal phenomena in Asia, the Americas and Europe;
international
conferences, and much more.
The Internet is a
tremendous resource. Look what it has wrought as a
response to your
posting! Let us use it even more. Who knows, your
postings might reach
some philanthropist who will underwrite an
international
research.
I will appreciate if
you could post this comment.
PAUL STONEHILL –
author of: THE SOVIET
UFO FILES ('98)
and UFO/USSR (2005)
with Philip Mantle
-----------------------------------------
From: Dr SUSAN A
CLANCY, Post Doctoral Research Fellow, Harvard
University
To: VICTOR MARTINEZ
Subject: Rebuttal to:
Abducted: People Come to Believe Were Kidnapped by
Aliens
Hi there:
Let me make sure I
understand correctly. There are responses to Benedict
Carey's review of my
book (and not the book itself or the
scientific/published
research that preceded it)?
Perhaps these letters
should be sent to Benedict Carey. Until then,
people should read
the book before getting too "worked up" -- many of
them might feel
differently after doing so. For example, I never have
and still don't
believe that sleep paralysis "explains" alien
abductions.
Thank you for your
e-mail.
Susan A. Clancy,
Ph.D.
Post Doctoral
Research Fellow
Dept. of Psychology
Harvard University
clancy@wjh.harvard.edu
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