January 29, 2009 -- Former CIA asset speaks out after criminal charges dropped...
Former CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) non-official cover (NOC) asset Susan Lindauer is speaking out after, in one of its final acts, the Bush Justice Department dropped all criminal charges against her for acting as an "unregistered" agent of the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein, traveling to Baghdad, and other acts. Lindauer was arrested in March 2004 after she volunteered to testify before a blue ribbon commission on pre-war intelligence on Iraq. Lindauer, the second cousin of George W. Bush White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card and the daughter of a one-time Republican gubernatorial candidate in Alaska, approached two commission members, Trent Lott of Mississippi and John McCain of Arizona with her offer of testimony about intelligence. It was after she made her approach that she was arrested on charges of acting on behalf of Iraq's government...
Lindauer had also kept her cousin Card apprised of all relevant information on Iraq from 2000 until the time of her arrest.
The judge in Lindauer's case, Michael Mukasey of the Southern U.S. District of Manhattan, ordered Lindauer to a federal prison facility at Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth, Texas for a psychiatric evaluation because federal prosecutors, led by Assistant U.S. Attorney Edward O'Callaghan, insisted that Lindauer was delusional about being a CIA and DIA asset. Mukasey, after becoming Attorney General, never recused himself from the prosecution of Lindauer. Mukasey, as the judge in the case, prevented the government from forcibly administering Haldol or similar drugs to Lindauer while she was being held in confinement at Carswell. Lindauer was confined at Carswell for seven months even though the maximum time the government was permitted to hold her at the facility was four months.
Now free to speak after the criminal charges were dropped against her, Lindauer says she warned prior to 9/11 that a major attack would occur in southern Manhattan in the autumn of 2001 that would involve hijacked planes and a repeat of the 1993 World Trade Center terrorist attack. Lindauer's pre-9/11 warnings of the attacks were verified by Dr. Park Godfrey, as associate professor of computer science at York University in Toronto, Canada.
In her NOC asset role, Lindauer covered the Iraqi and Libyan missions to the United Nations in New York. She refused to discuss details of the non-official cover status under which she worked, saying it remains sensitive information. Neither country had diplomatic relations with the United States and, therefore, had no embassies in Washington, DC. Lindauer was responsible for maintaining "back channel" links between U.S. intelligence and Iraq and Libya, primarily dealing with counter-terrorism matters.
Lindauer said her CIA handler, Richard Fuisz, a long-time U.S. intelligence agent in the Middle East, said the CIA learned from the Pan Am 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland that terrorists might use hijacked planes as weapons. Lindauer said that Fuisz was based in Syria in the 1980s and was close to then-President Hafez al-Assad. However, Fuisz almost ended up in a Syrian prison after he was discovered to have stolen the blueprints for Syria's telecommunications system.
Lindauer was told by Fuisz to pass on to both Libya and Iraq that if either government heard even so much as a whisper about terrorists using hijacked planes to hit targets in the United States and did not pass that intelligence on to the CIA, through Lindauer, that the United States would bomb both countries "back into the Stone Age."
Apparently, Lindauer did pick up intelligence about plane hijackings and the World Trade Center in August 2001 and Fuisz told her to pass the information on to Attorney General John Ashcroft's Office of Counter-terrorism, which she did. Lindauer's intelligence was very specific: that planes would be used to strike the World Trade Center...
The former NOC agent said on 9/11, Fuisz told her that before the North and South Towers of the World Trade Center collapsed, a man and woman were standing near the burning complex with a video camera. The man and the woman were discovered to be Israeli nationals and agents for Mossad. The CIA determined that the Mossad pair knew in advance that the buildings would collapse. According to Lindauer, Fuisz was in McLean, Virginia and she was in Washington, DC when they had their phone conversation on the morning of 9/11. Lindauer said that Fuisz said they must never again discuss Mossad's role ever again over the telephone. Lindauer said that neither Libya nor Iraq had any prior intelligence on Mossad's involvement in the 9/11 attacks...
Lindauer said she was one of three assets being run by U.S. intelligence to keep lines of communications open with Iraq. The other two were the sons of an Iraqi diplomat in New York who worked at a dry cleaner. Lindauer said the two Iraqi men were also arrested and charged with espionage on behalf of Iraq.
Lindauer emphasized the CIA's and DIA's back channel program with Baghdad was successful and that Saddam's Foreign Ministry constantly fed intelligence on jihadist terrorist activity to the United States, including information on the USS Cole bombing in Aden in October 2000. Lindauer said Saddam's government "was good on cooperating with the United States on anti-terrorism."
Lindauer revealed that prior to 9/11, Saddam had agreed to permit the FBI to open a counter-terrorism liaison office in Baghdad and to give the Bush administration financial records on Al Qaeda's money movements. The Bush administration refused the offers....
Saddam also promised to give U.S. companies Iraq reconstruction contracts after sanctions were lifted and even said he would cancel existing oil contracts with Russia's Lukoil and France's Total-Elf-Fina and give them to U.S. oil companies. The Bush administration rebuffed the offers...
The Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal, who lived in Baghdad in exile, was assassinated by Saddam's security forces in a move to please Washington. Even though it was later determined that Nidal was also a one-time CIA asset, Washington never reciprocated for Saddam's actions against Nidal.
Like CIA NOC Valerie Plame Wilson, who, along with her NOC firm Brewster Jennings & Associates, was outed by the Bush White House, the failure of the Bush administration to protect Lindauer and her contacts had potentially catastrophic consequences. Lindauer said her intelligence work with Iraq and Libya had made her enemy number one for Syrian-based Ahmed Jibril's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command, the actual perpetrators, along with Iran, of the Pan Am 103 bombing.
Prosecutor O'Callaghan, in his arguments before Mukasey, stated that neither Lindauer nor Fuisz were with the CIA. He said Fuisz was not a CIA agent and Lindauer was not an asset of either the CIA or the DIA. However, witnesses from the Lockerbie trial testified that Fuisz was with the CIA. Originally, Lindauer had a public defender named Sam Talkin, who appeared to be working with the prosecutors to have Lindauer jailed.
Lindauer revealed that both her second cousin Card, as well as Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, testified against her before the grand jury. Libby was later indicted and convicted for perjury and obstruction in the investigation of the leak of Plame Wilson's CIA identity to the media. Bush commuted Libby's prison sentence but did not issue a pardon. Libby's prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, is a veteran of the Southern District of New York and,as previously reported by us, suppressed critical evidence, in concert with North Jersey prosecutor Michael Chertoff, on the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. It is not known where O'Callaghan, Lindauer's prosecutor, and Fitzgerald are friends. However, O'Callaghan left New York in August 2008 and moved to Anchorage, Alaska to head up Governor Sarah Palin's "truth squad" in the Troopergate scandal. It is suspected that had McCain won the presidential election, O'Callaghan would have become Attorney General or Deputy Attorney General.
The most biased coverage of the Lindauer story came from The New York Times, which engaged in personal attacks on Lindauer's credibility during the court hearings.
Bush and Cheney and their henchmen were responsible for 9/11, it would be just another crime to add to a long list of crimes that have, in certain cases, also killed thousands -- like the lies that, like a spider’s web, entrapped the American military in Iraq. 9/11 could just be standard operating procedure for the Empire, another “false flag” attack, like the Tonkin Gulf situation in Vietnam, staged to enlist public support for expanded military operations abroad; and a search for 9/11 truth will in the end be as fruitless as the search for the truth of JFK’s assassination. And even if, as with JFK, a majority of Americans come to believe that the US government is the prime suspect, nothing will ever come of this belief.
I’ve had a number of conversations with liberal 9/11 truth skeptics, and my general impression has been that the primary reason they are skeptical of “conspiracy theory” (aside from their fear of ridicule) is that they don’t know very much about the subject.
In the first place, their defense of the official story is built upon the utterly illogical premise that, even though Bush and company have lied about virtually every matter of executive branch responsibility, from science to intelligence to defense contracting to politicization of the Justice Department, on this one issue -- 9/11 -- they are telling the truth. How much sense does that make?
And every other point in the “liberal” defense of the official theory (i.e., Arabs in caves outwit stupid Bushies) is subject to serious question. Bush’s incompetence? On the contrary, it could be argued that Bush and Cheney accomplished everything they wanted to while in office. The biggest asset that went into Bush’s so-called “blind trust” when he entered office in 2001 was Exxon stock -- a company that has seen world record profits ever since the Iraq invasion. And Halliburton stock has also soared.
The traditional Bush family interests, especially the defense and energy industries, have prospered mightily. A compliant media let Bush and Cheney do whatever they wanted for eight years, whatever the law might say, and are still on full guard, trying to protect them from investigation and prosecution. And Bush, in an Oedipal frenzy, vastly outdid his father’s measly half a trillion dollar savings and loan taxpayer rip-off, with trillions of dollars stolen from generations of taxpayers, and redistributed with unprecedented arrogance directly into the pockets of the wealthiest cronies of the power elite -- no questions asked. Bush played his dumb smirking redneck shticks to perfection.
On the other hand, as David Ray Griffin notes in his latest book, The New Pearl Harbor Revisited, Bush’s incompetence, as such, is on ready display in the fact that there are so many glaring holes in the official story -- from the lies told by the military and CIA to the 9/11 Commission, so egregious that the co-chairs considered asking for federal indictments; to the violations of fundamental laws of physics in the official explanations for the unprecedented “collapse” of three steel-framed skyscrapers in one day -- the only steel-framed buildings in history to “collapse” due to fire.
Also, the “need to know” compartmentalization of American intelligence guarantees that only a few key people, and possibly some outsourced mercenaries, would need to know the full story of the 9/11 operation; and either patriotism, bureaucratic groupthink, fear or money would keep everybody else in line. The few whistleblowers, like the FBI’s Sibel Edmonds, who had the courage to destroy their careers for the sake of truth, have been easily turned into “nonpersons” by a corporate-controlled media coordinating their broadcasts with a Defense Department psychological operations agenda, a dynamic revealed by the New York Times in its analysis of conflicts of interest among “independent” TV network military “analysts” (more accurately, Pentagon propagandists).
But it’s their lack of knowledge of significant 9/11 details that, in my experience, usually leaves liberal 9/11 truth skeptics in dumbstruck confusion, when confronted with facts.
In the first place, they’re generally unaware that 9/11 questions go way beyond “theory.” There is hard, cold physical evidence, from the microspheres of melted steel found in every single sample of dust from the World Trade Center (and which the US Geological Survey said needed to be further investigated, and never were); to the melting and “sulphurization” of the steel beams of WTC Building 7, as reported by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and which the New York Times called “the biggest mystery” of 9/11 -- and which was also never investigated further.
A few weeks ago, after the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) corrected its years-delayed draft report on the destruction of WTC7 (which was never hit by an airplane), to finally concede that critics of the original draft were correct that the 47-story building collapsed at free-fall speed (a concession ignored by corporate media), there was a discussion of the report at the website Democratic Underground.
The first reply to the original post was a snarky comment about “Bigfoot” causing the collapse, which initiated a sometimes ugly debate between defenders of the official story and 9/11 truth advocates. The “Bigfoot” commenter kept repeating, “Go read the report,” and giving the NIST URL. I was surprised that no one thought to tell him, on a site as tuned-in as DU, that he may as well have been saying, “Well, go ask George W. Bush,” since NIST is just a branch of Bush’s Commerce Department. Like I said, we now know about outright lies, especially lies about science, coming from every Bush-era executive branch agency, from EPA to CIA. Why would NIST be exempt from this pattern?
Not only that, but anyone can watch a Youtube video of one of NIST’s lead investigators, engineer John Gross, lying through his teeth in a public forum, trying, in answer to a question, to deny the existence of molten steel in the WTC rubble (since the NIST report, like every other government report, had to acknowledge that the fires barely got hot enough to weaken steel, much less melt it, and then only for brief periods). In the clip, he archly maintains, “I didn’t see any molten metal,” and claims ignorance of contrary accounts from numerous other eyewitnesses (including the WTC’s lead engineer), video of heavy equipment pulling molten metal out of the rubble, fires that smoldered at the site for months, and satellite thermal imagery.
NIST admits in all its WTC reports that it never investigated for the possibility of explosives in the buildings, even though that is standard procedure in fire investigations, and in spite of the questions raised in the USGS and FEMA reports about unexplained phenomena in the WTC steel, and in spite of the testimony of hundreds of eyewitnesses (including over a hundred firefighters) who said that they heard explosions in the buildings. An ABC report on the day of the attacks said that the FBI was initially working on the hypothesis that bombs had been planted in the World Trade Center.
Where liberal skeptics really freak out, however, is when they hear about the eerie “coincidences” related to WTC security in the weeks before the 9/11 attacks, “coincidences” greatly underplayed in the corporate media -- about the mysterious workmen upgrading the WTC electrical system, laying cable for a company owned by a Skull and Bones fraternity brother of the Bush family; about the unprecedented complete “power down” of the WTC complex the weekend before the attack; about the removal of bomb-sniffing security dogs from the WTC the Thursday before the attacks -- dogs who never returned to duty; about the CEO of the company in charge of WTC security being George W’s alleged cousin, Wirt Walker, who was also joined on the company’s board of directors by Bush’s brother, Marvin; about the millions (perhaps billions) of dollars made on unprecedented stock trades in the days right before the attacks, made on companies directly affected by the attacks, by traders whose actions were declared “innocent” and whose identities were kept secret by a 9/11 Commission staff who otherwise judged the source of funding for the 9/11 attacks to be “unimportant,” and who worked under the direction of a White House mole secretly communicating with Karl Rove, despite his assurances to the contrary to the Commission’s co-chairs.
Considered together, these “coincidences” are enough to generate a case of cognitive dissonance -- and often do -- among those who want to believe that “the system” still works.
It is the cumulative weight and seriousness of the questions that remain about 9/11, however, that lead me to think that Barack Obama is not in fact a skeptic of 9/11 truth. He’s much too smart to ignore the obvious contradictions in the official story. But that scenario opens up a pretty complicated can of worms....
