From the archives: American Free Press: Israel Conducts Massive Spying Operation in U.S.

"American Free Press was first to expose the “big secret” that the major media has been suppressing: that 60 Israeli Jews—many of whom are still in the military or intelligence—were taken into custody following the terrorist attacks and being held because the FBI suspects they have material knowledge about the attacks.
For publishing that story, critics angrily denounced AFP for spreading “ridiculous conspiracy theories.”
However, on Dec. 12 Fox News with Brit Hume, featuring reporter Carl Cameron, carried an eye-opening story that echoed precisely what AFP first reported. According to Cameron:
Where is no indication the Israelis were involved in the Sept. 11 attacks, but investigators suspect that they may have gathered intelligence about the attacks in advance and not shared it. A highly-placed investigator told Fox News there are “tie-ins,” but when asked for details flatly refused to describe them. “Evidence linking these Israelis to 9-11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It is classified information.”
During the broadcast segment, Hume asked Cameron: “What about this question of advance knowledge of what was going to happen on 9-11? How clear are investigators that some Israeli agents may have known something?”
Cameron responded: “It’s very explosive information, obviously, and there’s a great deal of evidence that they say they have collected. None of it necessarily conclusive. It’s more when they put it all together. A bigger question, they say, is ‘How could they not have known?’ [That is] almost a direct quote [from the investigators].”
Although Fox reported the Israeli embassy in Washington offered “categorical denials,” Fox indicated that it has been learned that “one group of Israelis spotted in North Carolina recently is suspected of keeping an apartment in California to spy on a group of Arabs who the U.S. authorities are investigating for links to terrorism.”
The Fox report revealed that federal investigators have said that some of the Israelis “failed polygraph questions inquiring about alleged surveillance activities against and in the United States,” echoing precisely what AFP said.
Fox confirms that AFP was on the mark only 10 days after the attacks when asking: “Did Israelis Have Fore knowledge?” and pointed out numerous odd items that suggested America’s reputed “ally” may have known in advance of the impending attack.
AFP’s story, a media exclusive by Christopher Bollyn, focused in particular on what had already been reported in Israel: that numerous Israelis had been picked up in the United States and were suspected by the FBI of being Israeli intelligence operatives. AFP went further than the Israeli news reports, reporting that evidence suggested the Israeli operatives had foreknowledge of the attack.
In the meantime, AFP has learned that on Oct. 17, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Pottstown (Pa.) Mercury reported that “two men whom police described as Middle Eastern” were detained in the Pottstown area (just northwest of Philadelphia) after being found with “de tailed video footage of the Sears Tower in Chicago”—the tallest building in the world, widely mentioned as a possible terrorist target
The Mercury did not identify the men’s nationality, but their names were Moshe Elmakias and Ron Katar.
“Moshe” is a Hebrew name which is not likely to have been bestowed on a Muslim or an Arab.
A woman named Ayelet Reisler, in their company, was also detained. She had a German passport in her name and medication in a different name.
The two men worked for a company known as “Moving Systems Incorporated”—which is intriguing because AFP’s report of Oct. 1 revealed several suspected Israeli intelligence operatives seized by the FBI in the New York area after filming the World Trade Center disaster from at least two venues also purportedly worked for moving companies.
Supporters of Israel suggest that it is “just a coincidence” that several different groups of Israelis in the United States—some of whom are definitively connected to Israeli intelligence—would be working for moving companies and also have detailed videos of the WTC disaster and the Sears Tower, a potential terrorist target.
What is additionally damaging—from an Israeli perspective— is that, according to Fox, even prior to Sept. 11 as many as 140 other Israelis had been detained or arrested in what Fox described as “a secretive and sprawling investigation into suspected espionage by Israelis in the United States.”
According to Fox reporter Cameron:

Investigators from numerous government agencies are part of a working group that has been compiling evidence in the case since the mid-1990s. These documents detail hundreds of incidents and cities and towns across the country that investigators say “may well be organized intelligence-gathering activities.”

Investigators are focusing part of their efforts on Israelis who said they are art students from the University of Jerusalem or Bezalel Academy and repeatedly made contact with U.S. government personnel by saying they wanted to sell cheap art or handiwork.
Documents say they “targeted” and penetrated military bases, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, dozens of government facilities and even secret offices and unlisted private homes of law enforcement and intelligence personnel.
The Fox report said federal investigators believe that dozens of Israelis working at kiosks in American malls, where they were selling toys called “Puzzlecar” and “Zoomcopter,” were suspected of being “fronts” for Israeli intelligence activity.
Many malls are fronts for Israeli interests.
For the benefit of shocked listeners who might be surprised to learn that America’s ally would be spying illegally on the United States, Fox explained that:

A General Accounting Office investigation referred to Israel as Country A and said, “According to a U.S. intelligence agency, the government of country A conducts the most aggressive espionage operation against the U.S. of any U.S. ally.”

Fox also cited a Defense Intelligence Report which said Israel has “a voracious appetite for information,” asserting that:

The Israelis are motivated by strong survival instincts which dictate every facet of their political and economic policies. It aggressively collects military and industrial technology and the U.S. is a high priority target. Israel possesses the resources and technical capability to achieve its collection objectives."

From the archives: Jeffrey Steinberg: Israeli Spies: 'Mega Was Not An Agent; Mega Was the Boss'

(Executive Intelligence Review) "For a brief period of time in early 1997, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the National Security Agency engaged in a frantic mole hunt for an Israeli spy, believed to be operating inside the highest levels of the Clinton Administration national security establishment. By the time the mole hunt was made public--in a May 7, 1997 Washington Post leak--the hunt had been abruptly ended, and for all intents and purposes, the story disappeared from the news within a matter of days.
According to the Post account, in January 1997, the National Security Agency (NSA) had intercepted a phone conversation between an Israeli official at the embassy in Washington, and Danny Yatom, the head of the Mossad, Israel's foreign intelligence service. The official sought permission from the spy boss to "go to Mega" in order to obtain a copy of a confidential letter that had been sent by then-U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher to Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, concerning U.S. assurances about a recently negotiated agreement for an Israeli military withdrawal from the Hebron area in the West Bank. Yatom, according to the NSA intercept, rejected the request, admonishing his agent, "This is not something we use Mega for."
The idea that the Israeli government was running another spy operation inside the U.S. national security establishment created a tremendous stir. The Washington Post, in its May 7, 1997 leak, had reported, "One official with knowledge of the FBI investigation into the identity of Mega cautioned that much remained unknown. But the official said that if it turned out that a senior U.S. official was passing sensitive information to Israeli authorities, it could prove more serious than the espionage case involving Jonathan Jay Pollard, a former Navy analyst who was convicted in 1986 of selling U.S. military intelligence documents to Israel."
To this day, the Pollard affair is a hot-button issue inside the U.S. intelligence community. At the time of Pollard's arrest in November 1985, it was known that the Navy analyst had been "tasked" to obtain specific U.S. military intelligence secrets, by someone much higher up in the U.S. intelligence community. To this day, the hunt for "Mr. X," Pollard's inside controller, continues. In 1986, EIR had revealed the existence of not merely a "Mr. X," but an "X Committee," made up of nearly a dozen top-level Pentagon and National Security Council officials, all suspected of having been part of the Pollard spy network.
Given the seriousness of the Mega security breach, the abrupt shutdown of the mole hunt naturally prompted some wild speculation about the circumstances under which the search for Mega was abandoned. In March 1999, British author Gordon Thomas released a book, Gideon's Spies, which alleged that Israel had blackmailed the Clinton Administration, with the threat to release tapped telephone conversations between the President and Monica Lewinsky, to force Washington to abandon the Mega hunt. Indeed, in her testimony before independent counsel Kenneth Starr, Lewinsky had reported that the President had warned her, on March 29, 1997, at the height of the Mega hunt, that he suspected the White House telephones were being tapped by agents of an unnamed foreign country.
Years later, it was revealed that the White House communications system had been overhauled and modernized during the early Clinton era, and one of the main outside contractors involved in the project was an Israeli firm, Amdocs. According to a May 2000 story in Insight magazine, Amdocs employees would have had nearly unfettered access to White House telephone lines and other super-sensitive communications equipment. However, the nature of the request from the Mossad man in Washington to Yatom—to obtain a confidential State Department document—rules out the possibility that Mega was an electronic eavesdropping source.

Mega-Suspects

Even though the Mega hunt was formally called off, still in some U.S. intelligence quarters, the effort to unearth the suspected Israeli spy cell apparently continued. In September 2000, a CIA team of counterintelligence specialists arrived in Israel, after U.S. Ambassador Martin Indyk had his security clearances temporarily lifted. Ostensibly, Indyk had breached security guidelines by bringing classified U.S. government documents to his residence in Tel Aviv. But it later was revealed that the CIA probe was triggered by an August 2000 unauthorized meeting between Indyk and the former head of the Mossad, Ephraim Halevy, which the ambassador had never reported back to Washington.
If there were anyone in the Clinton Administration's political hierarchy who was a prime candidate to be the Israeli spy Mega, it was Indyk. A British-born Australian citizen, Indyk had been Australia's top Mideast security official in the late 1970s, as deputy director of current Mideast intelligence at the Australian Office of National Assessments, the equivalent of the U.S. National Security Council. But, Indyk abruptly quit the post after just ten months, prompting speculation that he had come under suspicion of spying for Israel (he had lived in Israel while completing his dissertation on "The Power of the Weak: The Ability of Israel and Egypt to Resist the Policies of their Super-Power Patrons"). According to British journalist Kevin Dowling, Indyk next surfaced in Israel, as a "media consultant" to Israel's Likud Prime Ministers, Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir.
In 1982, Indyk came to America, ostensibly on a six-month sabbatical from his duties with the Office of the Israeli Prime Minister. Based out of Cornell University, Indyk formed a research department for the America-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the "official" Israeli lobby in the United States. Within a year, AIPAC had ponied up $100,000 to Indyk to hive off the research unit as the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP). Pro-Israel luminaries in Washington, including former Vice President Walter Mondale, former Secretaries of State George Shultz and Alexander Haig, and former United Nations Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, were among the initiating members of WINEP's advisory board, according to Dowling's Sept. 27, 2000 account of the Indyk counterintelligence probe.
Indyk's "six-month sabbatical" never ended, but it was not until 1987 that the Australian got his first green card, permitting him to work in the United States. Indyk was made a U.S. citizen on Jan. 12, 1993—just eight days before he was appointed to the incoming Clinton Administration's National Security Council (NSC) staff as Senior Director for Near East and South Asian Affairs. Indyk had already been an informal Mideast policy adviser to President George H.W. Bush, at the initiative of Dennis Ross, Bush's Assistant Secretary of State, previously a deputy to Indyk at WINEP. At the time of the Mega hunt, Indyk had Ross' old job as Assistant Secretary of State for the Near East.
Another prime suspect in the Mega mole hunt was Leon Fuerth, Vice President Albert Gore's national security adviser, and another well-known pro-Likud fanatic. The Washington Post, in a 1998 profile of Fuerth, reported that he was suspected by U.S. intelligence officials of passing sensitive U.S. policy information to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Likud), a passionate, personal enemy of President Clinton, who was suspected of activating the Mega spy operation.
Also on the Mega list of suspects inside the Clinton national security apparatus was Richard Clarke, the National Security Council "counterterrorism czar," who was fired from the State Department and brought onto the Bush Administration NSC in 1992, after he was accused by the State Department's Inspector General of concealing illegal Israeli arms sales to China.

The Purloined Letter Principle

While all of the above-mentioned Bush- and Clinton-era national security operatives may have been, indeed, secretly, or not-so-secretly passing critical American policy papers and classified documents to the Likud faction in Israel; and, while then-Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and his Mossad mandarins may have been attempting to blackmail the President, there is a much simpler answer to the Mega puzzle: Mega was not a deep mole inside the White House. Mega was a far more visible, far more powerful entity, known among its several dozen members as "the Mega Group."
The existence of the Mega Group came to light, almost exactly a year after the Washington Post revealed that the mole hunt was under way. Yet, the story of the Mega Group, which appeared in the Wall Street Journal on May 4, 1998, made no mention of espionage, and did not mention the Mossad, the CIA, or Monica Lewinsky, even in passing. Despite that, the Mega Group precisely fits the story of the illusive mole hunt, in a manner that has profound policy implications to this day, as President George W. Bush struggles to avoid an outbreak of war in the Middle East, which would have devastating consequences for the entire planet.
Under the innocent headline, "Titans of Industry Join Forces To Work for Jewish Philanthropy," Wall Street Journal staff reporter Lisa Miller reported on an April 1998 gathering of some 20 Jewish billionaires, at the Manhattan apartment of hedge-fund manager Michael Steinhardt. That gathering involved some of the most powerful names in the Jewish lobby in America, starting with Edgar Bronfman, the chairman of the World Jewish Congress. Others included: Charles Bronfman, Edgar's brother and a top executive of the family's flagship Seagrams Corp.; Leslie Wexler of Limited, Inc.; Charles Schusterman, chairman of Samson Investment Co. of Tulsa, Oklahoma; Harvey "Bud" Meyerhoff, a fabulously wealthy and powerful Baltimore real estate magnate; Laurence Tisch, chairman of Loews Corp.; Max Fisher, the Detroit oil magnate and Republican Party powerhouse; bagel magnate Max Lender; and Leonard Abramson, the founder of U.S. Healthcare.
According to the Journal account, the Mega Group was founded in 1991 by Wexler and Charles Bronfman, to add greater clout to the Israeli lobby, by establishing an informal, but all-powerful policymaking group, able to deploy billions of dollars in "charitable" funds for the maximum effect on U.S. policy toward Israel, the Mideast, and other issues of paramount importance to the Jewish megabillionaires. The Mega Group convenes twice a year, for two-day sessions, where, behind closed doors, the members make life-and-death decisions, affecting U.S. policy. Membership is by invitation only; the meetings are secret (the Wall Street Journal story was the only coverage to ever appear in the U.S. media about the existence of the Mega Group, before the publication of this EIR account); and the members each kick in $30,000 in annual dues, to cover "operating expenses" for the twice-yearly sessions.
Charles Bronfman reflected the Mega Group's propensity for secrecy, when he told the Journal's Lisa Miller, "From the beginning we didn't want to be seen as a threat to anybody. And that still pertains. We don't want to be seen as the Sanhedrin," a reference to the highest court of the ancient Jews. "We don't want to be looked at crooked." Charles' far more sinister and slick brother, Edgar, tried to dismiss the activities of the Mega Group, telling Miller, "We want to make it cool to be Jewish."

Not So Cool

But then, a March 13, 2001 dispatch by the Jewish Telegraph Agency revealed that the Mega Group is more than a loose bunch of Jewish billionaires out to do good. The JTA reported that newly installed Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was about to launch a two-pronged propaganda offensive inside the United States, aimed at winning American support for his plans to overturn the Mideast peace process. First, the JTA revealed, the Sharon government announced that it was hiring two U.S. public relations firms—Rubenstein Associates and Morris, Carrick and Guma—to peddle the Israeli government "spin" inside the U.S. media and in policymaking circles in New York and Washington.
The JTA wire continued, "More controversially, a handful of Jewish mega-donors has created a think-tank they hope will generate long-term strategies for presenting Israel in a favorable light."
The new think-tank, Emet (the Hebrew word for "truth"), JTA reported, is the collective brain-child of Leonard Abramson, Edgar Bronfman, and Michael Steinhardt—three of the leading Mega Group members (JTA made no mention of Mega). The Mega Group is expected to kick in $7 million to launch the new organization, with the Israeli Foreign Ministry also pledged to pony up $1 million in startup cash. But, lest there be any confusion about who's in charge at Emet, JTA revealed that "the group consulted with [Malcolm] Hoelein, [Abe] Foxman and other Jewish activists—and only then notified Israel's Foreign Ministry, Foxman said." Hoelein, the executive vice president of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, is a fanatical backer of the Sharon war-drive, a view he shared with the just-retired president of the group, Ronald Lauder, a big Sharon financial backer who met with Sharon in September 2000—just before the latter staged his provocation at the Islamic holy sites on the Temple Mount/al-Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem, triggering the ongoing violence.
The Emet project has been criticized inside Israel, by Foreign Ministry officials and peace activists alike. As JTA reported, "Some Foreign Ministry officials grumbled that American Jews were poaching on their turf. Not surprisingly, they would prefer that any extra money be funneled to the ministry's efforts.... Israel's left appeared concerned that hawkish American Jews will use Emet to push a hard-line approach to the peace process." Steinhardt, Bronfman, and Abramson refused to talk about the project. But the enthusiastic endorsement for Emet from Morton Klein, president of the hawkish Zionist Organization of America, is strong confirmation that the outfit will peddle Sharon's war line. As EIR reported recently, Klein led a delegation of right-wing Zionists and evangelical Christians in a White House meeting, where they threatened a Presidential representative with a cutoff of support, if Bush attempted to interfere in Sharon's war schemes (see Anton Chaitkin, "Temple Mount Fanatics Seek To Blackmail Bush," EIR Aug. 24, 2001).

The Power of Money

The Mega Group story came full circle on May 5, 2001, with the publication of a story in an obscure Israeli online publication, Media Monitors Network, by writer Israel Shamir. Shamir noted, with no lack of irony, the meeting of the Mega Group, which had taken place the previous day at the Manhattan mansion of Edgar Bronfman.
Shamir first described a meeting he had recently had with a Vermont-based psychoanalyst, the nephew of Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion. The nephew prided himself on the fact that his closest friends were Palestinians, and that he rejected the idea of a Jewish "tribal" identity, preferring to view all human beings as brethren.
Shamir observed, "That is the last thing the bosses want. I would not be amazed if they discussed it yesterday, when they met in the Edgar Bronfman mansion in Manhattan. The head of the World Jewish Congress hosted a meeting of the 50 richest and most powerful Jews of the U.S. and Canada. There was no press coverage, no limelight, just a few lines in the newspapers.... They agreed to launch a PR program under the Orwellian codename of 'Truth' with the purpose of influencing American public opinion regarding Israeli policies."
Shamir continued, "The megabucks call themselves 'Mega group.' This name appeared in the media a couple of years ago, as a name for the secret Israeli mole in the upper reaches of the U.S. establishment. It came up in an overheard phone conversation, later denied by the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. The newshounds and spook watchers got it wrong. 'Mega' was not an agent, Mega was the boss."
With some bitterness, Shamir wrote, "Megabucks influence us, even more than they influence the U.S. Our politicians are as weak and corrupt as America's and they are easier to swing. Even relative small-timers can cause eruption and bloodshed, like the California bingo-parlor owner [Irving] Moskowitz, who pushed our ex-prime minister Netanyahu to open the tunnel under the Haram al Sharif.... The Megabucks can buy Israel with their spare change. If they wish, we would have peace in Palestine today. But they are not interested in Israel per se.... Megabucks care for themselves, and they need Israel in order to keep the American Jews together, supporting them. That is why they do not mind bloodshed in Palestine, and even a bloody regional war does not scare them."
Shamir concluded: "In my opinion, Megabucks, rather than forces of Caballa, move the events in the Middle East. It is not magic, just money—but a lot of money. They do not rule America or Israel, but they exercise a lot of influence. Fifty multibillionaires united in one framework present a very real force in the world."
Of course, Shamir does not have the picture precisely right. The Bronfman-centered Mega Group is but one component of an insane and desperate element within the transatlantic financial establishment that is now pressing for a "Clash of Civilizations," as a means of responding to the collapse of their global financial empire, and the threat of a new set of Eurasia-centered cooperative arrangements among nations supplanting their power. But, as far as the Mega puzzle is concerned, Shamir has solved the mystery.
No wonder Mossad boss Yatom scolded his Washington-based underling with the warning, "This is not something we use Mega for." "

Conspiracy theories from the fringe: Stephen St. John: The Mastermind Behind 9/11?

"System Planning Corporation designs, manufactures and distributes highly sophisticated technology that enables an operator to fly by remote control as many as eight different airborne vehicles at the same time from one position either on the ground or airborne. For those looking for an extraordinarily interesting hobby, please see photos and specs of this hardware (about the size of a small refrigerator)at www.sysplan.com/Radar/CTS Just be sure your mom doesn't catch you causing havoc with the airlines.
Also, System Planning Corporation markets the technology to take over the controls of an airborne vehicle already in flight. For example, the Flight Termination System technology could hijack hijackers and bring the plane down safely. The Flight Termination System can be used in conjunction with the CTS technology that can control up to 8 airborne vehicles simultaneously. see www.sysplan.com/Radar/FTS Unfortunately, these systems as of yet are not able to prevent lyrics such as "When you get caught between the moon and New York City"!
The possibility of nefarious use of these brilliant technologies developed and deployed by Systems Planning Corporation certainly deserves careful consideration in any full and impartial investigation of what actually took place on 9/11.
In the context of 9/11 it also needs to be pointed out that Rabbi Dov Zakheim was Chief Executive Officer of System Planning Corporation's International Division until President George W. Bush appointed him Undersecretary of Defense and Comptroller of the Pentagon. Not long before Rabbi Zakheim rose to power over the Pentagon's labyrinthine, bottomless accounts, he co-authored an article entitled "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century" which was published by The Project for a New American Century in September 2000, exactly a year before 9/11; in this article, on page 51, it is stated that "the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor"!
Voila! 9/11!
Well, there you have it! Motive, means and opportunity all rolled into one and existing between Rabbi Dov Zakheim's ears. The motive was that a false flag intelligence operation would trigger a response by the USA that would be good for the Zionist state. The means consisted of the aforementioned remote control of airborne vehicle technologies as well as the nurturing, creative accounting at the Pentagon to pay for such an operation. The opportunity was Zakheim's closeness to the Command/Control/Communications in our nation's capital and its interwoven cousin network of psychopathic Zionist Neo-Cons all hell-bent on provoking a war with Saddam Hussein.
Unfortunately, it seems that the 9/11 commission is not looking in this direction when it ought to be."

Conspiracy, coincidence, or incompetence? Uri Dowbenko: Pentagon Fraud Chief Dov Zakheim Goes to BoozAllen

(Conspiracy Planet) "Rabbi Zakheim has left the Pentagon. Thank God.
After more than 20 years of presiding over more than $3 trillion worth of military fraud, Pentagon Comptroller Dov Zakheim has left the building. He will join Booz Allen Hamilton through the traditional revolving door for government-corporate insiders.
A former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense from 1985-1987 and Pentagon Comptroller since 2001, Zakheim was responsible for mismanaging more than $400 billion annually, as Pentagon discredited audits have persisted year after year.
The Department of Defense has never received a clean financial audit.
As recently as the December 18, 2003 audit by GAO (General Accounting Office), the Pentagon's 'War on Iraq Scam' and other Information Technology (IT) Fraud yielded $1.6 billion in "losses," money "missing" and otherwise unaccounted for.
In an article from "Government Executive" magazine ("Bye Bye Budgeteer," May 2004) Zakheim admitted, "...we are in the business of fighting wars. We are not in the business of balancing books."
Zakheim, an ordained rabbi, is leaving Pentagon finances in shambles with more than 5,000 different financial systems supposedly in place. That means 5,000 open-ended opportunities for fraud.
If his position was Chief Financial Officer of a major corporation, Zakheim would be charged with criminal conspiracy, negligence and thousands of counts of fraud. As it is, he is joining the so-called private sector.
After all, privatizing government fraud through the control of accounting and IT systems in federal agencies is the most lucrative scam in America.
The US, after all, is One Nation Under Fraud.
Ask Rabbi Zakheim. He can tell you how it's done.

~URI DOWBENKO is one of Alternative Media's foremost writers and media analysts and the author of "Bushwhacked: Inside Stories of True Conspiracy." A distinctive voice of modern American journalism, he is also the founder of Alternative Media websites: Conspiracy Planet.com, Al Martin Raw.com, Steamshovel Press.com, and Conspiracy Digest.com. His latest book to be published in Spring 2004 is called "Hoodwinked: Watching Movies with Eyes Wide Open" the most politically incorrect movie reviews ever published. He can be reached at u.dowbenko@lycos.com"

Wayne Madsen: Terrorism and the election: No postponement, just bedlam at the polls and a low turnout on the West Coast is Bush's plan for 'victory'

"You have to give the right-wingers credit. The fear tactics they learned from arch-Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels remain at the front of their political playbook. First, they put out the notion that in the event of a terrorist attack around the time of the November 2 election, a postponement of the vote may be necessary. Second, they start talking about the federal government's response to such a scenario. It's the second item we must all be focused upon.
The idea of terrorism affecting the election was first proffered by the Reverend DeForest B. Soaries, Jr, the Bush-appointed chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. Soaries is a right-wing former New Jersey Republican Secretary of State who has been living under the small "fanatics only" revival tent of the Christian fundamentalist crowd for some time. Soaries's job is to ensure that there is no repeat of the 2000 Florida fiasco. However, he and his friends in the Bush administration (read that as Karl Rove and Tom DeLay primarily) may have their eyes set on causing a major West Coast electoral disruption in 2004 that will make Florida 2000 look like a minor glitch by comparison.
As expected, suspecting a Bush conspiracy to cancel the election and remain in power until a determination would be made by Homeland Fuhrer Tom Ridge that an election was safe, the moderate, liberal, progressive, and libertarian communities cried foul. Postponing an election without a constitutional amendment would be a major breach of the Constitution (not that Bush has ever worried about his constitutional oath) and that would be impossible with only a little over three months before Election Day. Those who respect our Constitution pointed to the fact that President Abraham Lincoln did not cancel the 1864 presidential election during the Civil War—a war which saw this nation more at danger than it is during the current cable news bite-driven and somewhat sensationalist "Global War on Terrorism."
The right wing had a different take on the possibility of an election postponement. Neo-fascist babble mongers like Rush Limbaugh said, "No!" to a postponement of the election. They argued that if a terrorist alert or attack were to occur, the election should go on and only those votes cast should be counted. Bingo! The plan for a second Bush administration became clear as day. And that plan's target is California, with its whopping 54 electoral votes, and possibly Washington State's 11 electoral votes, at stake.
In 2000, Bush and the election fraud cabal that included his brother, Florida Governor "Jebbie" Bush, and Jebbie's old flame, Florida Secretary of State (now Congresswoman) Katherine Harris and Fox News election analyst John Ellis (Bush's first cousin), engineered Bush's phony Florida "win" using a combination of scrubbed electoral rolls that disenfranchised almost 100,000 African-Americans, confusing "butterfly ballots," an early Fox projected Bush "win" in the Sunshine State, and voter intimidation at mainly rural polling places. As with Osama bin Laden and his band of zealots, the Bush team never uses the same tactic twice. Therefore, all eyes should shift from Florida this Election Day, to California, where one of Bush's new minions, the Nazi-admiring Arnold Schwarzenegger, engineered a gubernatorial coup d'état with the help of Enron's Ken Lay and his Texas oil cronies, to seize control of the governorship from the reelected Democrat Gray Davis.
Clues to Republican motives are found back during that awful day in 2001. On September 11, the day of the terrorist attacks, New Yorkers were heading to the polls to vote in their mayoral primary. Under the direction of the outgoing incumbent mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, city election officials quickly postponed the election. Giuliani, one who never misses an opportunity to emulate the former Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, toyed with the idea of amending New York City's term limits law so that he could run for mayor for a third consecutive term. Another Giuliani plan would have postponed the primary and regular mayoral election for one year, giving him at least one more year in office with the possibility of a change in the city law to allow him to run for a third term. Another plan would have made Giuliani a write-in candidate. Wary of Giuliani's various proposed election contrivances and his intention to use the attack on the World Trade Center for his own political advantage, New York's City Council and the New York State Legislature quickly put the kibosh to Giuliani postponing the election indefinitely, extending his term for one year, or amending the city's term limit statute. The mayoral primary took place on September 25, two weeks after the terrorist attack, and the general election occurred on schedule on November 6. Michael Bloomberg was sworn in as the new mayor on January 1, 2002.
After having Tom Ridge drop the media bomb that an election cancellation was a possibility and then having National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice declare that no such plan existed, the cat was out of the bag. No, do not expect an election cancellation but be prepared for a terrorist "event" during the election. That is what the Bush White House and their media prostitutes are spinning.
Here's the scenario we must be all be prepared for:

If the pre-election internal tracking polls and public opinion polls show the Kerry-Edwards ticket leading in key battleground states, the Bush team will begin to implement their plan to announce an imminent terrorist alert for the West Coast for November 2, sometime during the mid afternoon Pacific Standard Time. At 2:00 PST, the polls in Kentucky and Indiana will be one hour from closing (5:00 PM EST–the polls close in Indiana and Kentucky at 6:00 PM EST). Exit polls in both states will be known to the Bush people by that time and if Kentucky (not likely Indiana) looks too close to call or leaning to Kerry-Edwards, the California plan will be implemented. A Bush problem in Kentucky at 6:00 PM EST would mean that problems could be expected in neighboring states and that plans to declare a state of emergency in California would begin in earnest at 3:00 PM PST.
The U.S. Northern Command, which has military jurisdiction over the United States, will, along with the Department of Homeland Security and Schwarzenegger's police and homeland security officials in Sacramento, declare an "imminent" terrorist threat–a RED ALERT—affecting California's major urban areas.
Although the polls in California will not be closed as a result of the declaration, the panic that sets in and the early rush hour will clog major traffic arteries and change the plans of many voters to cast their ballots after work.
That terrorist emergency declaration could be made around 5:00 PM PST and with only three hours left for voting throughout the state, a number of working class voters in urban centers will either be caught up in California's infamous freeway traffic and be too late to get to their polling places or be more concerned about their families and avoid voting altogether.
Without a doubt, many Democratic voters might simply opt to pick their kids up from day care centers or relatives and then go home without voting. These would tend to be the lower and middle income Californians and the Democratic base. The affluent voters in California who vote Republicans and can easily vote early (and be late for work) or have the option of leaving work at any time during the day to vote will have likely already cast their ballots. Therefore, the recipe of a White House-induced California terrorist alert and a low Democratic turnout could toss 54 electoral votes into Bush's lap, especially if the scare tactics affect the turnout in such urban and typically pro-Democratic vote-rich areas as Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Sacramento.
At 7:00 PM EST (4:00 PM PST), the polls will close in Florida (except for the Panhandle in the Central Time Zone), Georgia, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Vermont, and Virginia. A half hour later, they close in North Carolina, Ohio, and West Virginia. If Kerry-Edwards wins Florida and that is coupled with similar pickups in Ohio, West Virginia and too-close-to-call races in Virginia and maybe North Carolina, the Bush team may seek to extend the terror alert to other Western or even Midwestern states, particularly Washington State (since Oregon votes by mail, it would be largely immune from any polling manipulation on Election Day). A terrorist alert for the Seattle area after 5:00 PM PST would result in a similar situation to that of California's, with the exception that many potential voters could be trapped on Seattle's commuter ferries. Washington's polls close at 8:00 PM PST (11:PM EST). A low Democratic turnout in the vote-rich Seattle-Tacoma-Bremerton area could be offset by a large Republican turnout in eastern Washington, thus possibly throwing the state's 11 electoral votes to Bush—a net pick up of 65 electoral votes from the West Coast, adding those votes to California's. If Kerry picks up Ohio and some border states, the Bush team will be looking for a West Coast electoral offset and a terrorist alert would be the key to replacing lost Bush electoral votes in Ohio (21 votes), Florida (25), and West Virginia (5), a total of 51 electoral votes for Kerry.
With the stage set for a terrorist alert on the West Coast and with the polls closing at 8 PM EST (5:00 PM PST and launch time for the terrorist alert) in Alabama, Connecticut, Delaware, DC, Illinois, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Texas, we might be looking at the following electoral vote tally:

Kerry:
Florida (25); New Hampshire (4); Vermont (3); Ohio (21); West Virginia (5); Connecticut (8); Delaware (3); DC (3); Illinois (22); Maine (4); Maryland (10); Massachusetts (12); Michigan (18); New Jersey (15); Pennsylvania (23). Total: 176 (needed to win: 270).

Bush:
Indiana (12); Kentucky (8); Georgia (13); South Carolina (8); Virginia (13); North Carolina (14); Alabama (9); Kansas (6); Mississippi (7); Missouri (11); Oklahoma (8); Tennessee (11); Texas (32). Total: 152 (needed to win: 270).

At 8:30 PM EST (and a half hour into the West Coast terror alert), the polls close in Arkansas and its 6 electoral votes are added to Bush's column, giving him 158 to Kerry's 176.
At 9:00 PM EST, the polls close in Arizona, Colorado, Louisiana, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. With Kerry picking up Louisiana (9 votes), Minnesota (10), New Mexico (5), New York (33), Rhode Island (4), and Wisconsin (11), his vote total would stand at 248.
With Bush picking up Arizona (8), Colorado (8), Nebraska (5), North Dakota (3), South Dakota (3), and Wyoming (3), his vote count would stand at 188.
At 10:00 PM EST, the polls will close in mainly Bush states. With Bush picking up Idaho (4 votes); Montana (3); Nevada (4); and Utah (5) and with Kerry likely grabbing Iowa (7), the vote count would stand at: Kerry: 255 and Bush: 204.
With an hour to go before polls close on the West Coast and the region enmeshed in a major terrorist alert with cops and National Guardsmen now adding to the mix and possibly closing roads and delaying traffic to the polling places, Bush's team in Washington and Sacramento would be poised to deliver the death blow to Kerry-Edwards.
At 11:00 PM EST and 8:00 PM PST, the polls close in California, Oregon, and Washington. The fix is in: with California (the mother lode of 54 votes) and Washington (11 votes) going to Bush and Oregon (7 votes) possibly going to Kerry, the vote count stands at: Kerry: 262 and Bush: 269. Sometime in the wee hours of the morning of November 3, Alaska (3 votes) is declared for Bush and he is declared the winner with 272 votes to Kerry's 266 (with Kerry's pickup of Hawaii's 4 electoral votes). It's a down-to-the wire race with Bush being declared a winner without a Supreme Court fight but using his "homeland security" powers to ensure his election and Alaska putting him over the top.
That is what all this talk about a terrorist attack on Election Day is about. It is to prime the population and allow Bush surrogates at Fox News, CNN, and MS-NBC to begin their perception management campaign that an attack will occur around the election. But there will be no postponement of the election or cancellation—this is simply another plan to manipulate the public through the use of phony threats and fear tactics. The problem is that it just might work for Bush and his cabal of "the ends justify the means" manipulators.
This article is a wakeup call to all those who can try to forestall such a series of events. California's Democratic majority in the state legislature and its Democratic Lieutenant Governor and Attorney General must take steps now to ensure Schwarzenegger does not conspire with his fellow Republicans in Washington to do to California in 2004 what Jebbie Bush and his people did to Florida in 2000. Similarly, Washington's Democratic Governor Gary Locke and all the Democratic officials, including the two Democratic U.S. Senators, must take similar action to avoid a similar scenario in their state.
Action needed now includes:

1.Informing all state election officials about such a scenario and its potential impact on voter turnout.
2. Making contingency plans now to keep the polling places open to ensure that people can vote later or after any state of emergency is lifted.
3. Prevent the National Guard from being used to facilitate such a state of emergency.
4. Close coordination by the Democratic Party, smaller parties, and minority and labor rights organizations to respond to such a scenario.

To paraphrase James Carville, "It's California and the voter turnout, stupid!" Forget about canceling or postponing the election. Keep your eye on a "Red Terrorist Alert" on the West Coast for Election Day. That doesn't take a constitutional amendment, merely an okay from Bush and his homeland security team. They must be stopped—the future of this nation is at stake!

~Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and columnist. He served in the National Security Agency (NSA) during the Reagan administration and wrote the introduction to "Forbidden Truth." He is the co-author, with John Stanton, of "America's Nightmare: The Presidency of George Bush II." His forthcoming book is titled: "Jaded Tasks: Big Oil, Black Ops, and Brass Plates." He can be reached at: WMadsen777@aol.com."

William S. Lind: The October Surprise?

"Shortly before I left Washington for the summer (in the good old days whose passing I regret, few stayed in Washington in summertime), my informal intelligence network gave me an interesting report: Iran was beginning to mass troops on the Iran-Iraq border. Did this portend overt Iranian intervention in Iraq? I said I didn’t think so. Events in Iraq are not unfavorable to Iran, and the risks of direct intervention would be great.
However, there is a potential situation that could lead to Iranian intervention: if it were in response to an American-Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Such an attack may very well be on the agenda as the "October Surprise," the distraction George Bush desperately needs if the debacle in Iraq is not to lead to his defeat in November.
There is little doubt that Iran has a nuclear weapons program, one that is operating under forced draft to produce a nuclear deterrent as quickly as possible. Iran, along with everyone else in the world, knows that the best way to be safe from an American attack is to have nukes. Even the most howling neo-cons show little appetite for a war with North Korea.
The problem is that, while an Iranian nuclear capability may be directed at deterring the United States, it also poses a mortal threat to Israel. Israel is not known for sitting quietly while such threats develop. It is a safe bet that Israel is planning a strike on known Iranian nuclear facilities, and that such a strike will take place. The question is when.
If Israel plans to act this year, the Bush Administration may see a political opportunity it cannot pass up. At the very least it is likely to endorse the Israeli action, and it may well participate. In the Islamic world at least, an American disassociation from any action by Israel would not be believed. Israel and America are now perceived as one country. And the neocons seem to agree.
The question becomes, how would Iran respond? It might shoot some missiles at Tel Aviv, but absent at least "dirty bomb" or bio-engineered warheads, that is not likely to accomplish much.
A far better response lies right next door: attack the Americans in Iraq. America has about 130,000 troops in Iraq, a formidable army by local standards. But their disposition makes them vulnerable. Confronted by a guerilla war, they are spread out in penny packets all over the country. If Iran could mass quickly and use effective camouflage and deception to conceal at least the scope of its concentration, then suddenly attack into Iraq with two or three corps, we could face a perilous situation. Iranian success would depend heavily on how Iraqis reacted, but if Iran called its action "Operation Iraqi Freedom," promised immediate withdrawal once the hated Americans were beaten and waved the Koran at Iraqi Shiites, it might win the cooperation of Iraq’s resistance movement. That would make American efforts to concentrate all the more difficult as convoys would come under constant attack. Logistics would quickly become a nightmare.
Such an action would be perilous for Iran as well. The danger with threatening a nuclear power with conventional defeat is that it may go nuclear. America might choose to do that through its Israeli surrogate or, on the theory that the bigger the crisis the stronger the "rally around the President" syndrome, directly. Either way, Iran would have no effective response.
But the mullahs now running Iran are, like Mr. Bush, in a steadily weakening political position. If they did not respond powerfully to an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, they might well lose legitimacy with the hard-line base they now depend on. It is risky to count on them doing nothing, and they have few opportunities to do anything that would be effective. Unfortunately for us, their best chance lies right next door, and the party favor has our name on it.
This October could be full of surprises.

~William Lind [send him mail] is Director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation."

Must read: Orville Schell: Why the media failed Americans

(Asia Times) "When on May 26 the editors of the New York Times published a mea culpa for the paper's one-sided reporting on weapons of mass destruction and the Iraq war, they admitted to "a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been". They also commented that they had since come to "wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining claims" made by the administration of US President George W Bush.
But we are still left to wonder why the Times, like many other major media in this country, was so lacking in skepticism toward administration rationales for war. How could such a poorly thought-through policy, based on spurious exile intelligence sources, have been so blithely accepted, even embraced, by so many members of the media? In short, what happened to the press's vaunted role, so carefully spelled out by the Founding Fathers of the United States, as a skeptical "watchdog" over government?
There's nothing like seeing a well-oiled machine clank to a halt to help you spot problems. Now that the Bush administration is in full defensive mode and angry leakers in the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and elsewhere in the Washington bureaucracy are slipping documents, secrets, and charges to reporters, our press looks more recognizably journalistic. But that shouldn't stop us from asking how an "independent" press in a "free" country could have been so paralyzed for so long. It not only failed to investigate administration rationales for war seriously, but little took into account the myriad voices in the online, alternative, and world press that sought to do so.
It was certainly no secret that a number of America's Western allies (and other countries), administrators of various non-governmental organizations, and such figures as Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and Hans Blix, head of the United Nations' Monitoring, Verification and Inspections Commission, had quite different prewar views of the "Iraqi threat".
Few in the US media, it seemed, remembered I F Stone's hortatory admonition, "If you want to know about governments, all you have to know is two words: Governments lie." Dissenting voices in the mainstream were largely buried on back pages, ignored on op-ed pages, or confined to the margins of the media, and so denied the kinds of "respectability" that a major medium can confer.
As reporting on the lead-up to war, the war itself, and its aftermath vividly demonstrated, the US is now divided into a two-tiered media structure. The lower tier - niche publications, alternative media and Internet sites - hosts the broadest spectrum of viewpoints. Until the war effort began to unravel this spring, the upper tier - a relatively small number of major broadcast outlets, newspapers and magazines - had a far more limited bandwidth of critical views, regularly deferring to the Bush administration's vision of the world. Contrarian views below rarely bled upward.
As Michael Massing pointed out recently in the New York Review of Books, Bush administration insinuations that critics were unpatriotic - then White House press secretary Ari Fleischer infamously warned reporters as war approached, "People had better watch what they say" - had an undeniably chilling effect on the media. But other forms of pressure also effectively inhibited the press. The president held few press conferences and rarely submitted to truly open exchanges. Secretive and disciplined to begin with, the administration adeptly used the threat of denied access as a way to intimidate reporters who showed evidence of independence. For reporters, this meant no one-on-one interviews, special tips, or leaks being passed over in press conference question-and-answer periods, and exclusion from select events as well as important trips.
After the war began, for instance, Jim Wilkinson, a 32-year-old Texan who ran Centcom's coalition media center in Qatar, was, according to Massing, known to rebuke reporters whose copy was deemed insufficiently "supportive of the war", and "darkly warned one correspondent that he was on a 'list' along with two other reporters at his paper". In the play-along world of the Bush administration, critical reporting was a quick ticket to exile.
A media world of faith-based truth
The impulse to control the press hardly originated with George W Bush, but his administration has been less inclined than any in memory to echo Thomas Jefferson's famous declaration, "The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."
The Bush administration had little esteem for the watchdog role of the press, in part because its own quest for "truth" has been based on something other than empiricism. In fact, it enthroned a new criterion for veracity, "faith-based" truth, sometimes corroborated by "faith-based" intelligence. For officials of this administration (and not just the religious ones, either), truth seemed to descend from on high, a kind of divine revelation begging no further earthly scrutiny. For the president this was evidently literally the case. The Israeli paper Ha'aretz reported him saying to Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian prime minister of the moment, "God told me to strike al-Qaeda and I struck, and then he instructed me to strike Saddam [Hussein], which I did."
It is hardly surprising, then, that such a president would eschew newspapers in favor of reports from other more "objective sources", namely his staff. He has spoken often of trusting "visceral reactions" and acting on "gut feelings". For him as for much of the rest of his administration, decision-making has tended to proceed not from evidence to conclusion, but from conclusion to evidence. Reading, facts, history, logic and the complex interaction among the electorate, the media, and the government have all been relegated to subsidiary roles in what might be called "fundamentalist" policy formation.
Just as the free exchange of information plays little role in the relationship between a fundamentalist believer and his or her god, so it has played a distinctly diminished role in America's recent parallel world of divine political revelation. After all, if you already know the answer to a question, of what use are the media, except to broadcast that answer? The task at hand, then, is never to listen but to proselytize the political gospel among non-believers, thereby transforming a once-interactive process between citizen and leader into evangelism.
Although in the Bush political universe, freedom has been endlessly extolled in principle, it has had little utility in practice. What possible role could a free press play when revelation trumps fact and conclusions are preordained? A probing press is logically viewed as a spoiler under such conditions, stepping between the administration and those whose only true salvation lies in becoming part of a nation of true believers. Since there was little need, and less respect, for an opposition (loyal or otherwise), the information feedback loops in which the press should have played a crucial role in a functioning democracy ceased operating. The media synapses that normally transmit warnings from citizen to government froze shut.
Television networks continued to broadcast and papers continued to publish, but, dismissed and ignored, they became irrelevant, except possibly for their entertainment value. As the press has withered, the government, already existing in a self-referential and self-deceptive universe, was deprived of the ability to learn of danger from its own policies and thus make course corrections.
A universe in which news won't matter
Karl Rove, the president's chief political adviser, bluntly declared to New Yorker writer Ken Auletta that members of the press "don't represent the public any more than other people do. I don't believe you have a check-and-balance function." Auletta concluded that, in the eyes of the Bush administration, the press corps had become little more than another special-interest lobbying group. Indeed, the territory the traditional media once occupied has increasingly been deluged by administration lobbying, publicity, and advertising - cleverly staged "photo-ops", carefully produced propaganda rallies, pre-planned "events", tidal waves of campaign ads, and the like. Afraid of losing further "influence", access, and the lucrative ad revenues that come from such political image-making, major media have found it in their financial interest to yield quietly.
What does this downgrading of the media's role say about how the US government views its citizens, the putative sovereigns of the country? It suggests that "we the people" are seen not as political constituencies conferring legitimacy on our rulers, but as consumers to be sold policy the way advertisers sell products. In the storm of selling, spin, bullying and "discipline" that has been the Bush signature for years, traditional news outlets found themselves increasingly drowned out, ghettoized and cowed. Attacked as "liberal" and "elitist", disesteemed as "troublemakers" and "bashers" (even when making all too little trouble), they were relegated to the sidelines, increasingly uncertain and timid about their shrinking place in the political process.
Add in a further dynamic (which intellectuals from Marxist-Leninist societies would instantly recognize): Groups denied legitimacy and disdained by the state tend to internalize their exclusion as a form of culpability, and often feel an abject, autonomic urge to seek reinstatement at almost any price. Little wonder, then, that "the traditional press" has had a difficult time mustering anything like a convincing counter-narrative as the administration herded a terrified and all-too-trusting nation to war.
Not only did a mutant form of skepticism-free news succeed - at least for a time - in leaving large segments of the populace uninformed, but it corrupted the ability of high officials to function. All too often they simply found themselves looking into a fun-house mirror of their own making and imagined that they were viewing reality. As even the conservative National Review noted, the Bush administration has "a dismaying capacity to believe its own public relations".
In this world of mutant "news", information loops have become one-way highways; and a national security adviser, cabinet secretary, or attorney general, a well-managed and programmed polemicist charged to "stay on message", the better to justify whatever the government has already done, or is about to do. Because these latter-day campaigns to "dominate the media environment", as the Pentagon likes to say, employ all the sophistication and technology developed by communications experts since Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud, first wed an understanding of psychology to the marketing of merchandise, they are far more seductive than older-style news. Indeed, on Fox News, we can see the ultimate marriage of news and public relations in a fountainhead of artful propaganda so well packaged that most people can't tell it from the real thing.
For three-plus years we have been governed by people who don't view news, in the traditional sense, as playing any constructive role in our system of governance. At the moment, they are momentarily in retreat, driven back from the front lines of faith-based truth by their own faith-based blunders. But make no mistake, their frightening experiment will continue if Americans allow it. Complete success would mean not just that the press had surrendered its essential watchdog role, but - a far darker thought - that, even were it to refuse to do so, it might be shunted off to a place where it would not matter.
As the war in Iraq descended into a desert quagmire, the press belatedly appeared to awaken and adopt a more skeptical stance toward an already crumbling set of Bush administration policies. But if a bloody, expensive, catastrophic episode like the war in Iraq is necessary to remind us of the important role that the press plays in US democracy, something is gravely amiss in the way America's political system has come to function.

~Orville Schell is dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. This piece is adapted from the preface to a collection of New York Review of Books articles on the media's coverage of the war in Iraq by Michael Massing. It will be published soon as a short book, Now They Tell Us (The New York Review of Books, 2004)."

Sunday Herald: Regime change in Iran now in Bush’s sights

"PRESIDENT George Bush has promised that if re-elected in November he will make regime change in Iran his new target.
Bush named Iran as part of the Axis of Evil along with North Korea and Iraq almost three years ago. A US government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that military action would not be overt in changing Iran, but rather that the US would work to stir revolts in the country and hope to topple the current conservative religious leadership.
The official said: “If George Bush is re-elected there will be much more intervention in the internal affairs of Iran.”
The Iranian government announced this weekend that it had successfully eradicated all al-Qaeda cells operating in the country, but the statement comes as leaked reports from the US September 11 Commission show definite links between Iran and the September 11 terrorists.
The final report from the cross-party inquiry, which is examining the origins of the September 11 attacks, is believed to contain concrete evidence of contacts between al-Qaeda and Iran.
Time magazine reports that at least eight of the hijackers, who lived in the US for months before the attacks, passed through Iran between October 2000 and February 2001 apparently with help from the Iranian authorities.
Known al-Qaeda members also seem to have been allowed to cross in and out of Iran freely across the Afghan border, with Iranian border guards being told not to stamp the passports of al-Qaeda operatives, harass them or hinder their ability to travel freely.
The report is thought to hint that Iranian officials were ordered to assist al-Qaeda operatives with any travel needs.
The September 11 Commission report will, however, stop short of stating that Iran was aware of the plans for the September 11 attacks.
Tehran has always officially denied helping members of al-Qaeda escape from Afghan istan in 2001 when the Taliban regime fell.
State television in Iran yesterday showed the country’s intelligence minister announcing the capture of a number of al-Qaeda supporters.
Ali Yunesi said: “Iran’s intelligence apparatus has identified and arrested small Iranian deviate branches of the al-Qaeda group.” There was no clarification on how many people had been arrested or charged.
Yunesi warned that Iran would take a tough line against militants using Iran as a base. “Those who seek to misuse the safe situation in Iran will face serious consequences,” he said.
The Iranian government says it has arrested and repatriated hundreds of al-Qaeda suspects in the past two years in a display of willingness to bring terrorism in the Middle East under control.
A suspected Saudi al-Qaeda militant, Khaled al-Harbi, who appeared in a videotape with Osama bin Laden, gave himself up in Iran last week, and was flown back to Saudi Arabia on Tuesday.
On Friday US officials said the next stage of the September 11 Commission’s report would be available this week.
There was embarrassment for the Bush administration last week when it emerged a tight deadline was being pushed for the capture of Osama bin Laden to generate headlines during the Democratic Convention when presidential rival John Kerry will be grabbing the limelight.
Pakistani security forces have apparently been given deadlines to capture bin Laden that are before the US general election in November, according to US sources."

Marshall Auerback: Surprised in October? A New World of Oil

(TomDispatch) "The Saudis are out of capacity. That's my opinion... They have no infrastructure or extra pipes or gas, oil, and water separators [very expensive large globes used to separate what comes out of a water injection well]. They have very heavy oil which, through a conventional refinery, produces asphalt. We don't need asphalt. We need gasoline. It takes a complex refinery to make gasoline and it only takes 7-10 years to build one."
-- Matt Simmons, Simmons & Co., a leading independent oil analyst (from Michael C. Ruppert, Peak Oil Revisited)
 
"As July began, Saudi Arabian officials announced that they were satisfied with the current level of world oil prices, around $35 a barrel -- the clearest indication yet that the kingdom has abandoned support for the old OPEC price range of $22-$28 per barrel. Saudi Arabia's oil minister Ali al-Naimi indicated that, at current levels, oil prices were "fair." Two implications flow from this:
 
·         The Saudis have now lined up with the rest of the OPEC cartel in implicitly suggesting that the old reference benchmark of $22-$28 was less than fair. From this flows a simple but dramatic conclusion: It is highly unlikely that we shall see an "October surprise" in which the Saudis flood the crude oil market in order to bring prices down sharply and thereby help ensure a Bush re-election. Faced with rising welfare costs and escalating political tensions, the kingdom has a corresponding need for additional capital expenditure for increased oil capacity. Goldman Sachs estimates that the Saudis require an average price of at least $30 a barrel over the next 5 years just to maintain real per capita expenditure.
 
·         Perhaps more significant, the Saudi statement speaks volumes about the true state of supply/demand in the oil market. The kingdom's actions may in fact constitute an implicit fait accompli, an acceptance of their inability to increase production substantially beyond current levels, bringing the days of peak oil production ominously closer.

The latter point is especially germane to those who continue to harbor thoughts of a return to cheap oil. It remains the consensus among investors on Wall Street and among a number of policymakers in the West that current high prices are a temporary aberration. Such misplaced optimism mirrors the stated (inflated) production targets of oil companies and oil-producing nations. Oil companies themselves appear to be consistently overly optimistic because of their desire to convey to investors that they still have attractive growth prospects. This was certainly the case with Shell, which only recently sacked its CEO and director of exploration for persistently overstating the company's reserves.
The oil-producing nations of OPEC also continue to set forth ambitious production targets in an attempt to negotiate more favorable OPEC quotas. So far, careful analysis of these optimistic forecasts has revealed that they are based on questionable assumptions regarding investment and technology as well as unrealistic timetables. They all assume quite low depletion rates on existing output. Lastly, the historical record shows that this sort of optimistic bias has prevailed for some time, while actual production growth has consistently fallen short of optimistic forecasts.
It is striking that the vast majority of Wall Street oil analysts, indeed, the oil companies themselves, have continued to base their forecasts on the old OPEC targeted price range of $22-$28 per barrel in spite of increasing evidence of looming supply shortages. But the comments by Saudi Arabia last week, coupled with concerns raised by Nigeria, Iran, and Venezuela, all suggest that OPEC may finally be acknowledging the new reality: Depletion dynamics -- a technical term which simply refers to declines in production of existing fields regardless of demand or increased capital expenditure to improve them -- have now come to the fore. Investment aimed at newer, smaller reservoirs and improving existing fields will not be enough to overcome these depletion dynamics. Therefore even with higher prices and higher levels of investment, growth in global oil output will slow.
Which does call into question the efficacy of the planned production increase OPEC announced with some fanfare last month in Beirut. OPEC officials assured the world that the organization would increase production by 2m barrels per day to 25.3 million barrels per day in an attempt to cool down global oil prices. There is some question, however, about the sustainability of such production hikes, given that the cartel has not pumped out such volumes of crude since the second oil shock produced by the Iranian revolution over a quarter-century ago.
After the Oil Runs Out, an article by James Jordan and James R. Powell in the Washington Post 6/6/04 addressed just this point:
"If you're wondering about the direction of gasoline prices over the long term, forget for a moment about OPEC quotas and drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and consider instead the matter of Hubbert's Peak. That's not a place, it's a concept developed a half-century ago by a geologist named M. King Hubbert, and it explains a lot about what's going on today at the gas pump. Hubbert argued that at a certain point oil production peaks, and thereafter it steadily declines regardless of demand. In 1956 he predicted that U.S. oil production would peak about 1970 and decline thereafter. Skeptics scoffed, but he was right.
"It now appears that world oil production, about 80 million barrels a day, will soon peak. In fact, conventional oil production has already peaked and is declining. For every 10 barrels of conventional oil consumed, only four new barrels are discovered. Without the unconventional oil from tar sands, liquefied natural gas and other deposits, world production would have peaked several years ago...
"Lost in the debate are three much bigger issues: the impact of declining oil production on society, the ways to minimize its effects and when we should act. Unfortunately, politicians and policymakers have ignored Hubbert's Peak and have no plans to deal with it: If it's beyond the next election, forget it."
The reference to "Hubbert's peak" -- after the geologist who first made the case for depletion dynamics in the oil patch -- omits to note that the prediction was highly controversial inside and outside of the oil business until the 1980s, when it was proven correct. The basic reasons for a bell curve in any plot of production over time are that exploration is not a random process and that oil and gas are depleting assets. When exploration of an area begins, the largest reservoirs are the easiest to find. Total production rises as they are brought into production, while exploration for smaller reservoirs continues. Eventually enough smaller reservoirs cannot be found to offset the declines in production from the depleting large reservoirs. Prices and technology affect the area under the curve -- the total amount of oil and gas recovered over time -- but not the shape of the curve. Think of it as a process similar to aging and death in living organisms, as Hubbert himself rightly surmised.
Indeed, since 1970, the three largest non OPEC oil discoveries have all been in offshore areas and are expected to achieve peak production of only 11⁄4 million barrels a day -- far less than the peak production of the major discoveries of the past in the U.S., Russia, the Middle East, Mexico, Venezuela, and Nigeria. However much one trumpets these new discoveries, it is important to note that they will only offset declines in production on existing fields, and not increase the overall aggregate supply of global crude oil. Indeed, the disappointing exploration "successes" of the past 30 years have occurred despite huge investments engendered by dramatically higher oil prices in the 1970s and much of the 1980s. The record of the last two decades suggests that no more mega-fields may be discovered to replace the depletion of today's largest oil reserves and provide the growth in oil output that most market participants today take for granted.
Unfortunately, the Washington Post story relied on generalities about peak and decline to the exclusion of the hard data that has surfaced over the last two years, all of which points to an imminent acceleration in global depletion dynamics, notably in Saudi Arabia. There, Ghawar, the largest field in the world and all of Saudi Arabia's other large fields are old and tired. In recent years, the Saudis have resorted to both water injection and so-called "bottle-brush" drilling to maintain production -- techniques that tend to accelerate decline and damage reservoirs.
For a country with an allegedly huge marginal surplus of oil production, turning to such extraction techniques is likely to prove an unwise move. With bottle-brush drilling, a shaft is drilled horizontally over long distances with a number of brush-like openings. Water is then forced under pressure into the reservoir, forcing the oil upwards toward the well heads. Extraction is thereby increased. However, when the water table hits the horizontal shaft, often without warning, the whole field may go virtually dead and production will immediately drop off to virtually nothing.
Examples of what has happened in other oil producing countries when "bottle-brush" drilling was employed abound. Syria's oil production is now in terminal decline. Yemen is following, according to Ali Samsam Bakhtiari, Vice President of the National Iranian oil Company, who has long suggested that Saudi oil production might have peaked in the spring of 2003. Adds analyst William Kennedy, "For the record, Ghawar's ultimate recoverable reserves in 1975 were estimated at 60 billion barrels -- by Exxon, Mobil, Texaco and Chevron. It had produced 55 billion barrels up to the end of 2003 and is still producing at 1.8 billion per annum. That shows you how close it might be to the end. When Ghawar dies, the world is officially in decline."
In the short term, speculation in futures markets has contributed significantly to the fall in the oil price over the last month, although even with oil traders liquidating these futures positions on commodities exchanges, prices have stubbornly remained above $35 a barrel, well in excess of the old reference benchmarks. And while such speculative positions may influence the level of oil prices by several dollars a barrel over the short run, in the medium to longer term, supply/demand considerations will trump all else. Strong growth in global energy demand, a loss of capacity in some OPEC states, and rising depletion rates will all continue to contribute to a much tighter market. Moreover, as the Financial Times notes, "A build-up of inventories is now needed ahead of peak seasonal demand in the fourth quarter. But higher crude inventories do not address the problem of insufficient refining capacity in the US."
It is beside the point to maintain that current prevailing high oil prices are the result of a "political instability" premium, when the Saudis have set themselves up for additional terrorist attacks on their oil installations through repeated pledges to boost oil production and drive down prices. The Saudis were the only OPEC member to come out of the Amsterdam meeting 3 weeks ago with planned production hikes. This isolated position has likely earned them the ire of terrorists and given them a further vested interest in disrupting oil production, as has already been occurring with increasing frequency in Iraq over the past 12 months. Some security experts believe that key Saudi installations like Ras Tanoura and Abqaiq, the world's largest oil-processing complex, are vulnerable to attack. Questions about the competence and loyalty of elements within the Saudi security forces remain, as their ranks are said to be infiltrated by Islamic extremists. Recent attacks on foreign oil personnel in the kingdom seem to have revealed intricate personal and tribal links between the security forces and the alleged Al Qaeda operatives in the country.
Then there is the worst case scenario -- a complete collapse of the House of Saud. Were a collapse of the Saudi regime to remove the country's oil supply from world markets, even temporarily, the impact on prices would be far greater than those sustained during the two OPEC oil shocks of the 1970s. This would up the tab for a debt-ridden, cheap-oil driven American economy currently importing almost 60% of its crude from abroad.
"Whither oil prices?" is not simply an academic question. Future American economic growth is largely dependent upon reliable, accessible, and affordable supplies of energy. Hints of an impending oil-production peak are already beginning to impact seriously on economic growth against a backdrop of unprecedented financial fragility. The inexorable tightening of supply is destabilizing oil markets, which now manifest extreme price behavior in response to the smallest potential disturbance. Higher oil prices continue to increase the strain on consumption, particularly in the United States, while simultaneously reducing disposable income. How well equipped are we to deal with substantially higher energy prices? This is a question that no policy maker has honestly confronted yet. The markets remain in denial, but high energy prices are the new economic reality.
If there is indeed an "October oil surprise," the resultant shock is likely to be one which neither consumers, nor western policymakers will appreciate, since it could entail prices sharply higher than those currently prevailing. The days of cheap oil prices are over; the only question is, how high, how fast from here?
 
~Marshall Auerback is an international portfolio strategist for David W. Tice & Associates, LLC, a USVI-based money management firm. He is also a contributor to the Japan Policy Research Institute. His weekly work can be viewed at prudentbear.com"

Conspiracy, coincidence, or incompetence? Gerard Holmgren: THE TRUTH ABOUT SEPT. 11

"The following compilation presents documents and research from various sources demonstrating that the events of Sept 11 were planned and carried out by the US govt and its agencies. This compilation is my own creation and it cannot be assumed that the individual authors of the research below necessarily agree with each other on all details.

The compilation is divided into three main sections.

1) "Let it happen on purpose" evidence (LIHOP).

This presents research which takes as its founding assumption that we are basically being told the truth about which planes were hijacked, where they went and who hijacked them, and goes on to demonstrate that even if this were true, then the govt and its agencies must have known about it beforehand, and must have taken active steps to deliberately allow it to happen.

2) "Totally self inflicted" evidence (TSI).

This section demonstrates that the LIHOP evidence only scratches the surface, and that the govt claims about which planes were hijacked, were they went and who hijacked them is total fiction, and that the govt and its agencies must have organized the entire event.

3) Background and historical evidence.

This section does not present direct evidence of govt involvement specifically in the events of Sept 11, but demonstrates that the phenomonen of "Islamic terror", both real and imaginary, has been deliberately built up by successive US govts and agencies for more than two decades, in the interests of creating an enemy in the minds of the population. It also demonstrates that behind the scenes, the US govt and its agencies actively co-operate with their alleged Islamic enemies, and that there is sound historical precedent for the govt and its agencies having an active policy of committing or deliberately allowing terrorist attacks against their own people for the purpose of furthering this kind of agenda. . . ."

(click title for full text)

Conspiracy theories from the fringe: Joe Vialls: Air attack on US planned for October 2004

(click title for full text)

Must read: Paranoia or conspiracy? Annie Jacobsen: Terror in the Skies, Again?

(Womens Wall Street) "Note from the Editors: You are about to read an account of what happened during a domestic flight that one of our writers, Annie Jacobsen, took from Detroit to Los Angeles. The WWS Editorial Team debated long and hard about how to handle this information and ultimately we decided it was something that should be shared. What does it have to do with finances? Nothing, and everything. Here is Annie's story. 

On June 29, 2004, at 12:28 p.m., I flew on Northwest Airlines flight #327 from Detroit to Los Angeles with my husband and our young son.  Also on our flight were 14 Middle Eastern men between the ages of approximately 20 and 50 years old.  What I experienced during that flight has caused me to question whether the United States of America can realistically uphold the civil liberties of every individual, even non-citizens, and protect its citizens from terrorist threats.
On that Tuesday, our journey began uneventfully. Starting out that morning in Providence, Rhode Island, we went through security screening, flew to Detroit, and passed the time waiting for our connecting flight to Los Angeles by shopping at the airport stores and eating lunch at an airport diner. With no second security check required in Detroit we headed to our gate and waited for the pre-boarding announcement. Standing near us, also waiting to pre-board, was a group of six Middle Eastern men. They were carrying blue passports with Arabic writing. Two men wore tracksuits with Arabic writing across the back. Two carried musical instrument cases - thin, flat, 18" long. One wore a yellow T-shirt and held a McDonald's bag. And the sixth man had a bad leg -- he wore an orthopedic shoe and limped.  When the pre-boarding announcement was made, we handed our tickets to the Northwest Airlines agent, and walked down the jetway with the group of men directly behind us.
My four-year-old son was determined to wheel his carry-on bag himself, so I turned to the men behind me and said, "You go ahead, this could be awhile." "No, you go ahead," one of the men replied. He smiled pleasantly and extended his arm for me to pass. He was young, maybe late 20's and had a goatee.   I thanked him and we boarded the plan.
Once on the plane, we took our seats in coach (seats 17A, 17B and 17C). The man with the yellow shirt and the McDonald's bag sat across the aisle from us (in seat 17E). The pleasant man with the goatee sat a few rows back and across the aisle from us (in seat 21E).  The rest of the men were seated throughout the plane, and several made their way to the back.  
As we sat waiting for the plane to finish boarding, we noticed another large group of Middle Eastern men boarding.  The first man wore a dark suit and sunglasses. He sat in first class in seat 1A, the seat second-closet to the cockpit door.  The other seven men walked into the coach cabin.  As "aware" Americans, my husband and I exchanged glances, and then continued to get comfortable.  I noticed some of the other passengers paying attention to the situation as well.  As boarding continued, we watched as, one by one, most of the Middle Eastern men made eye contact with each other.  They continued to look at each other and nod, as if they were all in agreement about something. I could tell that my husband was beginning to feel "anxious."
The take-off was uneventful.  But once we were in the air and the seatbelt sign was turned off, the unusual activity began. The man in the yellow T-shirt got out of his seat and went to the lavatory at the front of coach -- taking his full McDonald's bag with him.  When he came out of the lavatory he still had the McDonald's bag, but it was now almost empty. He walked down the aisle to the back of the plane, still holding the bag.  When he passed two of the men sitting mid-cabin, he gave a thumbs-up sign.  When he returned to his seat, he no longer had the McDonald's bag.
Then another man from the group stood up and took something from his carry-on in the overhead bin. It was about a foot long and was rolled in cloth.  He headed toward the back of the cabin with the object.  Five minutes later, several more of the Middle Eastern men began using the forward lavatory consecutively. In the back, several of the men stood up and used the back lavatory consecutively as well.
For the next hour, the men congregated in groups of two and three at the back of the plane for varying periods of time. Meanwhile, in the first class cabin, just a foot or so from the cockpit door, the man with the dark suit - still wearing sunglasses - was also standing.  Not one of the flight crew members suggested that any of these men take their seats.
Watching all of this, my husband was now beyond "anxious."  I decided to try to reassure my husband (and maybe myself) by walking to the back bathroom.  I knew the goateed-man I had exchanged friendly words with as we boarded the plane was seated only a few rows back, so  I thought I would say hello to the man to get some reassurance that everything was fine. As I stood up and turned around, I glanced in his direction and we made eye contact.  I threw out my friendliest "remember-me-we-had-a-nice-exchange-just-a-short-time-ago" smile. The man did not  smile back. His face did not move. In fact, the cold, defiant look he gave me sent shivers down my spine.
When I returned to my seat I was unable to assure my husband that all was well. My husband immediately walked to the first class section to talk with the flight attendant.  "I might be overreacting, but I've been watching some really suspicious things..."  Before he could finish his statement, the flight attendant pulled him into the galley. In a quiet voice she explained that they were all concerned about what was going on. The captain was aware. The flight attendants were passing notes to each other. She said that there were people on board "higher up than you and me watching the men." My husband returned to his seat and relayed this information to me. He was feeling slightly better. I was feeling much worse. We were now two hours into a four-in-a-half hour flight.
Approximately 10 minutes later, that same flight attendant came by with the drinks cart. She leaned over and quietly told my husband there were federal air marshals sitting all around us. She asked him not to tell anyone and explained that she could be in trouble for giving out that information. She then continued serving drinks.
About 20 minutes later the same flight attendant returned. Leaning over and whispering, she asked my husband to write a description of the yellow-shirted man sitting across from us. She explained it would look too suspicious if she wrote the information. She asked my husband to slip the note to her when he was done. 
After seeing 14 Middle Eastern men board separately (six together, eight individually) and then act as a group, watching their unusual glances, observing their bizarre bathroom activities, watching them congregate in small groups, knowing that the flight attendants and the pilots were seriously concerned, and now knowing that federal air marshals were on board, I was officially terrified.. Before I'm labeled a racial profiler or -- worse yet -- a racist, let me add this. A month ago I traveled to India to research a magazine article I was writing. My husband and I flew on a jumbo jet carrying more than 300 Hindu and Muslim men and women on board.  We traveled throughout the country and stayed in a Muslim village 10 miles outside Pakistan. I never once felt fearful. I never once felt unsafe. I never once had the feeling that anyone wanted to hurt me.  This time was different.
Finally, the captain announced that the plane was cleared for landing. It had been four hours since we left Detroit. The fasten seat belt light came on and I could see downtown Los Angeles. The flight attendants made one final sweep of the cabin and strapped themselves in for landing. I began to relax. Home was in sight.
Suddenly, seven of the men stood up -- in unison -- and walked to the front and back lavatories. One by one, they went into the two lavatories, each spending about four minutes inside. Right in front of us, two men stood up against the emergency exit door, waiting for the lavatory to become available. The men spoke in Arabic among themselves and to the man in the yellow shirt sitting nearby. One of the men took his camera into the lavatory. Another took his cell phone. Again, no one approached the men. Not one of the flight attendants asked them to sit down.  I watched as the man in the yellow shirt, still in his seat, reached inside his shirt and pulled out a small red book. He read a few pages, then put the book back inside his shirt.  He pulled the book out again, read a page or two more, and put it back.  He continued to do this several more times.
I looked around to see if any other passengers were watching. I immediately spotted a distraught couple seated two rows back. The woman was crying into the man's shoulder.  He was holding her hand.  I heard him say to her, "You've got to calm down." Behind them sat the once pleasant-smiling, goatee-wearing man.  
I grabbed my son, I held my husband's hand and, despite the fact that I am not a particularly religious person, I prayed. The last man came out of the bathroom, and as he passed  the man in the yellow shirt he ran his forefinger across his neck and mouthed the word "No." 
The plane landed. My husband and I gathered our bags and quickly, very quickly, walked up the jetway. As we exited the jetway and entered the airport, we saw many, many men in dark suits.  A few yards further out into the terminal, LAPD agents ran past us, heading for the gate.  I have since learned that the representatives of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), the Federal Air Marshals (FAM), and the Transportation Security Association (TSA) met our plane as it landed.  Several men -- who I presume were the federal air marshals on board -- hurried off the plane and directed the 14 men over to the side.
Knowing what we knew, and seeing what we'd seen, my husband and I decided to talk to the authorities. For several hours my husband and I were interrogated by the FBI. We gave sworn statement after sworn statement.  We wrote down every detail of our account. The interrogators seemed especially interested in the McDonald's bag, so we repeated in detail what we knew about the McDonald's bag. A law enforcement official stood near us, holding 14 Syrian passports in his hand. We answered more questions. And finally we went home. 

Home Sweet Home

The next day, I began searching online for news about the incident.  There was nothing.  I asked a friend who is a local news correspondent if there were any arrests at LAX that day.  There weren't.  I called Northwest Airlines' customer service. They said write a letter.  I wrote a letter, then followed up with a call to their public relations department.  They said they were aware of the situation (sorry that happened!) but legally they have 30 days to reply.
I shared my story with a few colleagues. One mentioned she'd been on a flight with a group of foreign men who were acting strangely -- they turned out to be diamond traders.  Another had heard a story on National Public Radio (NPR) shortly after 9/11 about a group of Arab musicians who were having a hard time traveling on airplanes throughout the U.S. and couldn't get seats together.  I took note of these two stories and continued my research. Here are excerpts from an article written by Jason Burke, Chief Reporter, and published in The Observer (a British newspaper based in London) on February 8, 2004:

Terrorist bid to build bombs in mid-flight: Intelligence reveals dry runs of new threat to blow up airliners
"Islamic militants have conducted dry runs of a devastating new style of bombing on aircraft flying to Europe, intelligence sources believe.
The tactics, which aim to evade aviation security systems by placing only components of explosive devices on passenger jets, allowing militants to assemble them in the air, have been tried out on planes flying between the Middle East, North Africa and Western Europe, security sources say.
...The... Transportation Security Administration issued an urgent memo detailing new threats to aviation and warning that terrorists in teams of five might be planning suicide missions to hijack commercial airliners, possibly using common items...such as cameras, modified as weapons.
...Components of IEDs [improvised explosive devices]can be smuggled on to an aircraft, concealed in either clothing or personal carry-on items... and assembled on board. In many cases of suspicious passenger activity, incidents have taken place in the aircraft's forward lavatory."

So here's my question: Since the FBI issued a warning to the airline industry to be wary of groups of five men on a plane who might be trying to build bombs in the bathroom, shouldn't a group of  14 Middle Eastern men be screened before boarding a flight? 
Apparently not. Due to our rules against discrimination, it can't be done. During the 9/11 hearings last April, 9/11 Commissioner John Lehman stated that "...it was the policy (before 9/11) and I believe remains the policy today to fine airlines if they have more than two young Arab males in secondary questioning because that's discriminatory." 
So even if Northwest Airlines searched two of the men on board my Northwest flight, they couldn't search the other 12 because they would have already filled a government-imposed quota.
I continued my research by reading an article entitled Arab Hijackers Now Eligible For Pre-Boarding from Ann Coulter (www.anncoulter.com): 

"On September 21, as the remains of thousands of Americans lay smoldering at Ground Zero, [Secretary of Transportation Norman] Mineta fired off a letter to all U.S. airlines forbidding them from implementing the one security measure that could have prevented 9/11: subjecting Middle Eastern passengers to an added degree of pre-flight scrutiny. He sternly reminded the airlines that it was illegal to discriminate against passengers based on their race, color, national or ethnic origin or religion." 

Coulter also writes that a few months later, at Mr. Mineta's behest, the Department of Transportation (DOT) filed complaints against United Airlines and American Airlines (who, combined, had lost 8 pilots, 25 flight attendants and 213 passengers on 9/11 - not counting the 19 Arab hijackers).  In November 2003, United Airlines settled their case with the DOT for $1.5 million. In March 2004, American Airlines settled their case with the DOT for $1.5 million. The DOT also charged Continental Airlines with discriminating against passengers who appeared to be Arab, Middle Eastern or Muslim. Continental Airlines settled their complaint with the DOT in April of 2004 for $.5 million.  
From what I witnessed, Northwest Airlines doesn't have to worry about Norman Mineta filing a complaint against them for discriminatory, secondary screening of Arab men. No one checked the passports of the Syrian men. No one inspected the contents of the two instrument cases or the McDonald's bag. And no one checked the limping man's orthopedic shoe. In fact, according to the TSA regulations, passengers wearing an orthopedic shoe won't be asked to take it off.  As their site states, "Advise the screener if you're wearing orthopedic shoes...screeners should not be asking you to remove your orthopedic shoes at any time during the screening process. "  (Click here to read the TSA website policy on orthopedic shoes and other medical devices.)
I placed a call to the TSA and talked to Joe Dove, a Customer Service Supervisor. I told him how we'd eaten with metal utensils moments in an airport diner before boarding the flight and how no one checked our luggage or the instrument cases being carried by the Middle Eastern men. Dove's response was, "Restaurants in secured areas -- that's an ongoing problem. We get that complaint often. TSA gets that complaint all the time and they haven't worked that out with the FAA. They're aware of it. You've got a good question. There may not be a reasonable answer at this time, I'm not going to BS you."
At the Detroit airport no one checked our IDs. No one checked the folds in my newspaper or the contents of my son's backpack.  No one asked us what we'd done during our layover, if we bought anything, or if anyone gave us anything while we were in the airport. We were asked all of these questions (and many others ) three weeks earlier when we'd traveled in Europe -- where passengers with airport layovers are rigorously questioned and screened before boarding any and every flight. In Detroit no one checked who we were or what we carried on board a 757 jet liner bound for American's largest metropolis.
Two days after my experience on Northwest Airlines flight #327 came this notice from SBS TV, The World News, July 1, 2004: 

"The U.S. Transportation and Security Administration has issued a new directive which demands pilots make a pre-flight announcement banning passengers from congregating in aisles and outside the plane's toilets. The directive also orders flight attendants to check the toilets every two hours for suspicious packages."

Through a series of events, The Washington Post heard about my story. I talked briefly about my experience with a representative from the newspaper. Within a few hours I received a call from Dave Adams, the Federal Air Marshal Services (FAM) Head of Public Affairs. Adams told me what he knew: 

There were 14 Syrians on NWA flight #327. They were questioned at length by FAM, the FBI and the TSA upon landing in Los Angeles. The 14 Syrians had been hired as musicians to play at a casino in the desert. Adams said they were "scrubbed." None had arrest records (in America, I presume), none showed up on the FBI's "no fly" list or the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists List. The men checked out and they were let go. According to Adams, the 14 men traveled on Northwest Airlines flight #327 using one-way tickets. Two days later they were scheduled to fly back on jetBlue from Long Beach, California to New York -- also using one-way tickets.
I asked Adams why, based on the FBI's credible information that terrorists may try to assemble bombs on planes, the air marshals or the flight attendants didn't do anything about the bizarre behavior and frequent trips to the lavatory.  "Our FAM agents have to have an event to arrest somebody. Our agents aren't going to deploy until there is an actual event," Adams explained. He said he could not speak for the policies of Northwest Airlines.
So the question is... Do I think these men were musicians? I'll let you decide. But I wonder, if 19 terrorists can learn to fly airplanes into buildings, couldn't 14 terrorists learn to play instruments?" "