more than $100 million in insider credit card transactions took place in the hours and minutes before the twin towers collapsed. The mainframe computers in the towers processed these transactions; and the credit card data would have been lost forever had it not been for the successful data reconstruction of the CONVAR specialists. . . .

The reconstructed data was given by CONVAR to the FBI.

KABUL, Afghanistan - The U.S. military is "sure" it will catch Osama bin Laden this year, a spokesman said Thursday, but he declined to comment on where the al-Qaida leader may be hiding. . . .

Spokesman Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty said the military now believed it could seize him within months.
. . .

Hilferty declined to comment on where exactly bin Laden or Mullah Omar might be hiding, but his optimism coincides with comments from U.S. officials in Washington that the military is planning a spring offensive.

A fascinating video relating to an important unheeded warning of the 9/11 attacks was shown on WPTV, an NBC TV station in Florida on October 7, 2002. This video has been overlooked and forgotten until now.

What did Senator Bob Graham (left) and US intelligence know about the warning from Randy Glass (right) before 9/11?

In this video, Randy Glass, a private US citizen working as an undercover agent in a government sting operation, discusses how he learned about a threat to the World Trade Center and tried to warn various officials in government before 9/11. Florida State Senator Ron Klein and US Senator Bob Graham admit being given a warning by Randy Glass in the months before 9/11. What was the warning, who else knew about it, and why wasn't it acted upon?

Though the video doesn't discuss it, the sting operation Glass was part of recorded agents working for Pakistan's secret service, the ISI, say on more than one occasion before 9/11 that the World Trade Center was "coming down."

Today, the Maryland Department of Legislative Services, based on the analysis by RABA Technologies, concludes that the March primary election can be held successfully without any changes to the Diebold Election Systems software.

Computer security experts hired to hack electronic voting machines manufactured by Diebold Election Systems found that flaws in the machines could result in malicious insiders or outsiders stealing an election.

The findings, released in a report late Thursday afternoon, culminated a weeklong test undertaken by security experts at Raba Technologies, a firm hired by Maryland's legislative services department to hack the voting machines.

It is very clear that Howard Dean has been manipulated by the media, the other candidates and also by his own handlers to his own and our disadvantage. For example, Dean should NEVER have let himself be snookered into withdrawing that excellent ad in Iowa which exposed Kerry, Gephardt and Edwards as having voted for the Iraq War. This was the defining difference and it was eliminated. This is an example of that old psychological warfare trick of taking a person’s strong point and falsely portraying it as a weak point in order to try to put the person on the defensive.. . .

Regarding Howard Dean’s supposed "scream" and "tirade": I heard the short speech and yell several times and I think that it simply represented not a "scream" nor a "shriek" but an exuberant yell, a battle cry, signifying that he and his young supporters would NOT give up. That’s all it was. It was not "over the top" nor "unruly" (!) in any way. Nor was it at all "angry." Nor was it a "tirade." A tirade is defined as "a protracted speech usually marked by intemperate, vituperative, or harshly censorious language." Obviously, the media deliberately lied about the speech and Dean was intimidated sufficiently, undoubtedly ably assisted by his "advisors," to go along with the lie and assume a defensive posture. . . .

In the debate on last Thursday night Howard Dean obediently refrained from criticizing the phonies who are running against him in the primary. Howard Dean is NOT running against George Bush right now! He is running against the other Democratic candidates! But he has been told by his handlers that he has “made mistakes” and must pay the price and NOT attack the other Democratic candidates. Sure! Doesn’t that sound like an excellent strategy? . . . But the other candidates are allowed to attack him. And the media is permitted to attack him and belittle him relentlessly without Dean making an appropriate response.

Discarding his old stump speech, slipping-in-the-polls Dean took an Oliver Stone-ish shot at the GOP hierarchy, telling New Hampshire voters about his fear that new high-tech voting machines will be programmed to steal ballots from Democrats. . . .

"Whether you can program a chip or not is up for debate. I think you probably can and have a vote for Al Gore count as a vote for Pat Buchanan," said Dean, who says he'd like every electronic vote counter to leave a paper trail.

Some Democrats have charged that Diebold CEO Walden O'Dell is not to be trusted because he's been a Republican financial supporter.

At the start of network coverage, just after the polls closed, Kerry was listed with 38% of the vote, and Dean with 24%. That was with 14% of the precincts counted.

During the next six hours, I saw Kerry vary only one point, up to 39%. Dean went as high as 26%.

This morning, MSNBC is stating that, with 99% of all voting precincts reporting, Kerry is at 38% and Dean is at 26%.

Kerry is exactly where he began. Dean is two points higher than where he began, but exactly where he sat most of the night.

I don’t care whether they mostly used paper ballots or punch cards or touch screens. As the vote unfolded from minute to minute on TV---and they kept updating, showing the changing count of total votes cast for the various candidates on a continuously running basis---SOMEHOW THE PERCENTAGES FOR KERRY AND DEAN REMAINED VERY NEARLY UNCHANGED.

If you think about that, you’ll see (especially with seven candidates running) that this is beyond belief. How could this be?

We are to believe that each new small segment of reporting precincts is giving the same percentages to Kerry and Dean? That the returns are coming in on a uniform basis, like identical cupcakes being turned out on an assembly line?? All night?

At one point CNN claimed that voters in urban areas and voters out in the sticks were not in accord. If so, then how in hell were the emerging vote counts (every few minutes) on TV staying with the same percentages for Kerry and Dean? . . .

Because New Hampshire is such a small state, as the precincts reported in last night it would not have taken very many votes to change those percentages for Kerry and Dean in a very visible and significant fashion. But that didn’t happen. . . .

PDF

The Bush administration is warning Congress not to tinker with the Internet surveillance powers that the USA Patriot Act awarded to federal police.

In a four-page letter to the Senate on Thursday, Attorney General John Ashcroft . . . was responding to a proposal in the Senate called the Security and Freedom Ensured Act (SAFE), which would amend the USA Patriot Act by slapping limits on current police practices relating to surveillance and search warrants. It is sponsored by Republican Sen. Larry Craig of Idaho and has 12 co-sponsors, including two other Republicans.

The measure would amend the USA Patriot Act to require, for instance, that electronic-surveillance orders specify either the identity or location of the suspect and that the person be there at the time--a departure from current practice.
[...]
Another section of the SAFE Act that Ashcroft criticized would increase privacy protections for library patrons who use public computers for e-mail and Web browsing.
[...]
The USA PATRIOT Act . . . made it much easier for federal police to obtain "pen register" and "trap and trace" orders that could identify a suspect's e-mail correspondents and Web sites visited. The SAFE Act would permit those portions of the law to expire at the end of next year. . . .

The SAFE Act was introduced in the Senate in late October, and it has not had a hearing in the Senate Judiciary committee. A similar bill has been introduced in the House of Representatives.

FOX NEWS: Bush Pursues Big-Gov Nanny State
TIME.com: The Nanny in Chief

We have all been lied to about 9/11, the country is in mortal danger and only you can make it right.

If you need a label, I stand here as a 9/11 Truth Candidate and some may thus dismiss me as a single-issue candidate and in a narrow sense that is true. But if you consider that 9/11 has led us into fiscal ruin, endless war and constitutional twilight, my issue is the mother issue of our age.
[...]
Can you imagine a 9/11 investigative commission where most of the commissioners have ties to the oil, airline and arms industries if not to the White House itself?

Where the witnesses are not even asked to testify under oath?

Where interrogations of FBI, FAA and NORAD insiders are all supervised by White House chaperones called "minders"?

Where the executive director worked for years with Condi Rice, head of the National Security Council who herself refuses to testify under oath?

Where the latest appointed commissioner is an Iraq war hawk who publicly said he thought the most important role of the commission was quote "not to embarrass the president" unquote?

Could you believe in an investigation like that? Can you believe the shit that is going down?
[...]
The country has been swindled into endless war, repression and financial collapse. Thousands of people have been murdered and we still don?t know the facts.

JEREMY SCAHILL: In Yugoslavia, you used cluster bombs and depleted uranium...

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Sure did.

JEREMY SCAHILL: I want to know if you are president, will you vow not to use them.

CLARK: I will use whatever . . .

[...]

SCAHILL: Why did you bomb Radio Television Serbia? You killed 16 media workers . . . Amnesty International called it a war crime. . . It killed makeup artists.

CLARK: There were actually six people who were killed, as I recall.

SCAHILL: There were 16.

CLARK: I recall six.

SCAHILL: I was there at the time and I knew the families . . .

CLARK: It was all looked at by the International Criminal Tribunal crime by Yugoslavia. All of my actions were examined and they were all upheld by the highest law in the United States. . . .

SCAHILL: On April 12th you targeted a passenger train, and then you showed a video that was sped up at three time the speed. Why?

CLARK: I think -- first of all, the passenger train was not targeted. . . .

SCAHILL: What the actual in real-time speed showed is that the pilot actually moved the target so that it would hit the train. . . . 12 people were killed, including an orthodox priest.

CLARK: That's terrible. But, I don't have the information. . . .

SCAHILL: Do you think you owe the people of Serbia who died in that war an apology?

CLARK: No . . .

Fifteen months before Dean said he would seek the presidency, [he] spoke at a conference in Pittsburgh co-sponsored by smart-card firm Wave Systems where he called for state drivers' licenses to be transformed into a kind of standardized national ID card for Americans. Embedding smart cards into uniform IDs was necessary to thwart "cyberterrorism" and identity theft, Dean claimed. "We must move to smarter license cards that carry secure digital information that can be universally read at vital checkpoints" . . .

Dean also suggested that computer makers . . . should be required to include an ID card reader in PCs--and Americans would have to insert their uniform IDs into the reader before they could log on. "One state's smart-card driver's license must be identifiable by another state's card reader," Dean said. "It must also be easily commercialized by the private sector and included in all PCs over time . . .

"Barring anyone who isn't legal age from entering an adult chat room, making the Internet safer for our children, or prevent adults from entering a children's chat room and preying on our kids...Many new computer systems are being created with card reader technology. Older computers can add this feature for very little money," Dean said.
[...]
Does Dean still want to forcibly implant all of our computers with uniform ID readers?

Dean's presidential campaign won't answer.
[...]
Dean's March 2002 speech to a workshop at Carnegie Mellon University--given just six months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks--was designed to throw his support behind a standard ID proposal backed by the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA). At the time, Dean was chairman of the National Governors Association, a key ally for the AAMVA as it lobbied to transform the humble state driver's license into a uniform national ID card.
[...]
The AAMVA proposal would have mandated biometric identifiers such as digitized fingerprints or retinal scans. Depending on how the system was implemented, your license could be equipped with a smart card (which Dean suggested) that could store information about your movements whenever it was swiped in a reader.

Just a brief announcement to inform Libertythink readers that my new project, 'Awoken' has been updated. Cheers - valis

The Democratic leadership gave Kerry chairmanship of the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations and a charter to dig into the contra-drug connection. . . . The subcommittee published a report in 1989 that concluded the CIA and other US agencies had turned a blind eye to drug trafficking occurring on the fringes of the contra network. In many cases, traffickers were using the same airplanes, airfields, and other resources that the contras were using.

During the investigation, an Oregon businessman claiming CIA ties, Richard Brenneke, whose testimony was taken by Kerry's committee [charged] that Vice President George H. W. Bush's office had sanctioned a contra-drug smuggling operation.
[...]
The committee dropped the Brenneke angle.

Brenneke would later testify that most of the crates contained weapons and other gear to be used in the training program. He would also say that he found cocaine in some of the crates and while on the ground at Mena, called Donald Gregg, then-Vice President George Bush's chief of staff, and complained about the drugs. He quoted Gregg later as saying that it was none of his business. Brenneke later claimed his role in this affair was that of a money launderer for the Agency, that he worked out of Panama where the flight had originated, and that he had just thumbed a ride on the flight.' [p. 87]

Larry Patterson, an Arkansas State Trooper, testified under oath this
month that there were "large quantities of drugs being flown into the Mena Airport."
[...]
The plaintiffs in the suit are Terry and Janis Reed, who claim that they were embroiled in a US covert operation to assist the Nicaraguan Contras between 1983 and 1986. They say that the mission was based in Arkansas, with the alleged active involvement of Governor Clinton.
[...]
In a book published last year, Compromised: Clinton, Bush, and the CIA, Terry Reed alleged that he was recruited by Oliver North to help train Contra pilots in aerial supply skills, and to put his machine tool expertise to use developing a clandestine network for the manufacture of untraceable weapons parts.

Reed also claimed to have been present in an ammunition storage bunker outside Little Rock in 1986 when North and other Reagan Administration envoys allegedly met Clinton to discuss the covert operation - and to reprimand the Governor for members of his entourage skimming off money earmarked for national security purposes.

To no avail, [Reed] had spent three days the previous month [September 1988] in Washington with an attorney for Senator John Kerry's Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations.

There seemed to have been plenty of interest in Washington in the Reeds' story. "It all fits," they were told by subcommittee investigator Jack Blum. "It confirms our suspicions about Felix Rodriguez and what we suspected was really going on. Go back and tell your attorney to draft a proffer (a formal statement). I'm sure that either (Independent Counsel Lawrence) Walsh or Senator Kerry will want to question you under oath.

You'll be hearing from us soon." Trubey drafted the proffer, but there was never a call from Blum, Kerry, Walsh or anyone else. [p. 504]

Behar stated that he felt there was strong evidence to prove that Senator John Kerry's investigator, Jack Blum, had actually helped to stymie the Mena investigation.

Blum's job as special counsel to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations was to provide investigative services to Kerry's Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations and to funnel off pertinent leads he developed during the course of his investigation to Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh's office, which was seeking indictments involving the Iran-Contra affair. Blum had interviewed the Reeds extensively in Washington in 1988.

Behar had confided to Reed that he felt Walsh, probably in concert with Blum, was indeed part of the Iran-Contra cover-up, since Walsh's office had taken no action on Mena. Behar earlier stated that his suspicions stemmed from Walsh's lack of action on the preponderance of credible evidence provided directly to his office by federal, state and county law enforcement agencies, as well as the materials provided him by Arkansas Attorney General Winston Bryant and U.S. Congressman William Alexander concerning the activities at Mena.

Behar, completely reversing his earlier position on the Mena affair, responded, "I'm not convinced there is a cover-up."[p. 629]

Castillo was still in the DEA in Central America when Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts launched his probe into allegations of the ClA's involvement in drug running. Despite a parade of witnesses, including convicted drug dealers and associates of Eden Pastora and Manuel Noriega, the Kerry hearings received little attention in the mainstream press. Castillo said in 1997 that he believes it was easy for CIA defenders in the press to discount the Kerry probe because so many of its sources were compromised by their criminal records. "They never brought people like me in to testify. I was the special agent in charge of El Salvador. I did all the investigation, and they never contacted me."[p. 299]

The FBI/Justice requests to the secret court acting as a type of U.S. District Court under FISA, included:
[. . .]
That the FBI/Justice Department be authorized and empowered to block by forcible and other means any print or electronic news dissemination mentioning of the photo editor, Robert Stevens, of American Media, Inc., Boca Raton, Florida; of Stevens having been murdered by anthrax-by-mail, on or about September, 2001, through the aid, complicity, and connivance of U.S. Government civil/military covert operatives. And any mentioning or dissemination by news and other outlets, that the FBI by closing down the American Media, Inc. headquarters up to date, was thus blocking retrieval of reported pictures and supporting authentication as to George W. Bush in a coffin engaging as a proposed new member of the Skull & Bones Society, in a satanic ritual, in homosexual acts with his reputed male sex-mate who has numerous times visited Bush since that time; such rituals having been conducted at a building called "The Tomb", at Yale University. . . .

QUESTION for Mr Skolnick:

In your series named THE OVERTHROW OF THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC, you discuss Resident George Bush Jr and Skull & Bones. You say photos were taken during the initiation ceremony, which requires laying nekked in a coffin with the other Skull & Boners. You write that a "prominent US mayor" was photographed in a compromising position with Bush.

Victor Ashe is the former mayor of Knoxville, Tennessee (1988 to December 2003). Ashe is a Skull & Bones alum, and headed the National Mayors Confernce. He was nominated to the board of Fannie Mae S&L by Bush Jr. Ashe has vacationed with the Bush family all his life. . . . Ashe was invited to the White House for dinner in December 2003. . . .

Is Victor Ashe the mayor you are referring to?

PS . . . Mayor Ashe spent $200,000 for a creepy monument to sacrificed victims of 9-11-2001, naming every alleged victim on a black Egyptian obelisk in front of the City County Bldg.

FROM: John Lee; Knoxville, TN
geocities.com/idiotboxwars

I'm also most appreciative of the Mayor of Knoxville, Tennessee . . . I've know Mayor Ashe for years and years and years. And he has done a fabulous job . . . So, Victor, thank you.

[New York Gov.] Pataki, however, was in the thick of the university's volatile political life. He rose to be chair of the Yale Political Union's conservative party. The union was where visiting senators and Congressmen spoke to undergraduates and where vehement political debates were held. . .

Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts was active in the political union as chair of the liberal party, and so was Yale Daily News political columnist Victor Ashe, now the Mayor of Knoxville, Tenn.

[Kerry] talks often with fellow members of the Skull & Bones society, a conversation that began in 1965, when many Bonesmen assumed Kerry would run for president, and continues as he plots that course.

DES MOINES -- The buzz in political circles here is that one of the leading Democrats running for President --ok, it's John Kerry -- recently had some botox shots to perk up his kind of droopy, hound-dog look.

STEVEN Brill had a summit meeting of TV anchormen and their bosses over dinner at his Fifth Avenue apartment on Tuesday night with Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge to discuss how they'll cover the next terrorist attack. Brill, whose book "After" detailed the response to 9/11, spearheads the America Prepared Campaign to educate the public. Joining Brill, his wife Cynthia and two of their three kids for dinner were Fox News Channel boss Roger Ailes, ABC News prexie David Westin, CBS News chief Andrew Heyward, CNN anchor Aaron Brown, plus Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw.

We write to you out of concern regarding recent reports that, despite broad opposition from across the political and business spectrum, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) will push forward with plans to implement the Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System II (CAPPS II), a vast computerized network to probe the backgrounds of the 100 million Americans who fly each year . . .

New powers granted to government anti-terror initiatives must require that the power is necessary to thwart future attacks, and that the benefit of the new power outweighs its adverse effect on liberty. In its current form, CAPPS II fails both of these requirements. We ask that the program be suspended indefinitely until these serious concerns are addressed.

[Iranian intelligence agent Hamid Reza] Zakeri says the supreme Iranian leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the country's former president, Hashemi Rafsanjani, both were fully informed well before Sept. 11, 2001, that a brutal attack on America was planned.
[...]
"Four months and five days before 9/11," Zakeri says, one of bin Laden's sons, Saad bin Laden, turned up in the Iranian capital, met with Khamenei and Rafsanjani and gave them the details of the Sept. 11 plot.

His account, he says, can be corroborated by the Iranian security agent who served as Saad bin Laden's bodyguard during the visit, and who now is living quietly in Najaf, Iraq.
[...]
Dr. Ulrich von Jeinsen, a German lawyer who represents the families of some of those who died on Sept. 11. . . was inclined to believe what Zakeri has to say.
[...]
Zakeri said that in July 2001 . . . he visited Azerbaijan. . . and gave CIA personnel at the U.S. Embassy there a letter addressed to President Bush that warned of a major impending attack on U.S. soil. Zakeri, who says he also faxed a copy of the letter to the White House, claims it described a scale model of the World Trade Center and other high-rise buildings that suddenly and mysteriously had appeared in a hallway of the Iranian intelligence service's headquarters.
[...]
Zakeri claims a relationship with the CIA that dates from a meeting in Canada in 1992, after which he returned to Iran as an agent of the CIA . . .

The relationship, Zakeri said, culminated with an acrimonious meeting with the CIA and other American intelligence services in The Hague four months ago. "I told them the same story," Zakeri says. "They want me to say a different story.

Court papers in his scandal-ridden divorce reveal that, among other business interests, Bush received a $2 million contract from a large Chinese-Taiwanese company called Grace Semiconductor Manufacturing.

The contract hires Bush as a consultant in return for $400,000 per year in company stock for five years. In his deposition, Bush disclaimed expertise in semiconductors but stated that he has traveled extensively in Asia.
[...]
Grace Semiconductor has two founders, one a son of the former president of mainland China. Bush received his contract from the other founder, a Taiwanese businessman named Winston Wong (spelled WONG, pronounced the same way).
[...]
Back in the 1990s, the Clinton White House got into trouble when Winston Wang (spelled WANG, but pronounced "wong"), a Taiwanese businessman, had coffee at the White House in June 1995 and allegedly followed up by promising a $100,000 contribution to the Democratic National Committee.
[...]
It turns out that this is the same man.

Yes, that's right; in a sterling example of don't-they-ever-learn, Neil Mallon Bush (named after a founder of Dresser Industries, a Bush-connected company that became a subsidiary of Halliburton) entered into a contract with Winston Wang, the same man whose White House visit contributed to a political tempest.

Evidently the reason no one has noticed this connection is that the last name is now spelled, in most print reports, with an "o'' instead of an "a''.
[...]
Winston Wang (Wong) is the son of billionaire Y. C. Wang, regarded as Taiwan's most powerful businessman, head of mega-conglomerate Formosa Plastics Company.
[...]
Wong was also an early investor in Neil Bush's educational software company, Ignite! Learning.

Interestingly, the media ``conservatives" who devoted such attention to Charlie Trie in the 1990s never actually named either Winston Wang or Formosa Plastics.

Could there have been a reason why not? In his March 1, 2000, testimony before Congress, Charles ``Charlie" Trie, who introduced Wang to Clinton, told the House Committee on Government Reform, ``When I met Winston Wang, he told me that he had met with President Bush when he was president."