Was Delta 1989 Part of a Live-Fly Hijacking Exercise on 9/11?

It has been widely reported that on September 11, 2001, four passenger aircraft were hijacked, and three of them subsequently hit their intended targets in New York and Washington. Less well known is that, during the two hours over which the 9/11 attacks occurred, air traffic controllers and military personnel had to devote significant time to a fifth plane that was incorrectly reported as hijacked. This aircraft was, in the words of one military official, "the first red herring of the day." [1]

The aircraft was Delta Air Lines Flight 1989, a Boeing 767 that had taken off from Boston. From around 9:30 a.m., it was repeatedly suspected of having been hijacked. Even though subsequent events had indicated the aircraft was fine, a police SWAT team and FBI agents were sent out to it after it made an emergency landing in Cleveland, Ohio, and it was not until about two hours after the plane landed that all its passengers had been allowed off.

While a person might dismiss the suspicions about Delta 1989 as understandable mistakes in the chaos and confusion of the attacks, there is another possible explanation for what happened. We know that the U.S. military and other government agencies were running various training exercises on September 11. At least one military exercise was scheduled to include the scenario of a plane being hijacked. In light of this, the possibility arises that Delta 1989 was playing the part of a hijacked aircraft in a training exercise, and this led to all the mistaken reports about it. Certainly, the number and nature of suspicious incidents around Delta 1989 make this possibility seem worthy of serious consideration.

While much remains speculative, if this explanation is correct, it would have serious implications. It would mean that, at the time the attacks took place, a "live-fly" exercise was being conducted, which involved a real aircraft pretending to be hijacked. It would imply that this exercise was not promptly canceled, but instead continued throughout the entire duration of the attacks. And it would raise a sinister possibility: that the role of Delta 1989--and the exercise it participated in--was to somehow help rogue individuals within the U.S. military and government to successfully perpetrate the 9/11 attacks.

TWO CATEGORIES OF EVIDENCE

There are two specific categories of evidence indicating that Delta 1989 was a mock hijacked aircraft in an exercise. Firstly, there were incidents where the plane and its pilots behaved unusually, such as failing to respond to radio communications. It was as if they were playing the part of a plane under siege, in order to test the ability of Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and military personnel on the ground to recognize and respond to a hijacking. Secondly, there were incidents where some government personnel and members of the military alerted others that Delta 1989 had been hijacked, or was in danger of being hijacked, apparently with little justification for doing so. It is at least possible that these individuals were 'injecting' false information into the system, for the sake of the exercise, in order to create a realistic impression that Delta 1989 had been hijacked, when in reality it was fine.

I will describe this evidence later on, and then conclude by examining a military exercise that was held in mid-2002, which makes clear what kind of role Delta 1989 might have played in an exercise on September 11.

DELTA 1989 RESEMBLED FLIGHTS 11 AND 175

One thing that is notable about Delta 1989 is how much it resembled American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175--the first planes to be hijacked, which crashed into the World Trade Center. Like these aircraft, Delta 1989 was a Boeing 767, heavy with fuel, and making a transcontinental flight across America. Also like these two flights, it had taken off from Boston's Logan Airport, at around the same time as they had done. [2] And according to numerous accounts, it had the same destination as Flights 11 and 175, of Los Angeles, California. [3] (However, a few accounts have said its destination was Las Vegas. [4])

Some accounts have claimed that Delta 1989's similarity to Flights 11 and 175 contributed to it mistakenly being suspected as hijacked. But if Delta 1989 was involved in a training exercise, this would mean that an exercise was scheduled for 9/11 in which the mock hijacked aircraft had almost identical characteristics as two of the aircraft targeted in the real-world attacks. This would be an extraordinary "coincidence," to say the least, if not highly suspicious.

Not only did Delta 1989 resemble the first two hijacked planes, it also happened to be just 25 miles behind the fourth hijacked plane--United Airlines Flight 93--at the time this aircraft was apparently taken over by hijackers. This caused air traffic controllers at the FAA's Cleveland Center to initially conclude that Delta 1989, not United 93, had been hijacked. When, at 9:28, controller John Werth heard screaming over the radio, he was unsure which aircraft, out of seven or eight in the airspace he was monitoring, it had come from. When the Cleveland Center controllers then heard a voice with a heavy accent over the radio, saying "Ladies and gentlemen: Here the captain. ... We have a bomb on board," they thought it had come from Delta 1989. They concluded that the Delta flight had been hijacked and started notifying their chain of command of this. It was only after Flight 93 was subsequently observed flying erratically and its pilots failed to respond to radio communications that Werth concluded this flight, and not Delta 1989, had been hijacked. [5]

WAS DELTA 1989 PLAYING A HIJACKED AIRCRAFT IN AN EXERCISE?

It has been well established that the U.S. military and other government agencies were conducting training exercises at the time the 9/11 attacks occurred, and some of the exercise scenarios had uncanny similarities to the actual attacks. [6] One exercise, which was being conducted by the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), was scheduled to include a simulated aircraft hijacking. As Vanity Fair described, this exercise "was designed to run a range of scenarios, including a 'traditional' simulated hijack in which politically motivated perpetrators commandeer an aircraft, land on a Cuba-like island, and seek asylum." [7]

When NORAD's Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS) in Rome, New York, was notified of the first real-world hijacking at 8:38 a.m., its mission crew commander, Major Kevin Nasypany, thought this was part of the exercise, which he'd helped to design. He said out loud, "The hijack's not supposed to be for another hour." [8] NEADS was in fact alerted to the suspected hijacking of Delta 1989 almost exactly one hour later, at 9:39 a.m. [9] This was therefore around the time it was due to be notified of the simulated hijacking in the exercise, and supports the contention that Delta 1989 was playing the targeted aircraft in that exercise.

Delta 1989 made an emergency landing at Cleveland Hopkins Airport shortly after 10:15 a.m. [10] Cleveland was one of six major Ohio cities that for several years had been part of a federal program to help defend against domestic terrorism. [11] A possibility therefore worth considering is that the decision to land Delta 1989 in Cleveland was made before 9/11, so that personnel on the ground there would be able to respond to a simulated hijacking, as part of a training exercise for this federal program.

DELTA 1989 INDICATED THAT IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN HIJACKED

As previously mentioned, there are two categories of evidence that suggest Delta 1989 was playing a hijacked aircraft in an exercise. The first category involves incidents where the plane and its pilots behaved suspiciously. These incidents are summarized below.

i) Just after 9:39 a.m., when a radio transmission was heard coming from the hijacked Flight 93 in which a hijacker said, "There is a bomb on board," Cleveland Center controller John Werth started handing off the flights he was dealing with to other controllers so he could devote his attention to Flight 93. But, according to author Lynn Spencer, the crew of Delta 1989 missed the hand-off to their new frequency. The new sector controller dealing with Delta 1989 called out to the plane several times but received no response from its pilots. According to Spencer, Delta 1989 "was out of radio contact for several minutes," and this news soon reached an FAA teleconference. [12]

ii) Cleveland Center controllers again became suspicious when, at 9:44 a.m., the pilot of Delta 1989, Captain Paul Werner, called and requested a change of course so he could land in Cleveland. As USA Today noted, "the captain's request comes before he can know that the FAA wants every flight down." [13] (The FAA Command Center instructed air traffic control centers to tell all aircraft to land at the nearest airport a minute later, at 9:45. [14]) USA Today continued: "On this day, the fact that the pilot requests to be rerouted before he is ordered to land seems suspicious. Why the urgency?" The reason was reportedly that Delta Air Lines had been alerted to the concerns about Flight 1989's safety and had been closely monitoring the aircraft. It had then sent the pilots an instruction to "Land immediately in Cleveland." But even though Cleveland Center was in charge of Delta 1989, for some reason it was not informed of this. [15] Its air traffic controllers then noticed Delta 1989 making a 30-degree turn back toward its new destination of the Cleveland airport. Spencer described, "An abrupt change of course for a transcontinental [Boeing] 767 out of Boston raises further suspicion." [16]

iii) As Delta 1989 descended toward Cleveland, controllers at the Cleveland Center became suspicious again because pilot Paul Werner failed to reply to a message. According to USA Today, the reason was simply that Werner was "busy." But the controllers grew "alarmed. Why didn't he respond? Have both jets--the United [Flight 93] and the Delta flights--been hijacked?" [17]

iv) A notable example of Delta 1989 behaving unusually--perhaps because it was playing a hijacked plane in an exercise--occurred while it was under the control of the Cleveland Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON). TRACONs are FAA facilities that guide aircraft approaching or departing an airport. The Cleveland TRACON was in contact with Delta 1989 as it descended from 9,000 feet down to 3,000 feet. [18]

According to a detailed chronology produced shortly after 9/11 by the Cleveland Airport air traffic control tower, "One anomaly that perpetuated concern" at the TRACON was that Paul Werner "never used the 'heavy' designator in his communications." [19] The term "heavy" notifies controllers that they need to provide extra space behind very large aircraft, which are above a certain weight, because these aircraft generate significant wake turbulence. [20] The TRACON controllers used this important term in their communications with Delta 1989, but "the pilot did not respond with it."

Although this may seem a minor technicality, it is of much significance. The control tower's chronology stated: "The use of 'heavy' in the terminal environment is of the highest importance. Increased separation standards are required, and misapplication of separation standards can be disastrous. For pilots, not referring to a heavy aircraft as 'heavy' is tantamount to calling a doctor 'Mister.'" Therefore, Werner's failure to use the term "kept everyone alert and skeptical of the security" of Delta 1989. [21]

Could the reason Werner failed to use the 'heavy' designator be that he was acting the part of a pilot who was surreptitiously trying to alert controllers that something was wrong on his flight, as part of an exercise?

v) A curious final incident occurred after Delta 1989 landed at Cleveland Hopkins Airport. The plane was directed to park at a remote area, and its pilots were told not to allow passengers off. Eventually, the Cleveland Police SWAT (special weapons and tactics) team and a team of FBI agents went out to the aircraft. [22] Members of the SWAT team, who'd taken up a position just behind the aircraft, saw Paul Werner with blood running down his face as he leaned out of the window to give them the "all clear" signal. The explanation Spencer has given for his bleeding face is that Werner accidentally knocked his head and cut it when he returned to his seat, after going to the cabin to speak to the plane's passengers. While this may be correct, in light of the evidence described above, might Werner's bloodied face alternatively have been simulated--using fake blood--because he was acting the part of the pilot of a plane under siege? Perhaps this was supposed to convey the impression that he had been assaulted by one of the exercise's mock hijackers. [23]

If Delta 1989 was taking part in a training exercise, the evidence above raises an important question: How aware were the pilots that real-world attacks had occurred in New York and Washington? Reportedly, at around 9:15 a.m., they heard over the radio that two aircraft had crashed into the World Trade Center. According to USA Today, Werner figured these planes "must be small ones--not passenger jets like the Boeing 767 he commands." The pilots also heard the hijacker transmissions, apparently coming from Flight 93, between 9:28 and 9:39 a.m. [24] But did they think these hijacker communications and the news of the attacks in New York were real, or did they believe they were part of an exercise? The question remains uninvestigated and, therefore, unanswered.

MILITARY AND OTHER GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS WRONGLY REPORTED DELTA 1989 AS HIJACKED

The second category of evidence that Delta 1989 was playing a hijacked aircraft in an exercise is a series of incidents where personnel within the military and other government agencies reported that the flight had been hijacked, or was in danger of being hijacked, apparently without having much evidence that this was the case.

Again, individually these incidents could be dismissed as understandable results of the morning's confusion, or as concerns elicited by the unprecedented and shocking events taking place. But the number of incorrect reports suggests the possibility that false information was being deliberately 'injected' into the system for an exercise, to create a realistic impression that Delta 1989 was a hijacked aircraft. The incidents are summarized below.

i) The first three notable incidents occurred before anyone claimed Delta 1989 had been hijacked. Shortly after 9:03 a.m., when the second plane hit the World Trade Center, FBI agents called the FAA's Cleveland Center and warned its controllers to keep an eye on Delta 1989. According to USA Today, the FBI suspected "that terrorists plan to hijack [Delta 1989] next." Apparently they had seen no indications that the flight was in danger, but were concerned because of its similarities to the first two hijacked aircraft, such as it having taken off from Boston at around the same time as them. [25]

ii) Then, at 9:19 a.m., the FAA's New England regional office called the FAA's Command Center in Herndon, Virginia, and asked it to tell the Cleveland Center to contact Delta 1989 and advise its pilots to use extra cockpit security. It is unclear why the New England regional office made this request. In response to it, as the 9/11 Commission described, the Command Center "ordered controllers to send a cockpit warning to Delta 1989 because, like American 11 and United 175, it was a transcontinental flight departing Boston's Logan Airport." [26]

The FAA's Boston Center had previously asked the Command Center to contact all FAA centers, with the instruction to tell airborne aircraft to increase their cockpit security. What is curious is that the Command Center's instruction to the Cleveland Center regarding Delta 1989 was apparently an exception: the 9/11 Commission has said it found "no evidence to suggest that the Command Center acted on [the Boston Center's] request." [27]

iii) The third incident from before Delta 1989 was suspected as hijacked occurred at 9:27 a.m. Colonel Alan Scott, the former vice commander of the Continental United States NORAD Region, told the 9/11 Commission that, at this time, the FAA's Boston Center reported to NEADS "a fifth aircraft missing, Delta Flight '89." [28] Boston Center's report to NEADS was odd for two reasons. Firstly, Delta 1989 "never turned off its transponder," according to the 9/11 Commission, so it was never missing and should have been clearly visible on radar at all times. [29] Secondly, at 9:27, Delta 1989 was being handled by the FAA's Cleveland Center, not the Boston Center. [30] So why did the Boston Center contact NEADS about a flight that was not under its command?

iv) Boston Center called NEADS again at 9:39 a.m. regarding Delta 1989. Colin Scoggins, the center's military liaison, reported that the flight was a possible hijack. [31] Again, the question applies as to why the Boston Center made this call, since Delta 1989 was still under the control of the FAA's Cleveland Center. [32] And it appears that Scoggins had no evidence that the flight had been targeted. According to the 9/11 Commission, Boston Center simply "guessed that Delta 1989 might also be hijacked," apparently because--like Flights 11 and 175--it was a transcontinental 767 that had departed Boston's Logan Airport. [33]

v) At 9:45 a.m., one of the ID technicians at NEADS called the FAA's Cleveland Center and incorrectly said that Delta 1989 was "a confirmed hijack." This prompted a supervisor there to go "running back and forth" around the center, informing the controllers and managers of the news. [34]

The supervisor, Kim Wernica, spoke to John Werth, the controller who had been handling Delta 1989. She told him, "It's the Delta, it's the Delta!" She said a military liaison on the phone had confirmed that the Delta jet had been hijacked. However, due to its pilots' normal responses to his instructions, Werth had already concluded that Delta 1989 had not been hijacked. He told Wernica he was pretty sure that Flight 93, not Delta 1989, had been hijacked, and when she returned a few moments later, he said Delta 1989 was "fine, at least for now." But after Wernica consulted again on the phone, she came back and said to Werth, "They said it's a confirmed hijack and a bomb threat." Convinced that Delta 1989 was being confused with United 93, Werth responded, "Tell them they're full of it!" [35]

MILITARY, FAA, POLICE, AND FBI RESPONDED TO HIJACK REPORTS

Although they turned out to be incorrect, the reports that Delta 1989 had been hijacked were taken seriously at the time and acted upon. NEADS commanders ordered their troops to call Air National Guard bases in the vicinity of the Delta aircraft, to see if any of them could launch fighter jets. [36] According to the 9/11 Commission, NEADS ordered jets from Ohio and Michigan to intercept Delta 1989. [37]

When Delta 1989 was coming in to land, Cleveland Hopkins Airport was evacuated. As Spencer wrote, this was because the flight was "confirmed hijacked," and air traffic controllers "believe it contains a bomb intended to detonate when the aircraft crashes into the terminal." [38] Furthermore, for the first time in his administration, Mayor Michael White ordered the evacuation of all federal and city buildings in Cleveland; a parking ban was issued downtown; and owners of large commercial high-rises in Cleveland were asked to evacuate their buildings. [39]

After it landed, Delta 1989 had to park at a remote area of Cleveland Airport, far away from the terminal. Its passengers were only allowed off after a police SWAT team came out, and FBI agents then carefully took the passengers off the plane in small groups. [40] Bomb-sniffing dogs were subsequently taken onboard and the aircraft was searched, but no explosives were found. [41]

EXERCISE MAY HAVE CONTINUED DESPITE REAL-WORLD ATTACKS

If, as the evidence above indicates, Delta 1989 was part of a military exercise based around a fictitious aircraft hijacking, this raises serious questions about the events of 9/11 and the emergency response to the attacks.

The evidence casts doubt on the claim that a NORAD exercise that morning was canceled after Flight 175 hit the South Tower of the WTC at 9:03 a.m. According to Airman, the official magazine of the U.S. Air Force, "Shortly after the second airliner smashed into [the] World Trade Center ... the exercise ceased." [42] Larry Arnold, the commanding general of the Continental United States NORAD Region, said that after Flight 175 hit the South Tower, "I thought it might be prudent to pull out of the exercise, which we did." [43]

But if Delta 1989 was participating in it, then the evidence indicates that this exercise continued for much longer. For example, NEADS received the incorrect report that Delta 1989 was a possible hijacking at 9:39 a.m., and called the FAA's Cleveland Center to report the aircraft as a "confirmed hijack" at 9:45 a.m. These two communications could have been part of the exercise, intended to 'inject' a realistic impression of a hijacking into the system.

And it appears that Delta 1989 may still have been playing a hijacked aircraft while it came in to land (with the pilot failing to use the 'heavy' designator), and continued doing so after it landed at around 10:18 a.m. (when the pilot appeared out of the plane's window, apparently with blood running down his face). This would mean the exercise continued throughout the entire duration of the real-world attacks, ending only after the fourth aircraft to be targeted--Flight 93--supposedly crashed in Pennsylvania at 10:03 a.m. [44] If this was indeed the case, why was the simulated hijacking allowed to continue for so long? And who was responsible for this?

A LIVE-FLY EXERCISE IN 2002

We can better understand the role Delta 1989 might have played on September 11 by examining a later NORAD training exercise. "Amalgam Virgo 02" was a "live-fly" exercise conducted in June 2002, although NORAD was planning it as early as July 2001. [45]

This exercise involved two real aircraft being "hijacked," with actors playing the terrorists. One aircraft, a Delta Air Lines 757, was bound from Utah to Alaska and was taken over by FBI agents acting as hijackers. The other was a Navy C-9 bound from Washington State to Vancouver, Canada, with members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police playing the hijackers. On both planes, military personnel acted as civilian passengers, but the 757 had actual Delta Air Lines pilots at the controls. According to a NORAD spokesman, "both aircraft ... were to receive instructions once in-air, detailing the hijacking scenario affecting them and the roles they were to play."

NORAD launched fighter jets in response to the simulated hijackings. CNN reported before the exercise: "We don't know exactly how these [simulated] hijackings will play out. Neither do the pilots. Even their bases from which the U.S. and military--the U.S.-Canadian jets will be scrambled, don't know they are." After NORAD ran through a number of scenarios, the mock hijacked planes landed and law enforcement officers on the ground ran through scenarios around dealing with the hijackers.

About 1,500 people participated in Amalgam Virgo 02, including employees of NORAD, the FAA, the FBI, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), and Delta Air Lines. The NORAD spokesman said the exercise was "very intense, very realistic." [46]

Could Delta 1989 have been taking part in a similar exercise on September 11? Were some of its passengers played by military personnel or other government employees? Only a thorough new investigation of the 9/11 attacks can answer these and the many other crucial questions that remain, around Delta Air Lines Flight 1989 and its possible involvement in a training exercise on September 11.

NOTES

[1] National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States: Public Hearing. 9/11 Commission, May 23, 2003.

[2] Matthew L. Wald and Don Van Natta Jr., "Impact of Grounding Jets is Still Unclear." New York Times, October 18, 2001; Marilyn Adams, Alan Levin, and Blake Morrison, "Part II: No One Was Sure if Hijackers Were on Board." USA Today, August 12, 2001; 9/11 Commission, The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (Authorized Edition). New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004, pp. 27-28.

[3] Paul Singer, "No Explosives Found on Cleveland Plane." Associated Press, September 11, 2001; Matthew L. Wald and Don Van Natta Jr., "Impact of Grounding Jets is Still Unclear"; Marilyn Adams, Alan Levin, and Blake Morrison, "Part II: No One Was Sure if Hijackers Were on Board"; Tiana Velez, "How a Tiny Ladybug Changed the World for a Pilot on 9/11." Arizona Daily Star, September 24, 2007; Lynn Spencer, Touching History: The Untold Story of the Drama That Unfolded in the Skies Over America on 9/11. New York: Free Press, 2008, p. 167.

[4] 9/11 Commission, The 9/11 Commission Report, p. 28; Michael Bronner, "9/11 Live: The NORAD Tapes." Vanity Fair, August 2006.

[5] Marilyn Adams, Alan Levin, and Blake Morrison, "Part II: No One Was Sure if Hijackers Were on Board"; "Memorandum for the Record: Interview With John Werth, Air Traffic Controller, Area 4, Lorain Sector." 9/11 Commission, October 1, 2003; 9/11 Commission, The 9/11 Commission Report, pp. 11-12, 28.

[6] See "Complete 9/11 Timeline: Training Exercises on 9/11." History Commons.

[7] Michael Bronner, "9/11 Live: The NORAD Tapes."

[8] Ibid.

[9] "Timeline of the Events of the Day of 9/11 Drafted by the 9/11 Commission." 9/11 Commission, n.d.

[10] "DAL 1989 Order of Events." Federal Aviation Administration, September 16, 2001.

[11] "Cleveland Security." The Spotlight, WCPN, September 20, 2001.

[12] Lynn Spencer, Touching History, pp. 167-168.

[13] Marilyn Adams, Alan Levin, and Blake Morrison, "Part II: No One Was Sure if Hijackers Were on Board"; Alan Levin, "For Air Controller, Terror Still Vivid 7 Years Later." USA Today, September 11, 2008.

[14] U.S. Congress. House. Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, Statement of Jane F. Garvey, Administrator, Federal Aviation Administration, Before the House Subcommittee on Aviation, Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. 107th Cong., 1st sess., September 21, 2001; Alan Levin, Marilyn Adams, and Blake Morrison, "Part I: Terror Attacks Brought Drastic Decision: Clear the Skies." USA Today, August 12, 2002; 9/11 Commission, The 9/11 Commission Report, p. 29.

[15] Marilyn Adams, Alan Levin, and Blake Morrison, "Part II: No One Was Sure if Hijackers Were on Board"; Lynn Spencer, Touching History, p. 167; Alan Levin, "For Air Controller, Terror Still Vivid 7 Years Later."

[16] Lynn Spencer, Touching History, p. 168.

[17] Marilyn Adams, Alan Levin, and Blake Morrison, "Part II: No One Was Sure if Hijackers Were on Board."

[18] "DAL 1989 Order of Events"; "Co-Located TRACONs (Terminal Radar Approach Control)." Federal Aviation Administration, March 24, 2006.

[19] "DAL 1989 Order of Events."

[20] Meryl Getline, "Who You Calling Heavy?" USA Today, June 1, 2005; Meryl Getline, "Organs on Board." USA Today, May 22, 2006.

[21] "DAL 1989 Order of Events."

[22] Ibid.; Michael O'Mara, "9/11: 'Fifth Plane' Terror Alert at Cleveland Hopkins Airport." WKYC, September 11, 2006.

[23] Lynn Spencer, Touching History, p. 270.

[24] Marilyn Adams, Alan Levin, and Blake Morrison, "Part II: No One Was Sure if Hijackers Were on Board"; 9/11 Commission, The 9/11 Commission Report, pp. 11-12; Lynn Spencer, Touching History, pp. 166-167.

[25] Marilyn Adams, Alan Levin, and Blake Morrison, "Part II: No One Was Sure if Hijackers Were on Board."

[26] 9/11 Commission, The 9/11 Commission Report, pp. 10, 455.

[27] Ibid. p. 23; Staff Report: The Four Flights. 9/11 Commission, August 26, 2004, pp. 25-26.

[28] National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States: Public Hearing; "Timeline 6/17/03 Based on NEADS-FAA Transcripts." 9/11 Commission, June 17, 2003; "Timeline of the Events of the Day of 9/11 Drafted by the 9/11 Commission."

[29] 9/11 Commission, The 9/11 Commission Report, p. 28.

[30] Marilyn Adams, Alan Levin, and Blake Morrison, "Part II: No One Was Sure if Hijackers Were on Board"; 9/11 Commission, The 9/11 Commission Report, p. 10.

[31] Michael Bronner, "9/11 Live: The NORAD Tapes"; "Timeline of the Events of the Day of 9/11 Drafted by the 9/11 Commission."

[32] Marilyn Adams, Alan Levin, and Blake Morrison, "Part II: No One Was Sure if Hijackers Were on Board."

[33] 9/11 Commission, The 9/11 Commission Report, pp. 27-28.

[34] "NEADS Audio File, Identification Technician, Channel 4." North American Aerospace Defense Command, September 11, 2001; "Memorandum for the Record: Interview With Kim Wernica, Operations Manager at Cleveland ARTCC on 9/11." 9/11 Commission, October 2, 2003; "Timeline of the Events of the Day of 9/11 Drafted by the 9/11 Commission."

[35] "Memorandum for the Record: Interview With Kim Wernica, Operations Manager at Cleveland ARTCC on 9/11"; Alan Levin, "For Air Controller, Terror Still Vivid 7 Years Later."

[36] Michael Bronner, "9/11 Live: The NORAD Tapes."

[37] 9/11 Commission, The 9/11 Commission Report, p. 28.

[38] Lynn Spencer, Touching History, pp. 191-192.

[39] Paul Singer, "Plane Makes Emergency Landing." Associated Press, September 11, 2001; "Cleveland Reacts to the Terror." The Spotlight, WCPN, September 12, 2001; "Cleveland Security."

[40] Michael O'Mara, "9/11: 'Fifth Plane' Terror Alert at Cleveland Hopkins Airport"; Lynn Spencer, Touching History, p. 229.

[41] Paul Singer, "No Explosives Found on Cleveland Plane"; Lynn Spencer, Touching History, p. 271.

[42] Jason Tudor, "Inner Space: Cheyenne Mountain Operations Evolve Following Sept. 11 Hijacking." Airman, March 2002.

[43] Leslie Filson, Air War Over America: Sept. 11 Alters Face of Air Defense Mission. Tyndall Air Force Base, FL: 1st Air Force, 2003, p. 59.

[44] 9/11 Commission, The 9/11 Commission Report, p. 30.

[45] "NORAD to Sponsor Multi-Agency, Bi-Lateral Exercise." U.S. Department of Defense, May 31, 2002; Steven Komarow and Tom Squitieri, "NORAD Had Drills of Jets as Weapons." USA Today, April 18, 2004.

[46] Gerry J. Gilmore, "NORAD-Sponsored Exercise Prepares for Worst-Case Scenarios." American Forces Press Service, June 4, 2002; "Airborne Anti-Terrorist Operation Getting Underway." Live Today, CNN, June 4, 2002; "Mock Hijacks Play out Over U.S., Canada." United Press International, June 4, 2002; Nick Wadhams, "Joint U.S., Canadian Hijacking Drill Takes off With Whidbey Flight." Associated Press, June 5, 2002.

Source

Ex-FBI Agent: Why I Support a New 9/11 Investigation

In the absence of my being there in New York City to stand with the 9/11 families, first responders and survivors, I offer the following statement in support of your goal of a new investigation into the attacks of September 11th and the NYC CAN campaign to place it on the ballot for November.

At the time of 9-11, I had been an FBI agent for over 20 years. My main responsibilities by then were teaching criminal procedure to FBI agents and other law enforcement officers, mostly about 4th Amendment search and seizure, 5th and 6th Amendment law of interrogation, right to attorney and constitutional protection of rights to “free speech”, due process, habeas corpus, and against cruel and unusual punishment. A week before 9-11, I and the rest of the FBI’s ethics instructors were mandated (as a result of an earlier public FBI scandal) to give a one hour PowerPoint presentation, a form of remedial training on “law enforcement ethics” which I accomplished in a fairly perfunctory way, just reading the slides.

After 9-11, with the knowledge I had of the bitter internal dispute inside the FBI that was being hushed up but had kept some of our better agents from possibly uncovering more of the 9-11 plot before it happened, I couldn’t forget two of the slides in that Law Enforcement ethics curriculum: “DO NOT: Puff, Shade, Tailor, Firm up, Stretch, Massage, or Tidy up statements of fact.” And “Misplaced Loyalties: As employees of the FBI, we must be aware that our highest loyalty is to the United States Constitution. We should never sacrifice the truth in order to obtain a desired result (e.g. conviction of a defendant) or to avoid personal or institutional embarrassment.”

The official dissembling and excuse-making about the true causes and prior mistakes that gave rise to and allowed the terrorist attacks to happen, almost immediately ushered in the Bush-Cheney Administration’s egregious and lawless, post 9-11 “war on terror” agenda which bore no connection to the original causes and no connection to the goal of reducing terrorism and making the world safer. When I got a chance, about 8 ½ months after 9-11 to tell what I knew, I did so and my disclosures led to further investigation by the Department of Justice Inspector General and figured in the 9-11 Commission Report.

But it was way too late for this emerging bit of truth that has continued to leak out in dribs and drabs to have any impact. The laws themselves, especially the criminal procedure ones rooted in the Constitution that I had spent my career teaching to law enforcement, have largely gone up in smoke. Having seen the cost of remaining silent, I publicly warned, a few months after my first memo, against launching the pre-emptive invasion of Iraq. But false agendas had already filled the vacuum created by lack of truth. And we are still dealing with the disastrous consequences of these unjustified, pre-emptive wars.

Let me therefore simply repeat the request I made to the Senate Judiciary Committee in June 2002: “Foremost, we owe it to the public, especially the victims of terrorism, to be completely honest. I can only imagine what these crime and terrorism victims continue to go through. They deserve nothing but the complete, unfettered truth.”

Therefore, I fully support the 9/11 families, first responders, survivors and over 60,000 other New Yorkers who have endorsed a new 9/11 investigation in New York City as advanced by ballot referendum this coming November election.

Coleen Rowley is a former FBI staff attorney who turned whistle-blower after witnessing repeated failures within the bureau to properly investigate alleged 9/11 co-conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui. She was one of three Time Magazine Persons of the Year in 2002.

Source

Demolition access to the World Trade Center towers: Part one - tenants

Kevin R. Ryan, 7-09-09

Note: The author is indebted to a few particularly useful sources of information and inspiration, including Russ Baker’s book “Family of Secrets”, the websites nndb.com, sourcewatch.org and secinfo.com, and Richard Gage.

On occasion, the public has been asked by George W. Bush to refrain from considering certain conspiracy theories. Bush has made such requests when people were looking into crimes in which he might be culpable. For example, when in 1994 Bush’s former company Harken Energy was linked to the fraudulent Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) through several investors, Bush’s spokeswoman, Karen Hughes, shut down the inquiry by telling the Associated Press -- “We have no response to silly conspiracy theories.” On another occasion, Bush said in a televised speech -- “Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September the 11th.”

But paradoxically, we have also been asked to believe Bush’s own outrageous conspiracy theory about 9/11, one that has proven to be false in many ways. One important way to see the false nature of Bush’s conspiracy theory is to note the fact that the World Trade Center buildings could only have fallen as they did through the use of explosives. A number of independent scientific studies have pointed out this fact [1, 2, 3, 4], but it was Bush’s own scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), through their inability to provide a convincing defense of the official line, who ultimately proved that explosives were necessary.[2, 5, 6, 7]

This leads us to ask the obvious question -- Who could have placed explosives in the World Trade Center towers? To answer that question, we should first consider who had access to the buildings, specifically the areas of the buildings that would be relevant to a demolition operation. We should also consider the time periods of interest. Those who had access at the necessary times should be further considered in terms of their ability to obtain the necessary explosive technologies and expertise, their ability to be secretive, and the possibility that they could have benefited from the destruction of the WTC buildings or from the resulting War on Terror. But one thing is certain, unless it was done by one person acting alone, it must have been a conspiracy.

The Twin Towers and WTC 7, all highly secure buildings, were most readily accessed by tenants, security and building management staff, and construction-related contractors.

Evidence suggests that the period of interest should include the years between the 1993 WTC bombing and September 11th, 2001. This evidence includes the warning from 1993 bombing conspirator Nidal Ayyad, who reportedly wrote -- “next time it will be more precise.”[8] Additionally, evidence of a multi-year plot included the detailed information that FBI informant and mafia kingpin Gregory Scarpa Jr. received while in jail, as early as 1996, from Al-Qaeda operative Ramzi Yousef, while imprisoned in the adjacent cell. Yousef described plans to “bring New York to its knees” by blowing up the World Trade Center with American-owned “flying massive bombs.” Scarpa Jr. provided this information to Assistant US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald and FBI Counsel Valerie Caproni, who were apparently not interested.[9] Another example is the recorded conversation between FBI informant Randy Glass and Pakistani ISI agent Raja Gulum Abbas, in which Abbas claimed “Those towers are coming down”, indicating that a plan was in progress as of July 1999.[10]

Throughout the life of the WTC buildings, modifications were made to each structure. The modifications included upgrades to electrical, fire protection, and elevator systems, as well as general construction activities. As a rule, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PANYNJ) was responsible for initiating the modifications in the public access areas, and the tenants were responsible for completing the modifications throughout the leased spaces.[11] For this reason, the tenant companies would have been capable of coordinating the installation of explosive materials and other devices with reasonable certainty that those materials would not be detected by others. For a demolition plan to work, however, such tenants would need to be managed as a group, and explosives would need to be placed on enough floors to ensure the fall of each building through what would otherwise have been the path of most resistance.

While examining the tenants in each critical area, we should ask – Cui Bono? That is, who benefited from the destruction of the WTC buildings, and the resulting War on Terror? The obvious answer includes, primarily, the Bush Administration and its friends. It also includes overlapping groups of oil and gas companies, defense contractors, and those who desired to wield undue influence on international policies related to a wide number of issues from civil rights to space domination.

The North Tower Impact Zone

On 9/11, American Airlines Flight 11 hit the north face of the north tower (WTC 1) between floors 94 and 99. In a stunning coincidence, these floors bracket those that had been upgraded for fireproofing shortly before 9/11.[12] This coincidence was amplified by the fact that one tenant occupied all of those floors – Marsh & McLennan (Marsh), which at the time was the world’s largest insurance brokerage company. One other tenant, Sumitomo Bank, shared part of floor 96 with Marsh.

During the years from 1993 to 2001, Marsh made several modifications to these floors, in addition to the fireproofing upgrades mentioned above. According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Marsh made modifications to the south side of floor 94 in 1998. That same year, the PANYNJ helped Marsh demolish floors 95-98 in order to rebuild the fire alarm and sprinkler systems. Marsh did further modification work on floor 95 in the year 2000.[13] The full floor fireproofing upgrades on floors 93 through 100 were accomplished in August through November of 1998, except for floor 94, which was done in December 1996.

Marsh was a large company, with a number of subsidiaries, including Putnam Investments, Mercer, Johnson & Higgins, and Guy Carpenter, a company that occupied floors 47 to 54 of the south tower. Marsh was also known to be notoriously secretive, and had been likened to the CIA.[14] Its chief executive on 9/11 was Jeffrey Greenberg, a member of the Brookings Institution, the Trilateral Commission, and the son of the chairman of American International Group (AIG), Maurice Greenberg. AIG has been reported to be at the center of a number of CIA operations.[15]

Jeffrey Greenberg rose quickly through management at Marsh, having come there directly from AIG in 1995, and then becoming CEO just four years later. At Brookings, Greenberg hobnobbed with Lee Hamilton, co-chair of the 9/11 Commission, and the Iraqi Nemir Amin Kirdar, CEO of Investcorp, a BCCI-related company founded by the Saudi Abdullah Taha Bakhsh.[16]

BCCI was founded by a Pakistani named Agha Hasan Abedi, and was ”made up of multiplying layers of entities, related to one another through an impenetrable series of holding companies, affiliates, subsidiaries, banks-within-banks, insider dealings and nominee relationships.” In the early nineties, BCCI was extensively investigated for money laundering and terrorist financing, and was ultimately shut-down by the Bank of England in 1992.[17] Like BCCI, AIG developed the same fragmented and difficult to trace network of subsidiaries, spread across 130 countries and 400 regulators.[18]

Other very powerful and well-connected people worked in senior management at Marsh. These included Stephen Friedman, a senior principal at Marsh Capital and former partner at Goldman Sachs, who later became George W. Bush’s top economic advisor. Friedman was also a member of the Brookings Institution, the Bilderberg group, the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, and the board at In-Q-Tel, the investment firm founded by the CIA in 1998. In-Q-Tel invests in state of the art technologies related to defense and intelligence work, including nano and chemical technologies, according to its website.[19]

In another interesting coincidence, Friedman belonged, through Cornell University, to a secret society called Quill and Dagger, the membership of which includes Paul Wolfowitz, Sandy Berger and Stephen Hadley. Wolfowitz, the neo-con deputy secretary of defense in the Bush Administration, was the author in 1992 of the “Wolfowitz Doctrine” of pre-emptive warfare. He also made comments about a “surprise like Pearl Harbor” months before 9/11, and met with Pakistani ISI General Mahmud Ahmed in the week before 9/11.[20] Berger, the National Security Advisor to President Clinton, was later caught stealing documents from the 9/11 Commission investigation.[21] Berger was also the boss of White House counterterrorism Tsar Richard Clarke, and together with Hadley - who was Condoleeza Rice’s deputy - was responsible for delaying or obstructing Clarke’s plans to stop Al Qaeda in January 2001.[22]

The President of Marsh Real Estate Advisors, from 1982 to 2001, was Craig Stapleton, the husband of George W. Bush’s cousin, Dorothy Walker Bush. Stapleton’s Marsh division was responsible for negotiating office leases in the US, Canada and Europe. He once co-owned the Texas Rangers with George W. Bush, a spectacular investment for all involved. In 1997, Stapleton was a member of the board of a company called Cendant that was charged in 1998 with massive accounting fraud. The President of Cendant at the time was Henry Silverman, a former partner of the Blackstone Group and later Vice Chairman of the PANYNJ. Stapleton went on to join Winston Partners, a privately owned investment firm founded in 1993 and led by George W. Bush’s bother Marvin.

The Vice Chairman of Marsh on 9/11 was Mathis Cabiallavetta, a Swiss citizen. Although Cabiallavetta was a member of the Marsh board from 1993 to 2000, he took his position as Vice Chairman in 1999, after having been President of the Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) from 1996 to 1998. This was the same UBS that bailed out George W. Bush’s Harken Energy in 1987, with the help of billionaire Jackson Stephens. UBS was linked in other ways to the fraudulent terrorist financing bank BCCI.[16, 23]

Another connection to the Bush family can be seen in the Marsh acquisition of the New York insurance brokerage Johnson and Higgins in March 1997. Johnson and Higgins was the long-time employer of Prescott Bush Jr, brother to George H. W. Bush. Although Prescott Jr. no longer worked there, he had spent 33 years at Johnson & Higgins, retiring as Senior Vice President. After retirement, Bush continued to consult for the company, in Asian dealings. With Prescott Jr, Friedman and Stapleton, Marsh clearly had strong ties to the Bush network. Additionally, it seems possible that some members of Marsh management, particularly Stephen Friedman, through In-Q-Tel, had access to technologies that could have been used to bring about the deceptive demolition of the WTC buildings.

Add to this L. Paul Bremer, and the possible Marsh ties to demolition technology become clearer. One month after 9/11, Bremer would become the CEO for a new division called Marsh Crisis. Interestingly, the Yale graduate Bremer had been working to complete the National Report on Terrorism, and prior to that had been managing director for Kissinger Associates. According to a US Senate report, Kissinger Associates had a number of meetings with BCCI representatives in the late eighties and early nineties, and it refused to provide documents requested by the Senate investigators.[17] Bremer was also a member of the board for Akzo Nobel, the parent of International Paint, a company that produced a fireproofing application for skyscrapers called Interchar.[24]

Bremer was on the international advisory board for the Japanese mining and machinery company, Komatsu. At the time, Komatsu had been involved in a joint venture agreement with Dresser Industries, the oil-services/intelligence front in which Prescott Bush Sr. and George H. W. Bush got their start with Neil Mallon. The Komatsu-Dresser mining division operated from 1988 to 1997. In July 1996, it patented a thermite demolition device that could “demolish a concrete structure at a high efficiency, while preventing a secondary problem due to noise, flying dust and chips, and the like.”[25] Residues of thermite, the highly energetic chemical mixture, have been confirmed in samples of the WTC dust, and the use of thermite at the WTC was also revealed by environmental data.[1, 2, 3, 4, 26] Dresser Industries merged with Dick Cheney’s Halliburton in 1998.

It is less well known that Bremer’s relationship to Marsh started earlier. In fact, on 9/11, Bremer was the CEO of Marsh Political Risk Practice and he had an office in the south tower. That day, he was interviewed on NBC television, stating that Osama bin Laden was responsible and that possibly Iraq and Iran were involved too, and he called for the most severe military response possible. Google removed the interview video from its servers three times, and blocked it once.[27]

Bremer was called away from Marsh in 2003, to be the Iraq Occupation Governor. His work in that role has been widely criticized.[28]

The South Tower Impact Zone

United Airlines Flight 175 hit the south tower (WTC 2) between floors 78 and 83, in the southeast corner of the building. In the impact zone, Baseline Financial Services (Baseline) was located on floors 77 and 78, Fuji Bank was on floors 79 to 82, and AON Corporation was on floor 83.

Baseline was led by a very interesting individual named Joseph Kasputys, who had a history of being well connected to the highest levels of government, as well as to defense and intelligence industries. Kasputys worked, from 1972 to 1977, for the US departments of commerce and defense. He was also the deputy director of Nixon’s White House taskforce that dealt with the Arab oil embargo of 1973, and he was instrumental in the creation of the Department of Energy (DOE).

Kasputys’ connections to the DOE, from 1977 through at least 1997, are interesting considering that the DOE was developing thermite ignition devices as early as 1983.[29] Additonally, national laboratories working within the DOE developed nanothermites in the late 1990s. Nanothermites are explosive thermite mixtures where one or more reactants are present at the nanometer scale. These are also called super-thermites due to the extraordinarily large amount of energy released upon ignition.[3, 30]

Kasputys was also a member of the Logistics Management Institute (LMI), whose members included Paul Kaminski of In-Q-Tel and General Dynamics, Charles DiBona of Halliburton, Skull and Bones member Joseph Samuel Nye, and Michael Daniels of Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). It has been noted that SAIC, a defense contractor with expertise in thermite-related technologies, played a large part in the NIST WTC investigation. LMI’s self-proclaimed role is “advancing the science of government.”[30, 31]

Better known for his leadership of Primark Corporation from 1987 to 2000, Kasputys was CEO for both companies after the Primark acquisition of Baseline in 1996. Primark owned as many as 50 companies during that time, and was acquired by Thomson Financial in June 2000. Kasputys then became CEO for Thomson, and he later founded the intelligence-services company IHS Global Insight, in March 2001. Another Primark company, Primark Decision Economics, was located in the 11th floor of the north tower.

The sheer number of companies involved with Primark, along with the vague business descriptions given (Baseline was described as “an international provider of information”), gave the impression that something more than legitimate business was involved. Primark owned Triad International Maintenance Company (TIMCO), a company that, among other things, modified Boeing 757s and 767s. Primark also owned The Analytic Sciences Corp (TASC), a security and intelligence (spying) company that had contracts with the DOE. As CEO of World Markets Research Centre, Kasputys predicted in 2003 that the US was the country with the fourth-highest risk of terrorism, and that – “Another September 11-style attack in the US is highly likely." [32]

According to NIST, Kasputys’ Baseline modified the southeast corner of floor 78 in 1999, exactly where the aircraft hit on 9/11.[33] Floors 77 and 78 were upgraded for fireproofing in June and April of 1998, respectively.

Another company with an office on floor 78 was First Commercial Bank. This was a Taiwanese national bank that had, in January 1998, privatized all but one third of its shares. The other two thirds went to First Commercial Financial Corp (FCFC) of Seguin, Texas. Unfortunately, it is not clear if FCFC is related to First Commercial Financial Group (FCFG), owned by Abdullah Taha Bakhsh. FCFG was a commodities brokerage firm that was forced to distribute its customer accounts in 1994, after regulators raised concerns about capital shortfalls and customer complaints.[34].

Interestingly, another company located in Seguin, Texas is the machinery manufacturing company, the Alamo Group. Dave Grzelak, CEO of Komatsu-Dresser, was a director at Alamo. He was also a board member at Aoki Construction Co, a mining company associated with Prescott Bush Jr, as we’ll see below.

The tenant located just above Baseline, on floors 79 to 82, was Fuji Bank. Fuji modified the core of floor 78 in 1998, the east wall of floor 80 in 1999, unknown parts of floor 80 in 2001, and the southeast corner of floor 82 in 1997.[33]

Prior to the year 2000, Fuji Bank was the second largest bank in Japan. Fuji’s largest investors were Union Carbide, Mobil Oil and Raytheon. In 1996, Yasuda Trust became a Fuji subsidiary and in September 2000, Fuji merged with Dai-ichi Kangyo Bank (DKB), and the International Bank of Japan (IBJ), to form the largest bank in the world under the name of Mihuzo Holdings. The second largest at the time was the Sumitomo-Mitsui Banking Corp, formed in October 1999. But the Fuji Bank merger meant that, as of 9/11, Mihuzo Holdings controlled companies not only in the impact zone of the south tower, but also on floors 48 to 50 of the north tower by way of DKB.

Toru Hashimoto, chairman of Fuji Bank, was also with Deutsche Securities Limited Tokyo Branch and is now on the board of Deutsche Bank with Norman Augustine. Augustine, also known for being the CEO of Lockheed Martin, was founder of In-Q-Tel and a board member of Riggs National, the banking firm of Jonathan Bush, the other brother of George H. W. Bush. A 2004 expose by the New York Times revealed Saudi Arabian accounts at Riggs were being investigated for money-laundering and possible financing of the September 11th terrorists.[35]

Deutsche Bank was the bank of the German Gestapo during World War II, funding the construction of concentration camps. It was broken up after the war, only to merge together again in 1957.[36] In 1998, Deutsche Bank added Banker’s Trust, which had purchased Alex Brown and Sons in 1997, to its group of companies. It was Deutsche Bank and these subsidiaries that were identified as being involved in insider trading related to the 9/11 attacks. The person of most interest in these dealings was A.B. Krongard, the CEO of Alex Brown, and CIA counsel to George Tenet.[37] From 2001 to 2004, Krongard was executive director of the CIA. Another significant player was Wolfgang Demisch, managing director at Alex Brown from 1993 to 1998, managing director at UBS Securities from 1988 to 1993, and member of the board at SAIC.

Fuji Bank had a history, in the early 1990s, of scandal related to fraudulent loans and gangster connections. It had also been linked to large CIA-related payments deposited in the Cayman Islands, and to the BCCI connected First American Bank.[38, 39, 40]

Moreover, Fuji Bank was not the only Mihuzo company that was accused of criminal activity. In June 1997, executives of DKB were accused of conspiring to provide $80 million in loans to Ryuichi Koike, a Japanese gangster. Koike used the money to purchase shares in securities brokerages, like Nomura, Nikko (located on floor 79 of the north tower), and Daiwa. Some reports put DKB’s extorted loans to Koike at $272 million.[41] DKB was reported to have made loans to other Yakuza crime syndicates as well, and in June 1997, the chairman of DKB ultimately resigned over the scandal.[42]

Additionally, Mihuzo subsidiary IBJ was discovered to have generated $2.5 billion in fraudulent loans to a businesswoman named Nui Onoue in 1991. IBJ was also reported to have indirectly supported predatory lending by securitizing high-loan-to-value loans to companies like Dallas’ FirstPlus Financial, a company that shot to financial stardom in 1996 and then collapsed in 1999. Dan Quayle was on the board of directors.[43]

Back in the summer of 1989, while his brother was President, Prescott Bush Jr. was the middleman in the takeover of two companies by West Tsusho, a Tokyo-based investment firm linked to one of Japan's biggest mob syndicates. West Tsusho was part of the empire of Susumu Ishii, head of the Inagawa-kai yakuza gang. In 1992, two days after an article linking him to Bush appeared in the Daily Yomiuri, Ishii was dead, reportedly from a “long illness.”[44]

At the time, The Boston Globe reported that Prescott Bush Jr. had also been a business partner with Tokyo-based Aoki Construction Corp (Aoki), in its deals to build in China. Masahiro Sakane, now the CEO of Aoki, was managing director at Komatsu from 1994 to 1999. Komatsu and Aoki shared many other links in management.

The two companies West Tsusho acquired through Prescott Bush Jr., were Quantum Access (of which Bush was a board member) and Asset Management International. As a consultant for Asset Management, Prescott introduced Hughes Aircraft to Japanese investors in a deal in which Hughes and the government of China would launch satellites that would beam television programming to broadcasters in China. [45, 46] In December 1989, President Bush lifted the sanctions that blocked the satellite deal, citing "the national interest." The Bush administration had earlier granted Hughes Aircraft "preliminary licenses" to exchange data with Chinese officials.[47] Also involved in the West Tsusho mob dealings was Nikko Securities (floor 79 of the north tower).

After his death, West Tsusho’s Susumu Ishii was replaced as the leader of the Inagawa-kai gang by Toi Inagawa. In September 1996, Inagawa formed an alliance with Yoshinori Watanabe, head of the largest yakuza gang, Yamaguchi-gumi. Nui Onoue, who received the fraudulent loans from Mihuzo’s IBJ, was said to be associated with Yamaguchi-gumi’s Takumi gang, and also an investor in Inagawa-kai.[41]

Japanese Banks had experienced a relatively tough time in the 1990s, referred to in financial circles as “the lost decade”, and in general were still doing badly in the years 2000 and 2001. In November 2000, Mizuho Holdings had problem loans and bad debts of more than 4 trillion yen ($36 billion). By mid-2001, the company was trading at half the value it had been at just a year before, when the merger was announced. [48, 49] Japan’s financial system began to recover in 2002.[50]

Moving to floor 83 of the south tower, there was AON Corporation, a Chicago-based competitor of Marsh. Today, General Richard Myers, one of the people most responsible for not protecting us on 9/11, is a director at AON. But on 9/11, the most interesting character working for AON was Jim Pierce, the cousin of George W. Bush. Jim’s father Scott Pierce, formerly a partner at G.H. Walker & Co, pled guilty to 2,000 counts of mail fraud in 1985, as President of E.F. Hutton.

Jim Pierce was managing director of AON on 9/11, and he had arranged a meeting on the 105th floor of the south tower for that morning. Pierce survived that day, despite the fact that twelve people came to the meeting in the south tower, and eleven of them died. The location of the meeting had been changed, the night before, to the Millenium Hotel, where Pierce watched the south tower as it was hit by the aircraft. Apparently the meeting attendees were not all notified of the change in location.[51]

AON modifed “unknown” parts of floor 83 in 1997. Some photos of the impact zone suggest that the most explosive part of the fireball erupting from the south tower came from the east side of the building, near floor 83 (see NIST report NCSTAR 1-5A, figure 7-7).

Chuo Trust, which shared floor 83 with AON, was the trust portion of Mihuzo’s DKB. According to NIST, Chuo modified the southeast corner of floor 83 in 1999.

An unusual feature of the destruction of the south tower was the “cold spot” on the north face of the building. This section along a twelve-column area of floors 80, 81, 82 did not experience any fire, despite the fact that the areas on both sides did have fire. In its report NCSTAR 1-5, NIST “concluded that insufficient information is available to allow a likely formation mechanism for the cold spot to be postulated.”

The Washington Group

Another company of interest, on floor 91 just above the impact zone for the south tower, was Washington Group International (Washington). This company was known primarily as a construction and mining firm, and it had just acquired Raytheon Engineers in July 2000. Raytheon was reported to have also occupied floor 91.

Washington had an interesting history. It had been a contractor for the DOE and its predecessor agencies since 1942, when it was involved in the Manhattan Project. In 1995, a management shake-up at Washington resulted in the temporary installment of William Clark as acting chairman. Clark was a member of the Center for Security Policy, along with many neo-cons including Richard Perle, Eliot Abrams, Norman Augustine (In-Q-Tel), Douglas Feith, and 9/11 Commissioner John Lehman. After re-organizing the management at Washington, in just a few months, Clark resigned.

In 1996, Washington took over Morrison-Knudsen, an engineering and construction company that had a history of working on large projects around the world, including in China, Iran, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. In Vietnam, Washington led the RMK-BRJ construction project with Brown & Root. During the 1980s, it worked closely on hazardous clean-up projects for the DOE. The Army Corps of Engineers hired Morrison-Knudsen to demolish over 200 buildings in 1995.[52]

In 1999, Washington acquired Westinghouse Government Environmental Services Company (WGESC), a firm that provided management services to the DOE and DOD. In July 2001, E. Preston Rahe, Jr, the President of WGESC, was promoted to Executive Vice President of Business Development for Washington Group's Government operating unit. Rahe went on to form a new company called Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC, along with General John A. Gordon.

Gordon was George H. W. Bush’s Senior Director for Defense Policy on the National Security Council, and he worked with George Tenet at the CIA from September 1996 to October 1997, as associate director of central intelligence for military support, and as deputy director of the CIA from October 1997 to 2000. During this time, Gordon would have worked closely with A.B. Krongard, who was Tenet’s counsel from 1998 to 2001. Later, in 2003 and 2004, Gordon was George W. Bush’s Homeland Security advisor.

Apart from Lawrence Livermore labs (LLNL), one of the DOE facilities for which Washington was responsible, well before 9/11, was the Savannah River site near Aiken, SC. In February 1997, LLNL and the Savannah River site signed an agreement of cooperation to share technology. Savannah went on to add “Developing sol gel technology for fuels and other applications” to its portfolio.[53, 54] Sol-gel technology is utilized by LLNL for making nanothermites.[55] In another coincidence, Savannah River Technology staff participated in the search and rescue operations at Ground Zero by providing unique tools.[56]

Today, Washington is owned by URS Corp, and they still “help manage and operate Idaho NL, LANL and LLNL,” through a partnership with Battelle.[57] But just before 9/11 they were going through a tough time financially, and sought chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) documents show that Washington made court-ordered pre-petition payments, as part of these proceedings, to a number of companies including Komatsu. Washington also made payments to Greenhorne & O’Mara, whose employee Theresa McAllister was a lead author for the FEMA and NIST reports on the WTC disaster, and to Sumitomo Bank.[58] Sumitomo Bank was closely allied with Komatsu, and was involved with defense-related production.[59]

Other floors and companies of interest

If a “top down” demolition were implemented in the WTC’s Twin Towers on 9/11, then it would have been necessary to plant explosives on floors below the impact zone. From a novice perspective, it would seem ideal to have planted such explosives at regular intervals below the impact area, around floor 50, for example, and below that around floors 25 to 35, and lower. Videos show “squibs” emanating in these general areas of each tower, at levels spaced between the mechanical floors on 41-42, and 75-76.

We have seen that Marsh occupied the impact zone for the north tower, and floors 47 to 54 of the south tower. Additionally, in a reflective criss-cross pattern, Fuji Bank’s parent company Mihuzo Holdings occupied the impact zone for the south tower, as well as floors 48 to 50 of the north tower (DKB). Primark Corporation occupied part of the impact zone for the south tower, and also floor 11 of the north tower.

To evaluate floors 25 to 35 of each tower we should note that, in 1997 and 1998, big leases were signed at the WTC involving AON, Marsh, and Bankers Trust, and two other companies of interest, Exco Resources and Oppenheimer & Co. At the time, tenancy had gone way up and the complex was expected to be at full capacity due to growth of the financial sector.[60]

Exco Resources (Exco), of Dallas Texas, was an oil and gas holding company that was the parent to Garban Intercapital, located on floor 25 and 26 of the north tower, and also on floor 55 of the south tower, just above Marsh subsidiary Guy Carpenter. Exco experienced rapid growth as of 1998, in part due to some very well connected management representatives. Member of the board Mark Neporent also represented Cerebrus Capital, along with Dan Quayle. Robert L. Stillwell, senior partner at Bush friend James Baker’s firm Baker Botts, is currently a director at Exco.

Directors and Officers at Exco, during the period of interest, were associated with Enron affiliates, Anadarko Petroleum, a company owned and operated by long-time Bush family partner Robert Allison, and many other oil and gas exploration firms. Both Enron and Robert Allison met with Dick Cheney in regard to his secretive energy task force in early 2001.[61] In general, oil and gas exploration companies use explosives to underground create shock waves, so that oil reserves can be found through the seismic responses. Usually there is only a 10% success rate for finding new productive oil fields.[62]

Another Exco executive was Jeffrey Benjamin, who served on the board of Exco starting in 1998, and from 1996 to 1998 was managing director of UBS, the BCCI connected bank mentioned above with Mathis Cabiallavetta and Wolfgang Demisch. Just prior to working for UBS, Benjamin was managing director of Bankers Trust. Through Bankers Trust, he worked with A.B. Krongard, and as of 2002, Benjamin is a senior advisor to Apollo Management with Krongard’s wife, Cheryl Gordon Krongard.

Oppenheimer & Co, an investment bank, was on floors 31 to 34 of the south tower. Oppenheimer’s leadership once included Stephen Berger, former executive director of the PANYNJ (1985 to 1990). Berger was also on the board of Dresser Industries, the Bush dynasty firm, as well as being on the board of Forstmann Little & Co. with managing director of the Carlyle Group, Daniel Akerson, and with Alex Mandl of In-Q-Tel.

Oppenheimer was sold, by Stephen Robert and Nathan Gantcher, to the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) in 1997. Mr. Gantcher continued to serve as Vice Chairman of CIBC Oppenheimer from 1997 to 1999 and also served on the board of Jacobsen Partners with Gerald Parsky, the former undersecretary of the Treasury who introduced Saudi investors to America. Parsky developed a close relationship with the Bushes, and by 1976 was “the undisputed go-to man for the Saudis on oil and money.” He also raised a lot of money for George W’s campaign.[63] Parsky, Gantcher and Stephen Robert were all members of the Council on Foreign Relations as of 1997, along with Friedman, Bremer, Augustine, Gordon, and Maurice Greenberg (and about 3,000 others).

CIBC Oppenheimer was invested in a number of powerful and politically wired companies, including Hollinger International, whose board included Henry Kissinger, Richard Perle, and 9/11 Commissioner James R. Thompson. CIBC Oppenheimer was also invested in Robert Allison’s Anadarko Petroleum, and several DKB subsidiaries including CIT Group, on whose board sits 9/11 Commissioner Thomas Kean. On a side note, Kean is also a Trustee of Drew University with Garnett Keith of Komatsu.

In 2003, the SEC fined CIBC Oppenheimer $80 million for helping to manipulate the financial statements of Enron.

Conclusions and next steps

If we look at the companies that occupied the impact zones of the WTC towers, and other floors that might have played a useful role in the demolition of the towers, we see connections to organizations that had access to explosive materials, and to the expertise required to use explosives. Mining companies like Washington, Morrison-Knudsen, Komatsu and Aoki Construction (and John Lehman’s Special Devices Inc.) have access to many types of explosive materials. Oil and gas companies, like those associated with Exco, use explosives for exploration. Some of the explosive technologies available to these companies, for example Komatsu and Washington, involve thermite, a chemical mixture that has been identified in the WTC dust and in the environmental data at Ground Zero.

It seems that, if certain management representatives of the tenant companies listed above wanted to help bring the WTC towers down, they would have been well suited to do so. The companies mentioned were located at well-spaced intervals in the buildings, and some, for example Marsh and the Primark subsidiaries, had a reputation of being secretive. In fact, a number of the executives from these firms were either on the board of intelligence firms (e.g. In-Q-Tel, TASC), or were closely related to others who were. Others were connected to the CIA itself, and to some of the largest defense contractors in the world, like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Halliburton, and SAIC.

There are also strong connections to those who benefited from the 9/11 attacks, most notably the Bush family and their corporate network, including Dresser Industries (now Halliburton) and UBS, and to Deutsche Bank and it subsidiaries, reported to have brokered the insider trading deals. There are links between these tenant companies and the terrorist-related fraudulent bank BCCI.

In Part II of this series of essays, we’ll look at the security companies and other contractors that had access to the WTC buildings. We’ll then see more connections to the Bush family, through the companies that restructured the security systems in the late 1990s, like Securacom, where Marvin Bush and Wirt Walker were directors. Also involved in these security upgrades was Ensec, where future Democrat National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe was added as a director in 1996 and later worked for Harken Energy’s Alan Quasha. The second essay will also look at E.J. Electric, owned by J. Robert Mann of the Yale Glee Club, and examine particulars about the PANYNJ management staff, and the Giuliani and Silverstein teams that were involved.

Part III will review the clean up of Ground Zero, and some of the people involved in the cover-up investigations. For example, we’ll look more closely at Donald Evans, a close friend to George W. Bush since 1968 and his largest fund-raiser, and who also happened to be secretary of the Department of Commerce during the NIST WTC investigation. This is interesting because NIST reports to the Secretary of Commerce.

In the end, we might see that conspiracies are not just limited to the powerless people who happen to live on the most strategically important lands in the world. The conspiracies that matter might involve the powerful people who seek access to those lands, and who have spent their lives seeking more power.


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Endnotes and references:

[1] Steven. E. Jones, Why Indeed Did the WTC Buildings Completely Collapse?, Journal of 9/11 Studies, September 2006 http://www.journalof911studies.com/volume/200609/WhyIndeedDidtheWorldTradeCenterBuildingsCompletelyCollapse.pdf

[2] Steven E. Jones, et al, Fourteen Points of Agreement with Official Government Reports on the World Trade Center Destruction, The Open Civil Engineering Journal Volume 2, doi: 10.2174/1874149500802010035 http://www.bentham.org/open/tociej/openaccess2.htm

[3] Niels H. Harrit, et al, Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe, The Open Chemical Physics Journal, Vol 2, 2009, doi: 10.2174/1874412500902010007, http://www.bentham-open.org/pages/content.php?TOCPJ/2009/00000002/00000001/7TOCPJ.SGM

[4] Kevin R. Ryan, et al, Environmental anomalies at the World Trade Center: evidence for energetic materials, The Environmentalist, Volume 29, Number 1 / March, 2009, http://www.springerlink.com/content/f67q6272583h86n4/

[5] James Gourley, Appeal Filed with NIST, Pursuant to Earlier Request for Correction, Journal of 9/11 Studies, December 2007 http://www.journalof911studies.com/volume/2007/AppealLetterToNISTGourleyEtAl.pdf

[6] Eric Douglas, The NIST WTC Investigation--How Real Was The Simulation?: A review of NIST NCSTAR 1, J 9/11 Studies, December 2006 http://www.journalof911studies.com/volume/200612/NIST-WTC-Investigation.pdf

[7] Kevin Ryan, What is 9/11 Truth? - The First Steps, J 9/11 Studies, August 2006 http://www.journalof911studies.com/articles/Article_1_Ryan5.pdf

[8] Larry Neumeister, Trade Center bomber's threat foreshadowed September terrorist attacks, September 30, 2001, Associated Press http://multimedia.belointeractive.com/attack/perspective/0930learning.html

[9] Sandra Harmon, Mafia Son, St. Martin’s Press, NY

[10] History Commons, page for Rajaa Gulum Abbas, http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=rajaa_gulum_abbas

[11] NIST WTC Report, NCSTAR 1-1H, Chapters 11 and 12, http://wtc.nist.gov/NCSTAR1/PDF/NCSTAR%201-1H.pdf

[12] Kevin Ryan, Another Amazing Coincidence Related to the WTC, 911blogger.com http://www.911blogger.com/node/13272

[13] NIST NCSTAR 1-1H (see above), table 13-1, and table 13-2.

[14] Marcia Vickers, The Secret World Of Marsh Mac, BusinessWeek, November 1, 2004 http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_44/b3906001_mz001.htm

[15] Wayne Madsen, AIG is a “special case”, Online Journal. September 23, 2008 http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_3777.shtml

[16] Ellen Ray, William H. Schaap, Covertaction, Institute for Media Analysis, p 193

[17] John Kerry and Hank Brown, The BCCI Affair: A Report to the Committee on Foreign Relations United States Senate, December 1992, Senate Print 102-140, http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1992_rpt/bcci/

[18] Eric J.Fry, From BCCI to AIG..., March 13, 2009, Bullion Vault Gold News, http://goldnews.bullionvault.com/aig_bcci_031320093

[19] Website for In-Q-Tel, http://www.iqt.org/technology-portfolio/index-by-practice-area.html

[20] The History Commons, “Wolfowitz Doctrine”, http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=us_international_relations_41 Aaron Dykes, Wolfowitz Warns of 'Surprise like Pearl Harbor' Months Before 9/11 Attacks, Jones Report, February 9, 2007 http://www.jonesreport.com/articles/070207_wolfowitz.html Wolfowitz’s meeting with Mahmud Ahmed was documented in a FOIA response obtained by the 9/11 Working Group of Bloomington - http://911workinggroup.org/

[21] Philip Shenon, The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation, pp 249-253

[22] Craig Unger, House of Bush, House of Saud, pp 220, 228

[23] Craig Unger references the UBS links to BCCI in House of Bush, House of Saud, and Russ Baker describes the UBS bailout of Harken in Family of Secrets

[24] Akzo’s International Paint is the maker of Interchar http://www.international-pc.com/pc/pds/963to_uk.pdf http://www.sti.nasa.gov/tto/Spinoff2006/ps_3.html

[25] Taku Murakami, US Patent 5532449 - Using plasma ARC and thermite to demolish concrete, http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/5532449/description.html

[26] Steven E. Jones et al, Extremely High Temperatures During the World Trade Center Destruction, Journal of 9/11 Studies, January 2008 http://www.journalof911studies.com/articles/WTCHighTemp2.pdf

[27] Lewis Paul Bremer III on Washington DC NBC4 TV 09/11/01, Vehmgericht http://vehme.blogspot.com/2007/08/lewis-paul-bremer-iii-on-washington-dc.html

[28] A.K. Gupta, The Great Iraq Heist, January 15, 2004, Information Clearing House http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5692.htm

[29] Albert Gibson et al, Integral low-energy thermite igniter, US Patent number: 4464989, http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=rKl1AAAAEBAJ&dq=US+4464989

[30] Kevin R. Ryan, The Top Ten Connections Between NIST and Nanothermites, Journal of 9/11 Studies, July 2008, http://www.journalof911studies.com/volume/2008/Ryan_NIST_and_Nano-1.pdf

[31] Skull and Bones is a secret society at Yale University, founded in 1832. Members have included George H.W. Bush, his father Prescott Bush, his son George W. Bush, his brother Jonathan J. Bush, and many other powerful people. For LMI’s mission, see its website - http://www.lmi.org/aboutus/aboutus.aspx

[32] World Markets Research Centre, Global Terrorism Index: key findings, The Guardian (UK), August 18, 2003 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/aug/18/alqaida.terrorism1

[33] NIST NCSTAR 1-1H, table 13-2

[34] See Micha Morrison, Wall Street Journal, March 1, 1995. and, Gina Bellafante et al, All That Glitters…, Time Magazine, November 6, 1995

[35] Timothy O’Brien, A Washington Bank, a Global Mess, NY Times, April 11, 2004, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/11/business/yourmoney/11riggs.html?ex=1085025600&en=1cd00a0f06fad384&ei=5070&ex=1084852800&en=d2142d33570c4f4a&ei=5070

[36] Wikipedia page for Deutsche Bank - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Bank

[37] Michael C. Ruppert, Suppressed Details of Criminal Insider Trading Lead Directly into the CIA’s Highest Ranks, October 9, 2001, http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/10_09_01_krongard.html

[38] For the fraudulent loan scandal, see article from The Economist, entitled Japan’s financial scandals: now a big bank, July 27, 1991. For the Cayman islands deposits, see Terry Reed and John Cummins, Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA, p248

[39] William Bowles, ‘Frauds-R-Us’ The Bush Family Saga, Information Clearing House, May 11, 2003 http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3333.htm

[40] Sam Smith, Arkansas Connections, The Progressive Review, January 2001 http://www.prorev.com/connex.htm

[41] David E. Kaplan and Alec Dubro, Yakuza: Japan’s Criminal Underworld, University of California Press, 2003, see p 216 for the Koike loans and pp 198-199 for Niu Onoue

[42] Chairman Resigns at Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank, New York Times Business section, June 14, 1997

[43] For the IBJ loans, see Mihuzo press release - http://www.mizuho-fg.co.jp/english/company/info/pdf/19991222release_eng.pdf and James Sterngold, Japan Hit by Another Scandal, New York Times, August 14, 1991 For FirstPlus Financial, see the Center for Public integrity, The Buying of the President - http://www.buyingofthepresident.org/index.php/archives/2000/545/ For more on Japanese banks and the Yakuza in the early 90s, see – http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/japans-crime-incorporated-the-years-of-the-bubble-economy-lured-japans-yakuza-gangs-to-muscle-into-big-business-terry-mccarthy-in-tokyo-explores-their-corporate-web-1479105.html

[44] Thomas Flannigan, Bribing the Bushes - http://www.jpri.org/publications/critiques/critique_VIII_2.html

[45] Jeff Gerth, The 1992 Campaign; Business Dealings of the President’s Relatives: What the Record Shows, New York Times, April 19,1992, http://www.nytimes.com/1992/04/19/us/1992-campaign-business-dealings-president-s-relatives-what-record-shows.html?scp=9&sq=%2522asset%20management%20international%2522&st=cse

[46] Russel S. Bowen, The Immaculate Deception, American West Publishers 1991 http://www.mail-archive.com/ctrl@listserv.aol.com/msg33133.html

[47] archive.com/ctrl@listserv.aol.com/msg33133.html Masanobu Iwatani, Regulatory Reform Provokes a Wave of New Entrants to Japan’s Security Markets, Capital Research Journal, Vol 2, No 4, http://www.nicmr.com/nicmr/english/report/repo/1999/1999win04.pdf

[48] Stephanie Strom, International Business; Japan's Banks Pressed by Troubled Corporate Clients, New York Times, November 25, 2000, http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/25/business/international-business-japan-s-banks-pressed-by-troubled-corporate-clients.html

[49] Miki Tanikawa, Stocks Relapse As Japan Waits For Changes, New York Times, July 27, 2001, http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/27/business/stocks-relapse-as-japan-waits-for-changes.html?scp=6&sq=Mizuho&st=nyt

[50] Hiroko Tabuchi, In Japan’s Stagnant Decade, Cautionary Tales for America, New York Times, February 12, 2009

[51] See History Commons profile for Jim Pierce, and accompanying referencs, http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=jim_pierce

[52] Mark MacIntyre, Bunker Hill: light at the end of the tunnel, The Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce, August 20, 1998, http://www.djc.com/special/enviro98/10043970.htm

[53] The agreement between LLNL and Savannah River can be found here - https://www.llnl.gov/str/News597.html

[54] Savannah’s reference to developing sol-gels can be found here - http://srnl.doe.gov/mat_sci.htm

[55] Randy Simpson webpage at LLNL - https://www.llnl.gov/str/RSimpson.html

[56] News from the Savannah River National Laboratory, September 20, 2001, http://srnl.doe.gov/newsroom/2001news/nyc_911.pdf

[57] URS Website - http://www.urscorp.com/Divisions/index.php?s=102

[58] SEC document for Washington pre-payments - http://www.secinfo.com/dRqWm.4G1Vx.c.htm

[59] The Ties That Bind, Descended from family business empires, six huge business groups dominate the Japanese economy, Multinational Monitor, October 1983 - http://multinationalmonitor.org/hyper/issues/1983/10/ties.html

[60] John Holusha, Commercial Property/Downtown; At the World Trade Center, Things Are Looking Up, May 31, 1998, New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/1998/05/31/realestate/commercial-property-downtown-at-the-world-trade-center-things-are-looking-up.html?scp=121&sq=Mclennan&st=nyt&pagewanted=2 Also see PANYNJ press release from December 1997, - http://www.panynj.gov/pr/164-97.html

[61] Don Van Natta Jr. and Neela Banerjee, Top G.O.P. Donors in Energy Industry Met Cheney Panel, New York Times, March 1, 2002

[62] XROilPrice.com, http://xroilprice.com/Oil_Exploration.html

[63] Russ Baker, Family of Secrets, Bloomsbury Press, pp 292-295


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Kevin Ryan is the former Site Manager for Environmental Health Laboratories, a division of Underwriters Laboratories (UL). Mr. Ryan, a Chemist and laboratory manager, was fired by UL in 2004 for publicly questioning the report being drafted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) on their World Trade Center investigation. In the intervening period, Ryan has completed additional research while his original questions, which have become increasingly important over time, remain unanswered by UL or NIST. More information http://www.ultruth.com/Kevin_Ryan.htm feedback mailto:kncryan@REMOVETHISBITmsn.com

Source

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