Quote:1.All times are Eastern Daylight Time. Sometime around 10:30, after the decision had already been made not to return to Washington, a reported threat to "Angel"-the code word for Air Force One-was widely disseminated in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC) and aboard Air Force One. Notes from the morning indicate that Vice President Cheney informed President Bush in a phone conversation shortly after 10:30 that an anonymous threat had been phoned into the White House that was viewed as credible.At about the same time, news of the threat was conveyed on the air threat conference call.

The Secret Service's Intelligence Division tracked down the origin of this threat and, during the day, determined that it had originated in a misunderstanding by a watch officer in the White House Situation Room.The director of the White House Situation Room that day disputes this account. But the Intelligence Division had the primary job of running down the story, and we found their witnesses on this point to be credible. During the afternoon of September 11 the leadership of the Secret Service was satisfied that the reported threat to "Angel" was unfounded.

At the White House press briefing on September 12, spokesperson Ari Fleischer described the threat to Air Force One as "real and credible."White House transcript, Press Briefing by Ari Fleischer, Sept. 12, 2001 (online at http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/print/20010912-8.html). Fleischer told us he cited the information in good faith. Indeed, Fleischer had conferred with Vice President Cheney and Karen Hughes before the briefing, and they had decided to let people know about the threat, all of them believing it was true.According to Fleischer, only weeks later did he learn-from press reports-that the threat was unfounded. We have not found any evidence that contradicts his account.Ari Fleischer interview (Apr. 22, 2004); Chuck Green interview (Mar. 10, 2004); Deborah Loewer meeting (Feb. 6, 2004); Ralph Sigler meeting (May 10, 2004); Andrew Card meeting (Mar. 31, 2004); Edward Marinzel interview (Apr. 21, 2004); Secret Service briefing (Jan. 29, 2004).
http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report_Notes.htm

Quote:In an interview with Tony Snow on Fox News Sunday, National Security Advisor
Condoleezza Rice confirmed that the September 11 threat against President Bush's life included a secret code name.

SNOW: Sept. 11 there was a report that there was a coded message that said, "We're going to strike Air Force One" that was using specific coded language and made the threat credible. Is that true?

RICE: That is true.

SNOW: So we have a mole somewhere?

RICE: It's not clear how this coded name was gotten. We're a very open society and I don't think it's any surprise to anyone that leaks happen. So, I don't know -- it's possible the code name leaked a long time ago and was just used.

SNOW: How on earth would that happen?

RICE: I don't know. I don't know. We're obviously looking very hard at the situation. But I will tell you that it was plenty of evidence from our point of view to have special measures taken at that moment to make sure the president was safe.

This exchange was reported by Carl Limbacher of NewsMax.com, who added that "U.S. intelligence officials have not ruled out the possibility that a government mole may have given terrorists the top secret code language they used to deliver the threat Air Force One is next' as the World Trade Center and Pentagon were under attack."
(NewsMax.com, September 23, 2001)
Webster Griffin Tarpley
9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA

Quote:Digital moles in White House?
Terrorists had top-secret presidential codes

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted: September 20, 2001
1:00 am Eastern

© 2011 WND


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"Air Force One is next," read the message received by the U.S. Secret Service at 9 a.m. Sept. 11, after two hijacked planes struck the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York.
Three minutes later, Secret Service agents grabbed Vice President Dick Cheney from his seat opposite a television set in the White House and hustled him down to the president's emergency operations center, a bunker built to withstand a nuclear blast.

The terrorists' message threatening Air Force One was transmitted in that day's top-secret White House code words. As the clock ticked away, the Secret Service reached a frightening conclusion: The terrorists had obtained the White House code and a whole set of top-secret signals.

This made it possible for a hostile force to pinpoint the exact position of Air Force One, its destination and its classified procedures. In fact, the hijackers were picking up and deciphering the presidential plane's incoming and outgoing transmissions.

The discovery shocked everyone in the president's emergency operations center Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta. Their first question was: How did the terrorists access top-secret White House codes and procedures? Is there a mole, or more than one enemy spy in the White House, the Secret Service, the FBI, the CIA or the Federal Aviation Administration?

In the week after the attacks in New York and Washington, more hair-raising facts emerged. The terrorists had also obtained the code groups of the National Security Agency and were able to penetrate the NSA's state-of-the-art electronic surveillance systems. Indeed, they seemed to have at their disposal an electronic capability that was more sophisticated than that of the NSA.

This startling observation came as no surprise to those tracking the globe-spanning investments of Saudi Arabia's bin Laden family and those of its exiled son, Osama, in some of the world's biggest and most advanced satellite and telecommunications companies.

Bin Laden also has the NSA beat on the employment front, hiring the best computer experts on the market. One such is Nabil Khan Kani, a Syrian who lived in Barcelona with his Spanish wife, Jenna Florine, in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

No one ever suspected what the amiable Syrian was really up to until January 2000, when FBI agents found two apartments he used thousands of miles from Barcelona, in the Bab el-Shabaa district of Saana, Yemen. The apartments served as transit points for Egyptians suspected of operational links with the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and Algerians connected with the Armed Islamic Group, or GIA. There, investigators turned up nine fake identity cards in different names, all with Kani's photo, Spanish, Italian, French and Sudanese passports, likewise with the same photo but in different names, and two pistols fitted with silencers.

Kani must have used yet another alias for his getaway. His whereabouts are unknown to this day. Computer and terrorism experts suggest that the missing Syrian computer whiz was the author of the technology known as steganography, as first described in the Washington Post yesterday. This technology enables users to bypass electronic monitoring by hiding messages randomly in seemingly innocent digital files, such as music files, those of the popular online marketplace eBay, pornographic files or even e-mail headers. Scrambled with the help of basic encryption tools, they can only be read by those with a "key." These messages leave no trace of their presence.

U.S. intelligence has been unable to trace their authors and recipients in the three years since first detecting evidence of their existence in the files of the bin Laden organization. U.S. agencies now believe that the attacks in New York and Washington were coordinated through those encrypted electronic messages, which were opened by "key" holders.

They also believe that terrorists are in possession of all or part of the codes used by the Drug Enforcement Administration, the National Reconnaissance Office, Air Force Intelligence, Army Intelligence, Naval Intelligence, Marine Corps Intelligence and the intelligence offices of the State Department and Department of Energy.

Intelligence and counter-terror sources report that, while rescuers in New York and Washington were sifting through rubble inch by inch, US government experts were changing codes one-by-one and even more difficult, replacing procedures and methods of encryption. The nagging question of a mole in the highest reaches of the U.S. government and intelligence community with direct or indirect links with bin Laden remains. Since no single individual has access to every top-level code at any given time a single mole would not answer the case; it would have to be a large, widely spread number. U.S. experts do not believe bin Laden was capable of infiltrating double agents into the heart of the U.S. administration on a large scale. They are looking elsewhere, instead, at a country with a very well-oiled intelligence apparatus Iraq.

This theory was argued by an authoritative voice, former CIA Director James Woolsey, in a New Republic article reprinted by London's Daily Telegraph on Sept. 17. He refers to a book called "Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America," by Laurie Mylroie, which quotes a senior FBI investigator on the problematical identity of Ramzi Yousef, perpetrator of the first attempt to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993.

For that deed, a U.S. federal court in New York sentenced Yousef Jan. 8, 1998, to 240 years in solitary confinement. He was also indicted for conspiring to hijack 12 U.S. and Asian commercial aircraft on their way to the United States and blow them up over New York. It was claimed that the name Ramzi Yousef was an alias for his real identity, which was a Pakistani called Abdul Basit Karim.

However, the FBI investigator cited in the book said that Basit was not his real identity either; Yousef was actually an Iraqi army agent who stole Basit's identity. Basit and family were resident in Kuwait when Iraq overran the oil emirate in 1990. The Iraqis moved the family to Baghdad with other hostages. Some returned home, but the Basits were never heard of again, probably murdered for the sake of disguising Ramzi Yousef.

The former CIA director's advice is this: Iraq was involved in the first attack on the World Trade Center. Baghdad is therefore the place to look for the conspirators behind the second.

Intelligence sources can disclose that Woolsey's conclusion does not rest exclusively on the Mylroie book. While pointing the finger at Iraqi intelligence, he assigns Baghdad with no more than a partial role both in the1993 World Trade Center bombing and also in last week's suicide attack on its twin towers. His conclusions are based on a CIA investigation opened during his tenure as CIA director from 1993-1995.

Evidence kept in a personal dossier codenamed KG-84-HJ established Iraqi complicity in the 1993 attack. It also contains the first serious evaluations and theories regarding the identity of the high-placed penetration agents in the White House and at the heart of U.S. intelligence.

They appear to be the very moles who made those vital coded signals available to the kamikaze terrorists Sept. 11.

Quote:According to Bob Woodward's canonical mainstream account: "At about 10:30 AM
Cheney reached Bush again on Air Force One, which was still on its way toward
Washington. The White House had received a threat saying, Angel is next.' Since Angel was the codeword for Air Force One, it could mean that terrorists had inside
information."...

...the "Angel is next" story contained an explosive potential for the longer term, since by pointing toward the existence of highly-placed moles within the administration who had access to top secret code words and procedures, it threatened to explode the official myth of 9/11 which was then taking shape.
Webster Griffin Tarpley
9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA

Quote:Once airborne, Mr. Bush spoke again on a secure phone with Mr. Cheney, who relayed a new message that changed the president's mind, White House officials later said. The vice president urged Mr. Bush to postpone his return because, Mr. Cheney said, the government had received a specific threat that Air Force One itself had been targeted by terrorists. Mr. Cheney emphasized that the threat included a reference to what he called the secret code word for the presidential jet, "Angel," Mr. Bartlett said in an interview.

In a press conference on Sept. 12, 2001, then-White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said the threat tipped the scales for Mr. Bush. The president reluctantly agreed to remain away from Washington "because the information that we had was real and credible about Air Force One," Mr. Fleischer said.

After a stop in Louisiana, the presidential jet flew to Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. Offutt's deep underground bunker gave the president a secure place to hold a video conference with officials in Washington. Shortly after 4 p.m., he decided to return to the capital, arriving at the White House just before 7 p.m.

Although in the days after Sept. 11, Mr. Cheney and other administration officials recounted that a threat had been received against Air Force One, Mr. Bartlett said in a recent interview that there hadn't been any actual threat. Word of a threat had resulted from confusion in the White House bunker, as multiple conversations went on simultaneously, he said. Many of these exchanges, he added, related to rumors that turned out to be false, such as reports of attacks on the president's ranch in Texas and the State Department. As for the Air Force One code name, Mr. Bartlett said, "Somebody was using the word 'angel,' " and "that got interpreted as a threat based on the word 'angel.' " (Former Secret Service officials said the code wasn't an official secret, but a radio shorthand designation that had been made public well before 2001.)

The vice president's office gave an account differing from Mr. Bartlett's, saying it still couldn't rule out that a threat to Air Force One actually had been made.

Days after the attacks, Mr. Cheney had said word of the threat had been passed to him by Secret Service agents. But in interviews, two former senior Secret Service agents on duty that day denied that their agency played any role in receiving or passing on a threat to the presidential jet.

An official in Mr. Cheney's office said in an interview that Mr. Cheney had been mistaken in saying the threat came to him via the Secret Service. The official said that instead, Mr. Cheney had received word of the threat from "a uniformed military person" manning the underground bunker. The official said the vice president and his staff don't know who the individual was. And the official said that he couldn't say definitively whether or not a threat had been made. "I'm not in a position to know the answer to that question," the official in the vice president's office said.
http://www.unknownnews.net/040322911.html

Quote:Once the new policy has been institutionalized, every bureaucrat will attempt to defend it as a matter of self-preservation.

Lauren Johnson Wrote:

Quote:Once the new policy has been institutionalized, every bureaucrat will attempt to defend it as a matter of self-preservation.

These two paragraphs beg the question just when the "new policy" was institutionalized. One could argue it came with WWII and that the policy has been defended under different guises ever since. 9/11 through this lens is seen as a new cold war reinvigorating old patterns of institutional and social behavior. Without 9/11 the US might have lost its way and had a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people."