http://www.fromthewilderness.com/tim...before911.html

wrote:
"About three years ago JOHN MCCAIN became probably the first
politician who declared the CIA a 'rogue agency.'"

John McCain is a mental case.

Dave wrote:

wrote:
"About three years ago JOHN MCCAIN became probably the first
politician who declared the CIA a 'rogue agency.'"

John McCain is a mental case.

And so is David Rickmers.

Iran’s Role in 9/11 Attack

Wednesday, September 10, 2008 7:56 PM

By: Kenneth R. Timmerman


In an auspicious passage that went virtually unreported at the time,
the 9/11 Commission revealed in July 2004 that they “now have evidence
suggesting that 8 to 10 of the 14 Saudi ‘muscle’ operatives traveled
into or out of Iran between October 2000 and February 2001.”

The “muscle” operatives were the 9/11 hijackers who overpowered
airline crew members, slit their throats, and terrorized passengers so
the al-Qaida pilots could seize control of the airliners and fly them
into their targets.

The Commissioners concluded that there was “strong evidence that Iran
facilitated the transit of al-Qaida members into and out of
Afghanistan before 9/11, and that some of these were future 9/11
hijackers.”

“We believe this topic requires further investigation by the U.S.
government,” the Commissioners wrote.

This heavily-redacted passage in the July 2004 final report of the
9/11 Commission provided a tantalizing glimpse into the information
gathered by the U.S. intelligence community — mainly from national
technical means — on Iran’s material involvement in the 9/11 attacks.

And yet, until now it has been widely ignored by the intelligence
community, Congress, and most of the press.

I first revealed the inside story of what the 9/11 Commission found
out about Iran’s involvement in the 9/11 plot in my 2005 book
Countdown to Crisis: the Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran.

Among other things, I discovered from sources on the Commission that
the “senior Hezbollah operative” who accompanied the al-Qaida muscle
hijackers on flights from Saudi Arabia and Beirut to Tehran was none
other than Iran’s star terrorist, Imad Fayez Mugniyeh.

Either Mugniyeh’s presence on those flights was hard evidence that
Iran was actively and materially involved with the future al-Qaida
terrorists, or it was a “remarkable coincidence,” the 9/11 Commission
report stated.

[Editor's Note: Read “Iran’s Arch-Terror Master Killed in Syria” ].

I also interviewed a former Revolutionary Guards Colonel who gave
paramilitary and intelligence training to al-Qaida terrorists at a
specialized training camp in Iran before 9/11.

Former FBI assistant director Oliver “Buck” Revell tracked Mugniyeh
during the 1980s because of his involvement in the deadly bombings of
the U.S. Embassy and the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, among other
attacks.

“Mugniyeh is more dangerous and has killed more people and tortured
more people than any other terrorist,” Revell told me earlier this
year.

“Whenever he’s under pressure, he goes to Iran. He’s the creature of
the IRGC [the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps]. He’s the international
link between Hezbollah and the IRGC.”

Not long after the 9/11 attacks, Deputy Secretary of State Richard
Armitage called Mugniyeh’s Hezbollah “the A-Team of terrorists, and
maybe al-Qaida is actually the 'B' team.”

Armitage never accused Hezbollah or Mugniyeh of involvement in the
attacks, but was referring to their twenty-five-year history of
killing Americans.

Mugniyeh was assassinated on February 12, 2008, when he turned on the
ignition of his Mitsubishi Pajero in a highly-secure neighborhood of
Damascus, Syria. He had just left a meeting with the head of Syrian
intelligence, Rostam Ghazali, and with a senior Iranian intelligence
officer.

Most commentators speculated that Mugniyeh had been assassinated by
the Israelis, because of his ongoing role as Hezbollah’s military
chief. But a Newsmax source close to Hezbollah speculated that he had
been killed by the Iranians.

“Haj Radwan [a nom de guerre for Mugniyeh] knew too much, and had
outlived his usefulness to the Iranians,” the source said.

New York Times reporter Philip Shenon also examined Iran’s involvement
in the 9/11 plot in his recent book, The Commission, which details the
political infighting among the staff and commissioners as they debated
whether to apportion blame between the Clinton and Bush
administrations for missing the signs of the impending attacks.

But Shenon — like the published 9/11 commission report itself — falls
short of naming Imad Mugniyeh as the “senior Hezbollah operative” who
was Iran’s liaison with al-Qaida.

A senior member of the 9/11 Commission staff confirmed this
information to me again just a few months ago. “You mean, someone
doesn’t know it was Mugniyeh?” he told me.

Despite the Commission’s calls for “further investigation” into Iran’s
role in the 9/11 attacks, no agency of the United States government
has delved into this subject in the four years since the report was
published.

The boxes of highly-classified documents detailing what the
intelligence community learned about Iran’s involvement with al Qaeda
— many of which were identified in footnotes to the pages of the
report dealing with Iran — were returned to their originating agencies
once the Commission completed its work, where they have been forgotten
like an old aunt dying of dementia.

Imad Mugniyeh’s ties to al-Qaida go back at least to 1993, according
to Osama bin Laden’s former bodyguard, Ali Mohamed.

Mohamed, an Egyptian special forces officer who came to America in the
1980s and enlisted in the U.S. Army, was later considered a
“confidential informant” by the FBI as they were investigating the
first World Trade Center bombing in 1993.

At the same time he was talking to the FBI, however, Mohamed was
traveling back and forth to Sudan, where bin Laden had moved in the
early 1990s.

Former Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew McCarthy interviewed Mohamed at
one point when he was still a confidential informant. “The more I
listened to him, the more I’m thinking, this guy is not a witness,
he’s a terrorist!” he told me.

Mohamed was arrested later for his role in the 1998 bombings of the
U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya and ultimately made a plea
bargain with the U.S. government.

During his “allocution” at his sentencing hearing in October 2000, he
revealed his personal knowledge of Iran’s early ties to his boss,
Osama bin Laden.

“I arranged security for a meeting in the Sudan between Mugniyeh,
Hezbollah’s chief, and bin Laden,” Mohamed told the court.

That meeting took place in 1993, and was a historic “terrorist summit”
that laid the ground work for a “cease fire” between Shiite Muslim
Iran and the radical Sunnis of Bin Laden’s organization, according to
former ABC news reporter and author, Peter Lance.

“Hezbollah provided explosives training for al-Qaida and al Jihad.
Iran supplied Egyptian Jihad with weapons,” Mohamed said at his
sentencing hearing.

Egyptian Jihad was the al-Qaida component run by Ayman al-Zawahri, the
man who is still wanted in Egypt for master-minding the 1981
assassination of President Anwar Sadat.

Zawahri is bin Laden’s top deputy. He was also the al-Qaida operative
who had the best connections with Iran, former Iranian intelligence
officers tell Newsmax.

Earlier this week, however, al Jazeera reported receiving a copy of a
90-minute video by Zawahri that blasted Iran’s leadership for “co-
operating with the Americans in occupying Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Those bitter words may have been a ploy aimed at disguising al-Qaida’s
long-standing ties to Iran, and at reassuring al-Qaida foot-soldiers
that the terrorist group had not lost the war in Iraq, but had been
undermined or sabotaged by fellow Muslims.

The 9/11 commission also described an al-Qaida team that “traveled to
Iran to receive training in explosives” after the initial 1993 meeting
between bin Laden, Mugniyeh, and an Iranian general in Khartoum.

“Bin Laden reportedly showed particular interest in learning how to
use truck bombs such as the one that had killed 241 U.S. Marines in
Lebanon in 1983,” the Commission report states.

Mugniyeh designed the twin truck bombs that killed the marines and
another 68 French soldiers in October 1983. Fifteen years later, al-
Qaida pulled off a similar attack, hitting two U.S. embassies in
Africa with truck bombs that exploded just minutes apart but in
different countries.

Iran’s role in the 9/11 conspiracy remains one of the best kept
secrets of the United States government.

“Al-Qaida also forged alliances with the National Islamic Front in the
Sudan and with the government of Iran and its associated terrorist
group Hezbollah for the purpose of working together against their
perceived common enemies in the West, particularly the United States,”
the original 1998 indictment against bin Laden for the Africa embassy
bombings revealed.

But the passage was redacted in later versions of the indictment,
perhaps to conceal intelligence sources.

I revealed key details of the Iran/al-Qaida relationship in "Countdown
to Crisis: The Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran."

• Top al-Qaida leaders, including Ayman al Zawahri and Saad bin Laden,
traveled to Iran in early 2001 to win Iranian cooperation in the 9/11
plot, according to an Iranian eyewitness of those meetings. Top among
their requests were assistance in getting al-Qaida operatives into and
out of Afghanistan without being detected by U.S. intelligence
networks in Pakistan.

• The CIA was warned of Iran’s growing ties with al-Qaida, and of
Iran’s intention to carry out a massive terrorist operation against
the United States jointly with al-Qaida, by an Iranian defector who
walked into the U.S. Embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan in July 2001. The CIA
dismissed the warning and called the defector “a fabricator.”

• Not long before 9/11, a private company used as a front by Iranian
intelligence purchased a Boeing 757/767/777 simulator through
commercial contacts, according to another Iranian defector who had
personal knowledge of the companies and individuals involved in the
purchase. Iran did not then, and does not today own such aircraft. The
planes hijacked on 9/11 were Boeing 757s and Boeing 767s.

• Several al-Qaida operatives convicted of terrorist crimes in Europe
have said in open court that before 9/11 they were ordered to get
travel documents from Iranian embassies in Europe and to travel
through Iran to reach Afghanistan as a means of eluding U.S.
surveillance.

• The United States government detected a “rat line” set up by Iran to
evacuate several hundred al-Qaida terrorists and their families from
Afghanistan to Iran in late 2001 and early 2002. The Iranians used
army helicopters, fixed wing aircraft, and convoys of Nissan Patrols
for the al-Qaida rat line.

• Since then, Iran has continued to provide shelter, sanctuary,
training and other material support to al-Qaida operatives and served
as a rear base for al al-Qaida operations in neighboring Iraq.

• U.S. negotiations with Iran in early 2003 fell apart after Iran
refused to hand over Saad Bin Laden and other top al-Qaida operatives
then living in Iran.

• The U.S. severed all contacts with Iran in May 2003, after they
intercepted orders from al-Qaida operatives in Iran to a cell in Saudi
Arabia to initiate a bloody wave of terrorist attacks in Riyadh that
the Saudis called their 9/11.

• Imad Mugniyeh was Iran’s chief liaison to al-Qaida both during the
preparation phase of the 9/11 plot, and afterwards.

• Several sources report that Osama bin Laden visited Iran to meet
with senior government leaders in November 2004.

Despite this wealth of evidence, the conventional wisdom within the
U.S. intelligence community continues to assert that Iran did not
assist al-Qaida because of the religious differences between them.

“The conventional wisdom is idiotic,” former CIA Director R. James
Woolsey told me.

“I don’t remember what so-called expert was saying that Shia Islamists
will never cooperate with Sunni Islamists or with secular terrorists,
but I’ve thought this line of reasoning on totalitarians was wrong
since I was a sophomore in college,” Woolsey said.

Since 2006, the U.S. military has discovered Iranian-made weapons with
Sunni insurgents in Iraq, and has documented Iran’s active assistance
to Sunni groups.

“Today, it is well known that Iran has been transferring weapons to
the Taliban and thus to whatever is left of al-Qaida — sleeping with
the Devil, so to speak — because it suits their larger political
purpose of attacking America,” said Edward Luttwak, a senior associate
at the Center for Security and International Studies in Washington,
DC.

http://www.newsmax.com/timmerman/ira...10/129632.html

wrote:
Iran’s Role in 9/11 Attack

Wednesday, September 10, 2008 7:56 PM

By: Kenneth R. Timmerman


In an auspicious passage that went virtually unreported at the time,
the 9/11 Commission revealed in July 2004 that they “now have evidence
suggesting that 8 to 10 of the 14 Saudi ‘muscle’ operatives traveled
into or out of Iran between October 2000 and February 2001.”

The “muscle” operatives were the 9/11 hijackers who overpowered
airline crew members, slit their throats, and terrorized passengers so
the al-Qaida pilots could seize control of the airliners and fly them
into their targets.

The Commissioners concluded that there was “strong evidence that Iran
facilitated the transit of al-Qaida members into and out of
Afghanistan before 9/11, and that some of these were future 9/11
hijackers.”

“We believe this topic requires further investigation by the U.S.
government,” the Commissioners wrote.

This heavily-redacted passage in the July 2004 final report of the
9/11 Commission provided a tantalizing glimpse into the information
gathered by the U.S. intelligence community — mainly from national
technical means — on Iran’s material involvement in the 9/11 attacks.

And yet, until now it has been widely ignored by the intelligence
community, Congress, and most of the press.

I first revealed the inside story of what the 9/11 Commission found
out about Iran’s involvement in the 9/11 plot in my 2005 book
Countdown to Crisis: the Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran.

Among other things, I discovered from sources on the Commission that
the “senior Hezbollah operative” who accompanied the al-Qaida muscle
hijackers on flights from Saudi Arabia and Beirut to Tehran was none
other than Iran’s star terrorist, Imad Fayez Mugniyeh.

Either Mugniyeh’s presence on those flights was hard evidence that
Iran was actively and materially involved with the future al-Qaida
terrorists, or it was a “remarkable coincidence,” the 9/11 Commission
report stated.

[Editor's Note: Read “Iran’s Arch-Terror Master Killed in Syria” ].

I also interviewed a former Revolutionary Guards Colonel who gave
paramilitary and intelligence training to al-Qaida terrorists at a
specialized training camp in Iran before 9/11.

Former FBI assistant director Oliver “Buck” Revell tracked Mugniyeh
during the 1980s because of his involvement in the deadly bombings of
the U.S. Embassy and the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, among other
attacks.

“Mugniyeh is more dangerous and has killed more people and tortured
more people than any other terrorist,” Revell told me earlier this
year.

“Whenever he’s under pressure, he goes to Iran. He’s the creature of
the IRGC [the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps]. He’s the international
link between Hezbollah and the IRGC.”

Not long after the 9/11 attacks, Deputy Secretary of State Richard
Armitage called Mugniyeh’s Hezbollah “the A-Team of terrorists, and
maybe al-Qaida is actually the 'B' team.”

Armitage never accused Hezbollah or Mugniyeh of involvement in the
attacks, but was referring to their twenty-five-year history of
killing Americans.

Mugniyeh was assassinated on February 12, 2008, when he turned on the
ignition of his Mitsubishi Pajero in a highly-secure neighborhood of
Damascus, Syria. He had just left a meeting with the head of Syrian
intelligence, Rostam Ghazali, and with a senior Iranian intelligence
officer.

Most commentators speculated that Mugniyeh had been assassinated by
the Israelis, because of his ongoing role as Hezbollah’s military
chief. But a Newsmax source close to Hezbollah speculated that he had
been killed by the Iranians.

“Haj Radwan [a nom de guerre for Mugniyeh] knew too much, and had
outlived his usefulness to the Iranians,” the source said.

New York Times reporter Philip Shenon also examined Iran’s involvement
in the 9/11 plot in his recent book, The Commission, which details the
political infighting among the staff and commissioners as they debated
whether to apportion blame between the Clinton and Bush
administrations for missing the signs of the impending attacks.

But Shenon — like the published 9/11 commission report itself — falls
short of naming Imad Mugniyeh as the “senior Hezbollah operative” who
was Iran’s liaison with al-Qaida.

A senior member of the 9/11 Commission staff confirmed this
information to me again just a few months ago. “You mean, someone
doesn’t know it was Mugniyeh?” he told me.

Despite the Commission’s calls for “further investigation” into Iran’s
role in the 9/11 attacks, no agency of the United States government
has delved into this subject in the four years since the report was
published.

The boxes of highly-classified documents detailing what the
intelligence community learned about Iran’s involvement with al Qaeda
— many of which were identified in footnotes to the pages of the
report dealing with Iran — were returned to their originating agencies
once the Commission completed its work, where they have been forgotten
like an old aunt dying of dementia.

Imad Mugniyeh’s ties to al-Qaida go back at least to 1993, according
to Osama bin Laden’s former bodyguard, Ali Mohamed.

Mohamed, an Egyptian special forces officer who came to America in the
1980s and enlisted in the U.S. Army, was later considered a
“confidential informant” by the FBI as they were investigating the
first World Trade Center bombing in 1993.

FBI CI's are usually total bull****. They are notorious liars.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004...sa.september11