Pumpitout Radio: Foreknowledge and Lack of Air Defense

Jeff Hill's Pumpitout radio show featuring John-Michael Talboo detailing his research into the many pre 9/11 warnings of terrorist attacks using planes as weapons.

Also, the UNBELIEVABLE LACK of response from NORAD and other facilities equipped to defend our air space on the morning of September 11, 2001.

Note from John-Michael:

This is a mashup of two conversations I had with Jeff, so if there seems to be points where I am repeating myself this is why.

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Presidential Daily Briefing from August 6, 2001: Bin Laden Determined To Strike in US

Pat Curley of the Screw Loose Change blog has commented that, "The two paragraphs which do not appear historical in nature are also not very accurate in predicting 9-11; federal buildings in New York were not attacked and the attacks were not done with explosives."

Condoleezza Rice's bio on Wikipedia contains this tidbit:

Rice characterized the August 6, 2001 President's Daily Brief Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US as historical information. Rice indicated "It was information based on old reporting."[45] Sean Wilentz of Salon magazine suggested that the PDB contained current information based on continuing investigations, including that Bin Laden wanted to "bring the fighting to America."[46]

One commenter by the name of Brian Good on Pat's blog thanked him for his candor, "Thanks, Pat, for confirming that the 'Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US' memo actually did warn of new attacks, though Condi claimed under oath in the presence of the 9/11 widows that it did not."

Yes, there was a section that mentions "bin Laden supporters in the U.S. planning attacks with explosives," which as Pat pointed out, "the attacks were not done with explosives," meaning of course that it wasn't a bombing attack akin to the 1993 WTC bombing, but the memo also mentioned "suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks..." It then mentions that this included "recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York," to which Pat points out that the towers were not federal buildings, but the "recent surveillance" would be in addition to the "most attractive terrorist target" at the WTC as detailed by several reports dating back to the 1980s.

When we look at the PBD within a larger context we start to get a clearer picture of the situation.

Here is the list of mainstream news articles detailing ignored warnings, which I mentioned in the interview first got me started into 9/11 research.

Here is some of the more specific information.

In November 2007, Patty Casazza, one of the four New Jersey widows known as the "Jersey Girls" who helped instigate the formation of the 9/11 Commission, revealed that whistleblowers told her "the government knew the exact day, the type of attack, and the targets." Let's look further into this outrageous claim: Whom could she have meant by "the government?"

David Schippers, former Chief Investigative Counsel for the US House Judiciary Committee and head prosecutor responsible for conducting the impeachment against former president Bill Clinton, stated that at the behest of several FBI agents he had attempted multiple times to warn US Attorney John Ashcroft, along with other federal officials, of the impending attacks weeks before they occurred, only to be stalled and rebuffed in each attempt.

As summarized in the books The War on Freedom and The War on Truth by Nafeez Ahmed, who personally corresponded with Schippers, "According to Schippers, these agents knew, months before the 11th September attacks, the names of the hijackers, the targets of their attacks, the proposed dates, and the sources of their funding, along with other information."

The FBI command, however, cut short their investigations threatening the agents with prosecution under the National Security Act if they publicized this information.

Ahmed has stated, "In The War on Freedom, I merely laid out facts and lines of inquiry for an official investigation. The book was the first read by the Jersey Girls, informing their work with the 9/11 Family Steering Committee, and is part of the 9/11 Commission Collection at the US National Archives (a collection of 99 books, copies of which were provided to each Commissioner)."

Despite this fact, the account of David Shippers is nowhere to be found in The 9/11 Commission Report.

Thanks to Fran Sure from colorado911visibility.org for putting together the above material with me.

Jesse Ventura's book American Conspiracies recounts another similar warning passed along to John Ashcroft, Ventura writes:

Dr. Parke Godfrey, an associate professor of computer science at Toronto's York University, said under oath in a New York courtroom that a longtime associate of his, Susan Lindauer, warned him several times and as late as August 2001 "that we expected a major attack on the southern part of Manhattan, and that the attack would encompass the World Trade Center," an attack "that would involve airplanes and possibly a nuclear weapon." Lindauer, who says she was a CIA asset, claimed to have made an attemp to inform John Ashcroft at the Justice Department, who referred her to the Office of Counter-Terrorism.

FBI translator Sibel Edmonds, in an open letter to the 9/11 Commission, reported that there was "specific information regarding a terrorist attack being planned by Osama bin Laden," that mentioned major cities, airplanes, approximate timeframe, and operatives already in place in the US. This was reported by FBI agents to Special Agent in Charge of Counterterrorism Thomas Frields at the FBI Washington Field Office, but was subsequently ignored.

Edmonds has recently reaffirmed these points as factual and provided the testimony of the agent who first raised them. As Debunking the Debunkers blog contributor Scootle Royale wrote, "Pat Curley is confident that if we were to ever see the unredacted testimony, it will bear no resemblance to what Sibel posted. Well, how about supporting the truth movement in a quest for a new investigation so we can maybe see it unredacted then? No? Didn't think so."

Speaking of 9/11 foreknowledge often brings up the issue of how this all corresponds with the idea of 9/1 being an inside job. As I have pointed out, many people make the mistake of only seeing the issues concerning 9/11 in black and white, as opposed to shades of grey.

NORAD Stand-Down:

A stand-down is defined as "a relaxation from a state of readiness or alert." This certainly took place regarding air defenses on 9/11. One explanation offered was that the terrorists turned off the electronic device known as a transponder, which helps identify aircraft on radar.

As stated by the 9/11 Commission, "With its transponder off, it is possible, though more difficult, to track an aircraft by its primary radar returns. But unlike transponder data, primary radar returns do not show the aircraft's identity and altitude."

The commission failed to consider the fact that the US military has more than just ground radar at their disposal.

As defined by the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, AWACS is "a sophisticated detection aircraft, fitted with powerful radar and a computer, capable of simultaneously tracking and plotting large numbers of low-flying aircraft at much greater distances than is possible with ground radar."

On 9/11 an AWACS plane on a training mission in the Washington, DC, area was ordered to return to its base in Oklahoma limiting the communications and surveillance capabilities of NORAD’s Northeast Air Defense Sector.

In 2006 New Scientist magazine reported that "US military radar can track space debris as small as 10 centimetres across, and can sometimes see things as small as 5 cm wide if it is in just the right orbit."

The 35 USAF bases that were within range of the 9/11 flights unquestionably possessed highly-sophisticated radar.

Commercial airliners do not need their transponders turned on in order to be tracked by the US military. If America was being attacked by aircraft belonging to a foreign power, it is ridiculous to think these enemy aircraft would have transponders installed to help the US Air Force shoot them down. It is equally ridiculous to believe the US military lack the technology to track aircraft without a transponder signal.

Another excuse given by defenders of the official story is that NORAD only looked outward for threats, not inward. There is much evidence that looking inward was also one of their responsibilities, but in any event, there is at least one incident which proves NORAD could be tasked to defend any part of the skies over the United States and Canada, as well as much evidence that it is not the only time this has happened, but rather, the only time we have been privy to.

The Popular Mechanics book Debunking 9/11 Myths cites an article in a 2002 edition of the Colorado Springs Gazette, which claims that, "Before September 11, the only time officials recall scrambling jets over the United States was when golfer Payne Stewart’s plane veered off course and crashed in South Dakota in 1999."

Popular Mechanics adds, "Except for that lone, tragic anomaly, all NORAD interceptions from the end of the Cold war in 1989 until 9/11 took place in offshore Air Defense Identification Zones (ADIZ). . . . The planes intercepted in these zones were primarily being used for drug smuggling."

But an October 13, 2001 Calgary Herald article reported that before 9/11 fighter jets "were scrambled to babysit suspect aircraft or 'unknowns' twice a week."

As Professor David Ray Griffin pointed out in his book Debunking 9/11 Debunking, "Twice a week would be about 100 times per year, and 'babysitting' is not what planes would do with jets suspected of smuggling drugs into the country."

Furthermore, a 1994 United States General Accounting Office report on continental air defense states, "Overall, during the past 4 years, NORAD’s alert fighters took off to intercept aircraft (referred to as scrambled) 1,518 times, or an average of 15 times per site per year. Of these incidents, the number of suspected drug smuggling aircraft averaged one per site, or less than 7 percent of all of the alert sites’ total activity. The remaining activity generally involved visually inspecting unidentified aircraft and assisting aircraft in distress."

As the New York City Activist blog pointed out, "Admittedly this is the early 1990′s, not 2001, and the quote is from a report which recommended trimming down the force. But still it casts a lot of doubt on the Popular Mechanics claim that intercepts were a rare occurrence."

And as Griffin points out in Debunking 9/11 Debunking, "In this account NORAD made 379 interceptions per year, 354 of which 'involved visually inspecting unidentified aircraft in distress,' not intercepting planes suspected of smuggling drugs. Besides the fact that 1992 was part of 'the decade before 9/11,' it is doubtful that the pattern of interceptions would have changed radically after that."

A Canadian government performance report on their arm of NORAD for 1999-2000, the same period as the Payne Stewart flight, relevant to military operations in the years leading up to the 9/11 attacks, backs up Griffin’s statements. The report states, "If required, 'unknown aircraft' are intercepted and identified by aircraft dedicated to NORAD. Over the past year, NORAD has intercepted 736 aircraft, 82 of which were suspected drug smugglers…"

While not addressing these reports, Mike Williams of the “debunking” website 911myths.com states, "The Popular Mechanics claim that there was one intercept of a 'civilian plane over North America' in the decade before 9/11 still seems quite absolute, but then that just means it wouldn’t take much to disprove it. Just find a media report of an intercept, an interview with a pilot who was intercepted when they accidentally flew too close to the White House, anything like that... How difficult can it be?"

Being that Williams only provides two examples of other intercepts for comparison on his webpage concerning the Payne Stewart incident, and that he could not find all the information needed to draw firm conclusions on these, he should know that finding any detailed statistics on such matters is difficult.

The aforementioned entry on the New York City Activist blog highlights the following from the 2004 Complaint & Petition to the NY Attorney General (Spitzer at the time) for a new criminal investigation into 9/11:

Also necessary would be data on cases of errant planes or unknowns in which no scramble orders were issued. Of special interest would be the prior performance within NORAD’s Northeastern Air Defense Sector (“NEADS”), which is headquartered at Rome, New York. Such a cumulative analysis–with special attention to cases when passenger planes deviated from course in the air-traffic control zones within which the 9/11 attacks occurred–would provide indispensable context for serious research into the subject of air defense response on September 11. This data is currently unavailable to the public, and there is no indication such an analysis was undertaken by the Kean Commission.

When 9/11 researcher and activist Aidan Monaghan sent a Freedom of Information Act Request to the FAA he was informed that, "...The FAA does not track or or keep information about the request for support of NORAD for intercepting aircraft throughout the National Airspace System."

When Monaghan tried obtaining FOIA information from NORAD he was advised that they are not subject to the FOIA because they are a bi-national organization between the U.S. and Canada.

Perhaps those in government are the ones worthy of the question, "How difficult can it be?"

When Williams was asked in an interview to give his "strongest argument" against a NORAD stand-down he stated that, "I would point out the Payne Stewart intercept time of over 70 minutes, and the pre-9/11 confirmation that NORAD only had 14 fighters on alert at one time, none of which were at Andrews Air Force Base."

First off, as is pointed out in Paul Thompson's article "The Failure to Defend the Skies on 9/11," "We know details of a 1999 fighter scramble, because famous golfer Payne Stewart was aboard a runaway Learjet. With the pilot unconscious, NORAD used fighters from a number of bases outside NORAD’s official seven bases to follow the plane as it crossed over several states before finally crashing."

So William's first point takes away from his second one. As reported by Aviation Week and Space Technology magazine, after the second strike on the WTC, "Calls from fighter units… started pouring into NORAD and sector operations centers, asking, ‘What can we do to help?’" One of these bases was Syracuse, which offered to have planes in the air with some weapons within ten minutes. Paul Thomson notes that, "Even if fighters didn’t take off from Syracuse until 9:20, that still would have been enough time for those fighters to reach Washington before Flight 77 did, if they had been ordered to protect that city." Sadly, fighters from Syracuse did not take off until over an hour and a half after their offer to help.

William's admits on his page concerning Andrews that they "had some pilots and fighters, just not sufficiently prepared." This refers to their excuse for not launching fighters until 95 minutes after the second WTC crash because they were loading missiles, however, the first three planes to launch only had guns available.

Just as with Syracuse something could have been done much earlier. David Ray Griffin is quoted on William's page as stating "Fighters loaded with bullets, but no missiles, could have provided considerable protection. Even fighter jets completely unloaded would be better than no fighters at all, given their ability to deter and, if all else failed, ram an airliner headed towards the Pentagon, the White House or the Capitol." William's doesn't focus on this though, instead he rebuts Griffin's other argument that the "arming never happened."

While Griffin's latter point here isn't well supported, the article "IGNORAD - The military screw-up nobody talks about" by former U.S. Navy intelligence officer Scott Shuger also notes that there are other techniques fighters could have used with a hijacked plane, Shuger states:

It can first rock its wingtips to attract attention, or make a pass in front of the plane, or fire tracer rounds in its path. So even though on 9/11, the NORAD pilots working the first three airliners didn't have shootdown authority (they got it only after the Pentagon was hit), they would or should have been ready to try these other techniques, which might well have spooked or forced the hijackers into turning, which might have given the fighters a chance to force them out to sea. And even if the hijackers decided instead to fly right into a fighter in their way, wouldn't an airburst have killed fewer people than two collapsed flaming skyscrapers did?

As it turned out Shuger knew what he was talking about. Almost 8 months after his January 2002 article AviationWeek.com reported that:

Within minutes of American Airlines Flight 77 hitting the Pentagon on Sept. 11, Air National Guard F-16s took off from here in response to a plea from the White House to 'Get in the air now!' Those fighters were flown by three pilots who had decided, on their own, to ram a hijacked airliner and force it to crash, if necessary. Such action almost certainly would have been fatal for them, but could have prevented another terrorism catastrophe in Washington.

These or other heroes like them could have and should have been in the air much sooner on 9/11, but don't take my word for it.

In the 911blogger.com article "The 90-Minute Stand Down on 9/11: Why Was the Secret Service's Early Request for Fighter Jets Ignored?" Captain Brandon Rasmussen from Andrews is quoted as stating that, "We were relieved to actually be given permission to go up and do something, instead of feeling totally helpless. I mean, we are fighter pilots, just like guard dogs chomping at the bit, ready to go."

All this being said, the fact that NORAD's force had been cut down to 14 fighter jets and that Andrews wasn't more prepared is problematic enough. As "Loose Nuke" commented on the 911 Blogger article:

On pg 2 of Note 13 it says, 'Wherley had no properly armed planes at Andrews. His units were not air defense units.' There's a 'summer of threat', warnings of a planes as missiles attack, CIA and FBI knew operatives were in the country, nothing was done to disrupt the plot, and nothing was done to harden security, nothing was done to defend the nation's capital. Rather, it appears some took action to leave the capital open to attack.

Back to the Payne Stewart incident, on Willams' old webpage on the subject he states that, "To be fair, if the first fighters had been closer (as they were on 9/11) then the response time would have been better."

His new page on the subject no longer contains this line. So much for being equitable!

Regardless, using a roughly 76 minute starting point for a refutation is fine because these events are barely comparable. Stewart was flying a 6-8 passenger Learjet 35, not a large commercial airliner, which was not flying over densely populated areas, did not have its transponder turned off, and was on autopilot as opposed to having terrorists at the helm clearly attacking the country.

The third strike on 9/11 at the Pentagon took place at 9:38 a.m., 44 minutes after Flight 77 veered off course at 8:54 a.m. This is a conservative figure, and judging from William's own page on the subject, one with which he would agree. By this time the first tower had already been struck. Being that the FAA received 52 pre-9/11 warnings, including five that "specifically mentioned Al Qaeda's training or capability to conduct hijackings," and warned airports in the spring of 2001 that "the intent of the hijacker is not to exchange hostages for prisoners, but to commit suicide in a spectacular explosion," the moment Flight 77 deviated from it's course it should have become a target for interception.

Although many government officials would claim that they thought the first strike was just an accident, couterterrorism “tsar” Richard Clarke wrote in his 2004 book Against all enemies that a member of his White House staff told him that, “Until we know what this is, Dick, we should assume the worst.” And in Bob Woodward's 2002 book Bush at War it was reported that when CIA Director George Tenet learned of the strike he was told specifically that, “The World Trade tower has been attacked,” after which he immediately suspected bin Laden.

Furthermore, Williams neglects to mention the fact that the jets already in the air which failed to reach the first two strikes were not redeployed towards the deviating planes headed for the capital. This would have guaranteed interceptors reaching Flight 77 before it crashed into the Pentagon.

To put it all another way, if the military can get to a Learjet in roughly 76 minutes when they are not being waged war on, then 44 or more minutes should be sufficient when they are. These points hold all the more true for the fourth plane to perish that day.

Based on a timeline provided by NORAD, on September 17, 2001 CNN reported that at "9:16 a.m.: FAA informs NORAD that United Airlines flight 93 may have been hijacked." The 9/11 Commission would later claim that NORAD is first notified about Flight 93 one minute after it had already crashed at 10:07 a.m. However, the initial report is supported by statements from two NORAD commanders that they were already tracking the flight when it changed direction at 9:36. This would mean that the military was tracking the flight for 50 minutes as opposed to zero! This is just one of many such changes made in the 9/11 Commission's third mutually contradictory version of events.

During testimony given to the 9/11 Commission, then Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta had the following exchange with 9/11 commissioner Lee Hamilton regarding the plane coming into the Pentagon:

MR. MINETA: ...There was a young man who had come in and said to the vice president, "The plane is 50 miles out. The plane is 30 miles out." And when it got down to, "The plane is 10 miles out," the young man also said to the vice president, "Do the orders still stand?" And the vice president turned and whipped his neck around and said, "Of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?"...

MR. HAMILTON: The flight you're referring to is the --

MR. MINETA: The flight that came into the Pentagon.

MR. HAMILTON: The Pentagon, yeah.

The 9/11 Commission would assert that the military "had at most one or two minutes to react" to Flight 77 before it hit the Pentagon, however, Mineta's testimony indicates that they had 10 to 12 minutes, leading many to suspect the orders were stand-down orders. They omitted Mineta’s testimony from both their final report and the official version of the video record, however, they did imply Mineta was mistaken, stating that the discussion between Cheney and the aide occurred later than he claimed, and that it was referencing a shoot-down order for Flight 93, which crashed in a Pennsylvania field.

So, were the orders for a stand-down or a shoot-down? As pointed out by 9/11 researcher "jimd3100":

Even if the 9-11 Commission is correct, when they claim he arrived at 10:07 (according to the White House) Mineta makes it clear the order was given before he got there. There was no shoot down order given before 10:07. The 9-11 Commission seems to admit this.

...It seems very clear from the evidence that no shoot down order was given until 10:20 and none relayed to the military until 10:31. Which means if an order was given before 10:20 there is no reason to believe it was a shoot down order. Which would seem to indicate it was a stand down.

Now thanks to recent research by "jimd3100" we know that a one Douglas F. Cochrane was the naval aide Mineta was referring to. When 9/11 researcher Jeff Hill followed up and phoned Cochrane, asking him what the orders were, Cohrane replied that he was "really not prepared to talk about this subject at all." Jeff then pleaded with Cohrane to ease his mind about whether the orders were stand-down orders, to which Cohrane replied that he had "nothing further to add" to the information already publicly available. Hill then asked Cohrane if he thought answering his questions would get Cheney in trouble, Cohrane paused, and then stated that "The 9/11 Commission Report is the authoritative narrative on the events surrounding 9/11."

As it turns out, it is against the law for Cohrane to say anything else because his interview with the 9/11 Commission has been classified.

We need to be allowed to view Cohrane's testimony, but even if he says the orders were shoot-down orders, the fact remains that after seeing the second tower struck at 9:03 AM the National Military Command Center realized there was "a coordinated terrorist attack on the United States," but yet shoot-down orders were not relayed to the military until 10:31.

The Washington Post reported on August 2, 2006 that:

Suspicion of wrongdoing ran so deep that the 10-member commission, in a secret meeting at the end of its tenure in summer 2004, debated referring the matter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation, according to several commission sources... "We to this day don't know why NORAD [the North American Aerospace Command] told us what they told us," said Thomas H. Kean, the former New Jersey Republican governor who led the commission. 'It was just so far from the truth. . . . It's one of those loose ends that never got tied."

It is often claimed that 9/11 skeptics are quote mining the 9/11 Commissioners, as to suggest that they agree with our case, but this is the real logical fallacy. Kean admitted they were lied to and he did not know why. He can think that the 9/11 Commission's story of astounding incompetance is correct all he wants, but the fact remains that his report failed to tie up “those loose ends" and prove that ineptitude is all that was at hand.

As David Ray Griffin has stated:

...Although this explanation has been widely accepted, is it really believable? If our military had been guilty only of confusion and incompetence on 9/11, it would have been strange for its officials, by saying that they had been notified by the FAA earlier than they really had, to open themselves not only to the charge of criminal fraud but also to the suspicion that they had deliberately not intercepted the hijacked airliners. We are being asked to believe, in other words, that Scott, Arnold, and the others, in telling the earlier story, acted in a completely irrational manner--that, while being guilty only of confusion and a little incompetence, they told a lie that could have exposed them with being charged with murder and treason.

Equally counter intuitive is the fact that the top officials in charge of NORAD and the FAA on 9/11 were rewarded for their supposed incompetence with promotions instead of charges of perjury.

In regard to how the NORAD stand-down was achieved, many have speculated that inaction by an intentionally AWOL chain of command, combined with the four wargames that were conducted on 9/11, which seem to have included live-fly simulations of hijackings, and NORAD radar screens, which displayed false tracks throughout the attacks, caused deliberate confusion.

911myths.com features outdated pages on the issues of live-fly exercises and false radar blips, proving once again that we don't need "debunkers" to answer these questions, but rather a new investigative body willing to tie all "loose ends" so there is no need for Loose Change or their detractors.

Former U.S. Army Air Defense Officer and NORAD Tac Director, decorated with the Purple Heart, the Bronze Star and the Soldiers Medal stated that "there is no way that an aircraft . . . would not be intercepted when they deviate from their flight plan, turn off their transponders, or stop communication with Air Traffic Control ... Attempts to obscure facts by calling them a 'conspiracy Theory' does not change the truth. It seems, 'Something is rotten in the State.'"

"I knew within hours of the attacks on 9/11/2001 that it was an inside job. Based on my 11-year experience as an FAA Air Traffic Controller in the busy Northeast corridor, including hundreds of hours of training, briefings, air refuelings, low altitude bombing drills, being part of huge military exercises, daily military training exercises, interacting on a routine basis directly with NORAD radar personnel, and based on my own direct experience dealing with in-flight emergency situations, including two instances of hijacked commercial airliners, I state unequivocally; There is absolutely no way that four large commercial airliners could have flown around off course for 30 to 60 minutes on 9/11 without being intercepted and shot completely out of the sky by our jet fighters unless very highly placed people in our government and our military wanted it to happen. - Robin Hordon, Former FAA Air Traffic Controller at the Boston Air Route Traffic Control Center, located in Nashua, NH, 1970 - 1981. FAA certified commercial pilot. FAA certified Flight Instructor and certified Ground Instructor. After leaving the FAA, he had a 12-year career in the field of comedy ending up as artistic coordinator for "Catch A Rising Star" in Harvard Square in Cambridge, MA.

Related Info:

Debunking the Debunkers on Pumpitout Radio

Sibel Edmonds, SNAFUs, and Freedom Fries!

So, Pat Curley from of Screw Loose Change blog had a look at my blog entry "FBI Whistleblower Sibel Edmonds is Credible... and Yes... She is a Truther Too!," he writes, "Hat Tip to Debunking the Debunkers. No matter how much John-Michael dances around the point, the fact is that Sibel lied to the 9-11 Commission about the contents of the Chicago Tribune article she cited in her letter."

Well, thanks for the hat tip. :)

Now to my accompanying jig. Let's think this out. Sibel asked the Commission to look at an article that would prove she was lying to them? That makes no sense at all.

I think an exchange in Pat's comment section highlights this quite well...

Boris Epstein said, "What Chicago Tribune article would that be, Pat?"

Pat replies, "Boris, did you ever learn how to follow links? Go to the Debunking the Debunkers post, and then follow their link to my post on Sibel explaining how she lied."

Boris Epstein replies:

Well, guess what, I found this link. All it illustrates is that what Ms Edmonds says differs from what the Star Tribune had reported. Note that the actual record of the unnamed FBI source's revelations is not presented; hence we have a potential for misinterpretation or deception. The potential exists for both the Star Tribune and Sibel Edmonds. You clearly have not accounted for that; perhaps this is why you wouldn't simply furnish the relevant links but would rather hide them under the layers of references hoping no one would check on that.

Pat replies, "The press reported this incident, and a report in the Chicago Tribune on July 21, 2004, stated that FBI officials had confirmed that this information was received in April 2001. Except that the Chicago Tribune report did not say what she said it did. In fact, it contradicted her on several points."

Boris Epstein replies, "Pat, Sibel Edmonds may have not been precise in what she was saying; the FBI acknowledged the receipt of the information, yet characterized it differently. I don't know if there is deception involved here on anybody's part; that does not cancel the fact that many improprieties Edmonds reported were acknowledged as legitimate by none other that the FBI/DOJ officials."

As I pointed out in the original post, just because anonymous FBI officials claimed the warning was "very vague and doubtful" does not make it so. Edmond's point in citing the Tribune seems to have been simply to point out that the information she laid out in her letter was presented to the FBI. It's either that or she cited the Tribune in the manner that Pat suggests, as if the allegations she said were made in the meeting with FBI officials were backed up in the article. She obviously knew they were not and it is ludicrous to suggest otherwise. She testified under oath about these issues on August 8, 2009:


A better attempt at debunking came in the comments by "Marc" who first quotes my blog, "Edmonds saying that Osama bin Laden worked for the U.S. right up until 9/11 has much supporting evidence. This evidence includes a report from one of the most reputable French papers, Le Figaro, which claims that a CIA agent met with bin Laden two months before 9/11."

Marc then states:

"Reputable" and "French paper" do not often go together. I certainly would not cite them as a source. While we're talking about sources the gold-standard is three independant sources and all three have to be on the record. An unnamed source, if reliable, should be able to lead you to a named source. There are no named sources other than Edmonds. Thus, sloppy research leads to sloppy logic."

If Marc doesn't want to accept the "oldest and second-largest national newspaper in France" as a source that is his choice. Feel free to add a section on Wikipedia explaining why Le Figaro is not worthy of being cited as a source. Or you might try re-doing the article "Media of France" on WikiPedia and prove to the world how French papers cannot be trusted. Just remember, "Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed."

And I'm sure it stands to reason that this part of my blog didn't mater:

French counterterrorism expert Antoine Sfeir says the story of this meeting has been verified and is not surprising: It "is nothing extraordinary. Bin Laden maintained contacts with the CIA up to 1998. These contacts have not ceased since bin Laden settled in Afghanistan. Up to the last moment, CIA agents hoped that bin Laden would return to the fold of the US, as was the case before 1989." - Source

Marc then quotes a bit more of my blog:

Author Richard Labeviere later wrote a book, where he said "a Gulf prince who presented himself as an adviser to the Emir of Bahrain" confirmed the meeting, which had been arranged by Prince Turki al-Faisal of Saudi Arabia.

Confirmation? Maybe, but again we don't know the source, so there’s no way to determine its accuracy.

Hasn't this site ever heard that a good reporter never reveals their sources?

Everything except the last line quoted here actually comes from the "debunking" website 9/11myths.com, which I pointed out tries to cast doubt on the validly of this report, while at the same time admitting possible confirmation.

Marc's answer to all this, "Labeviere is notorious for making shit up."

Yeah well, Labeviere has an answer or two to such charges.

Marc then quotes my blog again, "The evidence supporting Edmonds also includes a CIA commander stating the U.S. let bin Laden escape from Afghanistan, French soldiers stating they could have killed Bin Laden, but were not allowed by American commanders, and an Al Qaeda trainer who it turns out worked with the Green Berets, CIA, and FBI!

He replies:

Let us take these one by one.

In the books "Jawbreaker", and "Kill Bin Laden", both authors express frustration that they were not allowed to pursue bin Laden into Afghanistan. However, if one actually reads these books (which are both outstanding) it becomes clear that there were two main factors on the ground in Afghanistan: 1- During the final push on the AQ stronghold there was a devistating break in the assault initiated by the local warlords to negotiate a surrender. This turned out to be a trick to let AQ escape.

Filmmaker Oliver Stone was reported in 2006 to be considering making "Jawbreaker" into a feature film. Here was his take on the situation:

"This will be partly about the ground war in Afghanistan, among other things," Stone said. "We've been discreet because we didn't want 'World Trade Center' to be affected unnecessarily by political bullshit about Afghanistan."

"World Trade Center" was marketed as a heroic rescue tale, but Stone recognizes it will be harder to avoid political discussions on "Jawbreaker." In a memoir heavily vetted by the CIA (there are pages of blacked-out lines), Bernsten details feeling stymied by bureaucrats in President Bill Clinton's administration who prevented operatives from engaging a growingly malicious Al Qaeda and Bin Laden presence. While Bernsten describes how he and his cohorts were stunningly told to stand down when they had Bin Laden cornered in Tora Bora, he writes approvingly of President George W. Bush's handling of the invasion.

But Stone, an outspoken critic of Bush's decision to invade Iraq, said Bernstein's tome does look skeptically at the situation, too. "Gary might be a defender of the administration, but he certainly had very clear criticisms of bureaucratic snafus in Afghanistan," said Stone.

Question: When do astounding SNAFUs surrounding the events of 9/11 end and conspiracy begin?

Next from Marc, "2- There were zero French soldiers in Afghanistan in 2001 when this campain took place. The only foriegn personel were a few British SBS and SAS operators."

Nowhere was it claimed that the issue concerning the French Soliders had anything to do with the operations in Tora Bora in 2001, from the link provided:

Two French filmmakers and reporters, assesses and confirms the claims of French soldiers that they could have killed Usamah within two operations, but the American forces prevented them...

Even though French soldiers have insisted on this in the battlefield many times, the Elysees Palace in Paris and the White House in America have rejected this, and the Afghan leadership does not have any information about it yet!

Of course we can't trust French soldiers and filmmakers any more than we can trust French journalists and counterterrorism experts. You just can't trust french people. Long live freedom fries!

And finally Marc replies, "3- It is true that AQ had a mole at Fort Bragg at the JFK Special Warfare School. We got skunked. However, we didn't know the guy was AQ." Marc probably bases his statement off of an August 2006 National Geographic special on Ali Mohamed, however, as Dr. Peter Dale Scott points out in his article "How the FBI protected Al Qaeda’s 9/11 Hijacking Trainer.":

...This TV show, just before the 9/11 anniversary, was itself another cover-up. It suppressed for example the information given it about Mohamed’s detention and FBI-ordered release in Canada. According to Peter Lance, the principal author for the show, the show suppressed many other sensational facts. Here is Lance’s chief claim: that [U.S. Attorney Patrick] Fitzgerald and his FBI counterpart on the Bin Laden task force, John Cloonan, learned shortly after 9/11 that Mohamed “knew every twist and turn of” the 9/11 plot.20

Within days of 9/11 Cloonan rushed backed from Yemen and interviewed Ali, whom the Feds had allowed to slip into witness protection, and demanded to know the details of the plot. At that point Ali wrote it all out - including details of how he'd counseled would-be hijackers on how to smuggle box cutters on board aircraft and where to sit, to effect the airline seizures.

If all these latest revelations about Ali Mohamed are true, then:

1) a key planner of the 9/11 plot, and trainer in hijacking, was simultaneously an informant for the FBI.

2) This operative trained the members for all of the chief Islamist attacks inside the United States – the first WTC bombing, the New York landmarks plot, and finally 9/11, as well as the attacks against Americans in Somalia and Kenya.

3) And yet for four years Mohamed was allowed to move in and out of the country as an unindicted conspirator. Then, unlike his trainees, he was allowed to plea-bargain. To this day he may still not have been sentenced for any crime.22

Peter Lance has charged that Fitzgerald had evidence before 1998 to implicate Mohamed in the Kenya Embassy bombing, yet did nothing and let the bombing happen. In fact, the FBI was aware back in 1990 that Mohamed had engaged in terrorist training on Long Island; yet it acted to protect Mohamed from arrest, even after one of his trainees had moved beyond training to an actual assassination.

Just more SNAFUs I guess.

Related Info:

Nitpicking the Nitpickers: Curley's Mistranslation