Nigerian Plane Underpants Bomber - Mind Control Suspect? LIHOP?

[Charles Drago]

Q. What's round, hairy, and glows in the dark?

A. A frequent flyer's balls.

(With apologies to the National Lampoon.)

[Magda Hassan]

The Slovakian government today apologised to the Republic of Ireland for planting explosives on a passenger boarding a Dublin-bound flight.
Irish authorities were not notified of the incident until four days after it had taken place.
The 96g of plastic explosives, enough to make two hand grenades, where planted on an unsuspecting 49-year-old electrician by Slovakian agents to test their country's airport security.
The RDX explosives, one batch of eight planted, went undetected at Poprad-Tatry airport in eastern Slovakia on Saturday January 2nd. The passenger was allowed to board his 11:00 Danube Wings flight to Dublin where he has lived and worked for the last three years.
The man, who had no knowledge of the exercise, arrived in Dublin airport and returned to his flat, in Gardiner Street, Dublin, where he unpacked without discovering the mobile phone-sized package.
It was not until Tuesday morning that Slovakian authorities contacted Dublin Airport Authorities (DAA) to inform them of the incident.
The man's flat was raided by the Gardaí (Irish police) causing them to seal off roads and evacuate nearby homes and business as a precaution.

A statement released by the Irish department of justice after the raid said: "Following contact earlier today from the Slovakian authorities with the airport police at Dublin airport, members of the Gardaí Síochána have recovered a small quantity of explosive material from the luggage of a passenger who had flown into Dublin from that country on Saturday last.
"It has since been established that this material was concealed without his knowledge or consent in the passenger's luggage as part of an airport security exercise by the authorities in Slovakia. The Slovakian minister for the interior has conveyed to justice minister Dermot Ahern his government's profound regret for this incident."
A Gardaí investigation into the incident is currently underway. The seven other packages planted by Slovakian agents were all detected by sniffer dogs in Slovakia. DDA claim there has been no breach of Dublin airport security as at all international airports security checks are carried out on departing passengers only.
The unwitting carrier was arrested on Tuesday morning when his home was raided but has since been released without charge.
Following the alleged plot to bomb an airliner over Detroit on December 25th airport security has been stepped up in many countries. It is unclear whether the Slovakian tests were linked to such efforts.

http://www.inthenews.co.uk/news/politics...lin-flight-$1351569.htm

[Peter Lemkin]

The Slovakian government today apologised to the Republic of Ireland for planting explosives on a passenger boarding a Dublin-bound flight.
Irish authorities were not notified of the incident until four days after it had taken place.
The 96g of plastic explosives, enough to make two hand grenades, where planted on an unsuspecting 49-year-old electrician by Slovakian agents to test their country's airport security.
The RDX explosives, one batch of eight planted, went undetected at Poprad-Tatry airport in eastern Slovakia on Saturday January 2nd. The passenger was allowed to board his 11:00 Danube Wings flight to Dublin where he has lived and worked for the last three years.
The man, who had no knowledge of the exercise, arrived in Dublin airport and returned to his flat, in Gardiner Street, Dublin, where he unpacked without discovering the mobile phone-sized package.
It was not until Tuesday morning that Slovakian authorities contacted Dublin Airport Authorities (DAA) to inform them of the incident.
The man's flat was raided by the Gardaí (Irish police) causing them to seal off roads and evacuate nearby homes and business as a precaution.

A statement released by the Irish department of justice after the raid said: "Following contact earlier today from the Slovakian authorities with the airport police at Dublin airport, members of the Gardaí Síochána have recovered a small quantity of explosive material from the luggage of a passenger who had flown into Dublin from that country on Saturday last.
"It has since been established that this material was concealed without his knowledge or consent in the passenger's luggage as part of an airport security exercise by the authorities in Slovakia. The Slovakian minister for the interior has conveyed to justice minister Dermot Ahern his government's profound regret for this incident."
A Gardaí investigation into the incident is currently underway. The seven other packages planted by Slovakian agents were all detected by sniffer dogs in Slovakia. DDA claim there has been no breach of Dublin airport security as at all international airports security checks are carried out on departing passengers only.
The unwitting carrier was arrested on Tuesday morning when his home was raided but has since been released without charge.
Following the alleged plot to bomb an airliner over Detroit on December 25th airport security has been stepped up in many countries. It is unclear whether the Slovakian tests were linked to such efforts.

http://www.inthenews.co.uk/news/politics...lin-flight-$1351569.htm

Now, how the hell can you arrest a man who a government says was an unwitting accomplice to the government's crime? The luck of the Irish is gone.

Plants Explosives on Unsuspecting Passenger


The Irish government is demanding answers after an unsuspecting passenger carried high-grade explosives on a flight to Dublin as part of a botched training exercise. Slovakian Agents planted RDX explosives in the bag of a 49-year old electrician without his knowledge. The explosive was one of eight items planted by the Slovakian authorities in the baggage of unsuspecting passengers at Bratislava airport this past weekend.

Irish police arrested the man after the explosives were found in an apartment following a tip-off from the Slovakian authorities. He has since been released. The Slovakian government has apologized, and a full investigation is underway, but the Irish authorities want to know why it took three days to fully explain to them what happened.

We might complain about the TSA, but at least they’ve never snuck explosives into a passenger’s bag. They haven’t, have they? :listen:

Slovak man takes hidden explosive on Dublin flight

By SHAWN POGATCHNIK

Associated Press Writer

A Slovak man unwittingly carried hidden explosives on board a weekend flight to Dublin after a Slovakian airport-security test went awry, Irish officials announced Tuesday.

Slovak Interior Minister Robert Kalinak expressed "profound regret" to the Irish government for the oversight and the three-day delay in alerting Irish authorities. Dublin security chiefs said it was foolish for the Slovaks to hide bomb parts in the luggage of unwitting passengers under any circumstances.

Security experts said the episode illustrated the inadequacy of security screening of checked-in luggage - the very point the Slovak authorities had sought to test when they placed real bomb components in nine passengers' bags Saturday.

Eight were detected. But the bag containing about 90 grams (3 ounces) of RDX plastic explosive traveled undetected through security at Poprad-Tatry Airport in central Slovakia onto a Danube Wings aircraft. The Slovak carrier launched services to Dublin last month.

The Dublin Airport Authority confirmed that no incoming baggage is screened in Dublin. The man didn't find out about the explosives cache until Irish police, acting on a Slovak tip-off, raided his inner-city apartment Tuesday morning.

Police said they initially were led to believe the man might be a terrorist, until Slovak authorities provided more information about their role in planting the explosive.

Irish Justice Minister Dermot Ahern said Dublin police eventually confirmed that the explosive "was concealed without his knowledge or consent ... as part of an airport security exercise."

A major north Dublin intersection was shut down and neighboring apartment buildings were evacuated as a precaution while Irish Army experts inspected the explosive. The man was released without charge after several hours' detention.

An Irish Army spokesman, Commandant Gavin Young, stressed that the explosive posed no threat to passengers because it was stable - meaning it wouldn't explode on its own if hit or placed under pressure - and was not connected to other essential bomb parts.

The Dublin Airport Authority says it periodically tests the skills of baggage screeners - but only using bags under the control of security officers, not civilian passengers.

[Ed Jewett]

[B]Transparent Underpants: MITOP Again[/B]


By Michael David Morrissey

The smoke from Mr. Abdulmutallab's underpants cleared extremely rapidly. Within three days we had an actual photo of the charred briefs and the explosive 6-inch packet contained therein, complete with ruler for size verification. (Nevertheless one overzealous commentator estimated 8-10 inches, due to foreshortening.) In less than a week the word was out that it was an inside job (see here and here). The Keystone Kops could not have bungled the "intelligence" in this case any more spectacularly, and hilariously had it been a laughing matter, than the multibillion-dollar US security agencies. The scale of the ineptitude was so great that mainstream journalist Richard Wolffe reported that even the White House suspected a "conspiracy" rather than a "cock-up," despite the aptness of the British idiom, last heard when the BBC used it to describe (6 1/2 years later) their astounding announcement of the collapse of WTC 7 on 9/11 23 minutes before it happened.

"It seems that the president," Wolffe said, "is leaning very much towards thinking this was a systemic failure by individuals who maybe had an alternative agenda." What agenda? Well, Wolffe said, it might be "a case of the agencies having so much rivalry between them that they were more determined to stymy each other or the centralized system rather than the terrorist threat."

This is about as lame an explanation as when the White House ended up dismissing the Air Force One fly-by over Manhattan last April as a "publicity stunt." They might just as well have blamed it on a hair in Louis Caldera's underpants, since he graciously took the blame even though the official report makes it perfectly clear that it was an Air Force operation from start to finish. (See[size=12] "Was the Air Force One Flyover a Warning to Obama?")

Commentators more accustomed to thinking outside their underpants, like Barry Grey, Bill Van Auken, and Patrick Martin of wsws.org, Webster Tarpley, Wayne Madsen, Tom Burghardt, Pete Johnson, Michael Collins, and Paul Craig Roberts, have picked up the ball in the meantime where Obama predictably dropped it ("our intelligence community failed to connect those dots") and see the incident as another false-flag operation, strikingly similar to 9/11, designed to justify ratcheting up the war on "terror" in the Middle East and at home (the Patriot Act is up for renewal).

But does this make any more sense? Surely if the "intelligence community" wanted to create a false-flag incident, they would be able to do so without leaving true flags all over the place pointing to themselves. Some will say I underestimate the stupidity of spooks, who no matter how much money and power you give them are still more like Maxwell Smart than James Bond, but I do not buy into Stupidity Theory. This is what is sold by the mainstream media, of course. If no plausible lie can be found, the affair is dismissed as "failing to connect the dots," to use the latest expression. This is the official explanation of 9/11 (the alternative, that 19 Arabs beat the crap out of the US Air Force, being less plausible), of the Manhattan fly-by, of Gen. McChrystal's blatant disregard of the chain of command in announcing troop requirements in Afghanistan, and of the underpants incident. Even wars can be sent down the rabbit hole this way; e.g., Vietnam was a "well-intentioned mistake," and despite all the evidence to the contrary, much clearer now than in the case of Vietnam, Iraq/Afghanistan is already getting the same treatment.

Transparency Theory makes more sense. In 2008 I wrote an essay redubbing it MITOP (Made It Transparent On Purpose) in relation to 9/11, because the acronym fits well with and is actually the logical extension of LIHOP (Let It Happen On Purpose) and MIHOP (Made It Happen On Purpose), a distinction which now seems to have dissipated and never made much sense anyway.

I think MITOP applies to the underpants bomber as well: Yes, Big Brother did it, and he wants us to know it.

A good theory, in science, is one that explains more facts better than others. It fulfills the requirements of explanatory power and simplicity, or Occam's razor. In other words, if the walking, talking, and quacking is duck-like, most likely we're dealing with a duck. We might not want it to be a duck, or we might be terrified that it will turn out to be a duck, but this is not science, and not rational. The facts will most often quack for themselves, if we allow them to.

I have always maintained that the best evidence that 9/11 was an inside job is the fact that it happened at all. This is the prima facie case: it could not have happened otherwise. 19 aeronautically-challenged Arabs with box-cutters could not have defeated the US Air Force unless the US Air Force wanted it to happen. By the same simple and transparent logic, if indeed the official fairy tale were true, it would have been proven to everyone's satisfaction long ago. (The Pentagon videos would have been released, the plane and building debris found and examined, etc., etc.)

The thing about being logical is, once you start, you have to finish. You can't just say the most logical explanation for 9/11, or for Abdulmutallab's explosive underpants, is that it was an inside job because it is obviously and transparently so. You have to go further. You have to ask why it was obvious and transparent. Webster Tarpley, Wayne Madsen and the other conspiracy theorists should ask themselves this question. It is not the same question as "Why did they do it?" The question is "Why did they make it so obvious that they did it?"

I tried to answer this question in a previous essay, "MITOP and the Double Bind," by offering some amateur psychological analysis, and I'm glad to see that a professional, Bruce Levine, has written something along much the same lines ("Are Americans a Broken People? Why We've Stopped Fighting Back Against the Forces of Oppression"). I called it a double bind; he calls it "abuse syndrome." Orwell and Huxley called it love of slavery, of one's own chains, in the one case because of fear and in the other because of soma-induced pleasure. The abuser, the oppressor, can also be variously characterized, as Big Brother, Mustapha Mond, or in the non-fictional world, the secret government, national security state, ruling elite, military-industrial complex (Eisenhower), "deep state" (Peter Dale Scott), "rogue network or invisible government of treasonous and subversive moles inside the US government" (Tarpley), the "Unspeakable" (Jim Douglass, after Thomas Merton), etc. I prefer the term "Big Brother" because it avoids the logical pitfalls inherent in the other terms (see "Deep State Doublethink"), and I think on the whole we are closer to Orwell's dystopia than to Huxley's.

Where is the hope in this view of reality, or as Levine calls it, the morale? Well, two points. First, BB may be a reality, but he is not Orwell's BB. He may wish to be, or something more "benevolent" like Huxley's Mustapha Mond, but he is not. We are not fictional, either. The story is far from over. The situation is bleak, but there is wriggle room. And when, after all, in the history of mankind, has it ever been any different? The struggle against oppression, in one form or another, has been going on forever.

Secondly, our BB, the real BB, unlike the one in the book, is flawed, precisely because he is real, like ourselves. He may be able to pull off one 9/11, and maybe a second one, and then put the big lid on -- declare martial law, shut down the internet, jail all the dissidents -- which would be terrible, but what then? He must know this doesn't work in the long run (the Nazis tried it), and the soma solution is totally untested and even riskier. The Inner Party is not completely unified (e.g., some want war with Iran, some don't), so chances are he will stay with what has worked so far ("If it ain't broke, don't fix it"), and apart from having to tolerate articles like this, everything is going fine, from his point of view. The "war on terror" (i.e., for global control) is going well. Thanks to Abdulmutallab, BB can extend the war to Yemen and, most likely, renew the Patriot Act.

The more we become aware of what is going on, the better our chances. Noam Chomsky, whose work often seems to allow little room for optimism, cites the progress we have made since the 60s thanks to the grassroots work of antiwar, civil rights, feminist, and environmental activists, as well as democratic movements in Latin America (e.g., Bolivia, Venezuela), as hopeful signs, and I would add to that the fact that we now have not only Chomsky and Zinn et al. but also people like Paul Craig Roberts on our side. I can't imagine the former Wall Street Journal columnist and "father of Reaganomics" talking about [size=12][size=12][size=12] Big Brother and our loss of liberty and the rule of law [/SIZE][/SIZE][/SIZE]and writing things like this too many years ago: "In truth,[size=12][size=12][size=12] government represents private interests, those of the office holders themselves and those of the lobby groups that finance their political campaigns. The public is in the dark as to the real agendas.[/SIZE][/SIZE][/SIZE]"

Things are getting better. Yes, it is true that the Abdulmutallab incident serves to remind us of how far we have to go. If the bomb had exploded, how many of us then would be able to bear the fury of the backlash, which would fall not only on Yemen or "al-Qaeda" but equally if not more so on anyone attempting to "exonerate" them by suggesting "outrageous conspiracy theories" such as the possibility of an inside job? The bigger the catastrophe, the harder it will be to oppose the forces screaming for the blood of the designated enemy. Still, the better we understand this, the better off we will be.[/SIZE]
I am a retired English teacher with a Ph.D. in linguistics. I live in Germany.

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Transpa...1-461.html

[Ed Jewett]

The Weird Factor
The panty bomber mystery deepens
by Justin Raimondo, January 11, 2010

What I call the Weird Factor, for lack of a better name, seems to have become a permanent feature of our post-9/11 world, a dark and sinister leitmotif that plays in the background. On 9/11, of course, the Factor was on full display as a whole string of unusual events and unexplained phenomena were visited on us. The 9/11 Commission did little to clear these matters up, for the most part because they didn’t address them. Just a few for the record: Bush reading My Pet Goat to schoolchildren after being told of the attacks, the sudden appearance of the "Israeli art students" – and their buddies, the "laughing Israelis" – in the months and weeks leading up to the attacks, and the apparent passivity of US air defenses on that fateful day.
I mean, how is it possible that the terrorists actually hit the Pentagon, the symbolic fortress of America’s alleged military supremacy? After spending untold trillions on "defense" over the years, a sum that never declines in real terms, and driving ourselves into near-bankruptcy on account of it, how in the name of all that’s holy did nineteen men armed with box-cutters manage to drive Don Rumsfeld stumbling into the street, literally running for his life?

The Weird Factor seems to intensify whenever there is some significant event in our ongoing "war on terrorism," or whatever they’re calling it these days. My longtime readers will be familiar with my theory of how this works. Briefly: on Sept. 11, 2001, the impact of those airliners as they hit the Twin Towers sent us careening into an alternative dimension where up is down, right is left, and torture is the American Way – in short we landed in Bizarro World, where we have been trapped ever since. The post-9/11 cognitive shift that heralded our entry into this alternate dimension is amplified around these incidents, and certainly the most recent – the midair antics of the Undie Bomber – underscores the Weird Factor at its absolute weirdest.
The official narrative has been in flux, due in part to the political firestorm that surrounds the event: President Obama’s characterization of the Undie Bomber as an "isolated" individual, unconnected to a larger network, began to fall apart almost before it was uttered. As the links between Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab and the specter of "al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula" surfaced – along with the incredible story of how Mutallab’s father, a prominent Nigerian banker, personally reported his son to the US embassy and the CIA – the official story had to be amended. Now it’s "the buck stops here," an admission of failure, and the inevitable calls for making everyone’s flying experience more problematic and unendurable than ever.
Also inevitable was the way the Republicans leapt on the incident to somehow prove the President and his party are "soft" on terrorism, a strangely empty critique that doesn’t seem to consist of anything more substantial than a highly arguable perception of "softness" in the President’s rhetoric. GOPers complained that the President didn’t use the word "terrorism" enough, that his tone lacked the requisite harshness , but when it comes to substantial differences over policy – or over the specifics of this case – the Republican critics come up empty. I won’t be the first to point out that the Bush administration’s response to the Richard Reid/Shoe Bomber incident was nearly identical to the Obamaites’ on this very similar occasion. Team Bush raised the threat level, imposed all sorts of new regulations and restrictions to make air travel decidedly more unpleasant, and were somewhat less self-critical than their successors.
In all of this politicized brouhaha, however, we hear not one word about the various anomalies clustered around al-Qaeda’s latest – and most successful – post-9/11 attempt to sow fear and confusion in the West. I count three:
1) The well-dressed "Indian" man seen accompanying Mutallab at Amsterdam’s Schnipol airport. Michigan attorney Kurt Haskell, a passenger on the flight, was playing cards with his wife in front of the ticket desk when he saw what he considered to be a bit of an odd couple approach the desk and engage in a conversation with the attendant. Mutallab, who looked to Haskell as if he might be a teenager, was dressed somewhat shabbily, and was accompanied by an older "well-dressed" man who looked and sounded like he might be a native of India. When they approached the desk, the Indian did all the talking, explaining that Mutallab didn’t have a passport but needed to get on the flight. The attendant replied that everyone on the flight had to have a passport, to which the Indian retorted that his companion was a Sudanese refugee, and "we do this all the time." Well, then you’ll have to speak to my supervisor, said the attendant, and the odd couple went down a hallway: the next time Haskell saw this "refugee," he was setting his underpants on fire in an attempt to down the plane.
Dutch security is now denying Haskell’s eyewitness report, on the basis of having reviewed 200 hours of surveillance video. Haskell, however, is sticking with his story, and has located another passenger who (he says) corroborates his account, but this witness is afraid to step forward out of fear of being in the spotlight. Haskell also asks a reasonable question: why don’t they release the surveillance video, just like the US authorities released video of that idiot in New Jersey who snuck through security?
Additionally, there are all sorts of other questions that arise when we consider how the Dutch handled security at Schiphol in this instance: for example, all passengers at Schnipol are interviewed, an innovation introduced by the Israeli companies that provide security services there. No doubt these interviews are videotaped, or at least there must be some account of the interview, either from interviewer or his notes: let’s see them. I refuse to believe that Mutallab, being interviewed and sitting there with a bomb in his underpants, wasn’t sweating bullets at the very least. How did he explain himself? What did the interviewer ask? These are questions that won’t be answered until and unless the Dutch are more forthcoming – and the media start getting more aggressive when it comes to uncovering questions of simple fact.
2) The "man in orange" arrested at the Detroit airport, who was on the same flight. As Haskell tells it:
"Ever since I got off of Flight 253 I have been repeating what I saw in US Customs. Specifically, 1 hour after we left the plane, bomb sniffing dogs arrived. Up to this point, all of the passengers on Flight 253 stood in a small area in an evacuated luggage claim area of an airport terminal. During this time period, all of the passengers had their carry on bags with them. When the bomb sniffing dogs arrived,[one]1 dog found something in a carry on bag of a 30-ish Indian man. This is not the so called ‘Sharp Dressed” man.’ I will refer to this man as ‘The man in orange.’
"The man in orange, who stood some 20 feet away from me the entire time until he was taken away, was immediately taken away to be searched and interrogated in a nearby room. At this time he was not handcuffed. When he emerged from the room, he was then handcuffed and taken away. At this time an FBI agent came up to the rest of the passengers and said the following (approximate quote) ‘You all are being moved to another area because this area is not safe. I am sure many of you saw what just happened (Referring to the man in orange) and are smart enough to read between the lines and figure it out.’ We were then marched out of the baggage claim area and into a long hallway."
This account is backed up by Daniel Huisinga, an American from Tennessee, who was also on the flight and saw the "man in orange" being handcuffed and led away.
As Haskell points out, the explanation offered by US government officials has gone through a few different versions, from it never happened to it had nothing to do with terrorism. So what’s the real story? Our government isn’t saying – and our media isn’t asking.
3) The man who videotaped the entire flight. Charlie and Patricia Keepman, of Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, who were sitting 20 rows behind Mutallab on the flight "said another passenger" sitting right in front of them "videotaped the entire flight, including the attempted detonation of explosives," according to this news report:
"’This person actually was videotaping it,’ Mr. Keepman told the Detroit News. Mrs. Keepman told 620WTMJ’s Wisconsin’s Morning News: ‘He sat up and videotaped the entire thing, very calmly. We do know that the FBI is looking for him intensely. Since then, we’ve heard nothing about it.’"
The Keepmans’ account is backed up by another passenger, Beau Taylor:
"Taylor was in seat 29A of the plane, and was about 10 rows back from Abdulmutallab when he allegedly attempted to stage an attack. In the midst of passengers trying to subdue Abdulmutallab and flight attendants working to put out the fire, Taylor says he looked behind him and saw a man filming the situation about two to five rows back.

“‘I looked behind me as the flight attendant ran through, and I looked and there was a guy with a camera,’ Taylor says.

"Taylor says he notified the FBI of what he saw, in hopes of helping them to obtain footage of the foiled attack.

"’There’s definitely footage from the time it was mission critical, to the time they hauled (Abdulmutallab) to the front,’ Taylor says. ‘I told them 100 percent there was a guy filming.’"
In recording the entire flight, was the mystery cameraman inspired by Andy Warhol’s film, Empire, an 8-hour movie in which the unmoving camera was simply trained on the Empire State Building – or was a more sinister motive involved?
See what I mean by the Weird Factor?
All this is aside from the incompetence and missed signals that allowed the Undie Bomber to even get on a plane. Our government officials aren’t addressing any of these other questions, nor are their Republican critics – who only want to know why the President doesn’t launch an immediate invasion of Yemen. None of the issues raised by these oddities are being addressed by anyone – except a very few ordinary Americans, like the Haskells and the Keepmans, who witnessed the Weird Factor in action.
I have no hypothesis to submit to my readers as to the meaning of the above: all I can say, at this point, is that there is a lot more to the Christmas Day incident than our government is letting on. We don’t yet have all the facts, but it is weird indeed that these particular facts are being steadfastly ignored.
What we do know is this: the bare bones scenario, aired by the President in his earliest remarks, is incorrect. What we don’t know – yet – is how much broader was the conspiracy to down flight 253. If the eyewitnesses are right, then the activities of Mutallab’s well-dressed companion certainly point to a pro-terrorist auxiliary, of some sort, providing Mutallab with invaluable assistance. This scenario is also implied by the "man in orange," whose identity and whereabouts are a complete mystery at this point. As for the person who videotaped the entire proceedings – I have no idea what to make of it. It’s the Weird Factor – and it’s pretty strange, even considering how far down this particular rabbit hole we have gone.


http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2010/...rd-factor/

[Jan Klimkowski]

Flight 253: Anatomy of a Cover-Up
A Failure to "Integrate and Understand," or a Thin Tissue of Lies


by Tom Burghardt


New revelations about the failed Christmas Day attack on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 continue to emerge as does evidence of a systematic cover-up.

With the White House in crisis mode since the attempted bombing, President Obama met for two hours January 5 with top security and intelligence officials. Obama said that secret state agencies "had sufficient information to uncover the terror plot ... but that intelligence officials had 'failed to connect those dots'," The New York Times reports.

The latest iteration of the "dot theory" floated by the President, aided and abetted by a compliant media, claims "this was not a failure to collect intelligence" but rather, "a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had."

"Mr. Obama's stark assessment that the government failed to properly analyze and integrate intelligence served as a sharp rebuke of the country's intelligence agencies," declared the Times uncritically.

While the President's remarks may have offered a "sharp [rhetorical] rebuke," Obama's statement suggests that no one will be held accountable. Indeed, the President "was standing by his top national security advisers, including those whose agencies failed to communicate with one another."

While the President may be "standing by" his national security advisers, the question is, are the denizens of America's secret state standing by him? One well-connected Washington insider, MSNBC pundit Richard Wolffe, isn't so sure.

Wolffe, the author of a flattering portrait of Obama, Renegade: The Making of a President, when asked on MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann January 4 what is the White House "focus here right now?" Wolffe's startling reply: "Is this conspiracy or cock up? It seems that the president is leaning very much towards thinking this was a systemic failure by individuals who maybe had an alternative agenda." (emphasis added)

"I will accept that intelligence by its nature is imperfect" the President said, "but it is increasingly clear that intelligence was not fully analyzed or fully leveraged."

The question is why? And more pertinently from a parapolitical perspective, what "alternative agenda" is playing out here that would put the lives of nearly 300 air passengers at risk?

British Evidence: Down the Memory Hole

As Antifascist Calling reported last week, The Sunday Times and The Observer newspapers disclosed that MI5 had built a dossier on Abdulmutallab which showed "his repeated contacts with MI5 targets who were subject to phone taps, email intercepts and other forms of surveillance."

It has since emerged, the Associated Press reported January 4, that British authorities began assembling a security file on Abdulmutallab shortly after his arrival the UK in 2005 when officials claimed he was in contact with "known radicals."

Prime Minister Gordon Brown's spokesperson Simon Lewis said on Monday, "Clearly there was security information about this individual's activities, and that was information that was shared with the U.S. authorities. That is the key point."

In an climb-down from Lewis's admission, The Wall Street Journal reported that Home Secretary Alan Johnson, whose brief includes MI5, said in an appearance before Parliament Tuesday, "Whilst we did provide information to the U.S., according to standard operational practices, linked to the wider aspect of this case, none of the information we held or shared indicated that Abdulmutallab was about to attempt a terrorist attack against the U.S."

The Brown government has steadfastly refused to say just when the file on Abdulmutallab was passed to the U.S., letting stand the implication it was sent before the aborted Christmas Day attack.

The cover story being floated by MI5 now mendaciously claims the agency did not send Abdulmutallab's security dossier on to American officials "because of concerns about breaching his human rights and privacy," The Sunday Times reported January 10.

"MI5 has privately conceded that as early as 2006 its surveillance operations had picked up 'multiple communications' between the 23-year-old Nigerian student and suspected terrorists in Britain," The Sunday Times disclosed.

Despite these concessions, we're now to accept at face value the absurd claim that information on a terrorist suspect wasn't passed along by British spooks to their closest ally "because of guidance from [MI5's] legal department."

Trying selling that fairy tale to Republican victims of the secret state's "human rights and privacy" campaign in Northern Ireland as The Sunday Herald revealed during their multiyear investigation into Britain's dirty war!

Under intense pressure by the United States about these disclosures, the Brown government has gone to great lengths to stress "the importance to Britain of close intelligence cooperation with the United States."

Still reeling however, from U.S. threats to cut-off intelligence sharing last summer if torture evidence was disclosed to the public by the British High Court, the government is moving to avoid a similar controversy over the Abdulmutallab affair.

In late July, The Guardian revealed that "Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, personally intervened to suppress evidence of CIA collusion in the torture of a British resident, the high court heard today." The Guardian also reported that MI5 chief Jonathan Evans said in a speech in October that the "Security Service had been 'slow to detect the emerging pattern of US practice in the period after 9/11'."

While the torture files were eventually released in late October by a High Court order, it is certainly reasonable to ask: what other "U.S. practice(s)" are being suppressed today by the Brown government?

The Independent confirms this and states, "The Downing Street comments were reported to have angered the US government, but after talks with the White House, Mr Brown's spokesman tried to lower the diplomatic temperature. He said relations remained 'excellent' between the two countries."

As part of a new and improved sanitized narrative, the Home Office now claims that Abdulmutallab's transformation into an erstwhile suicide bomber began only after he left Britain. This, despite revelations by The Sunday Times last week, that he stoked MI5's interest precisely because of his repeated contacts with individuals "who were subject to phone taps, email intercepts and other forms of surveillance."

In a further development that can't please the British state, The Guardian reported January 7, that Yemen's Deputy Prime Minister for Defense and Security, Rashad al-Alimi, told a news conference that "information provided to us is that Umar Farouk joined al-Qaida in London."

The Wall Street Journal reports that al-Alimi said Thursday, that Abdulmutallab had "no links" to al-Qaeda "when he first came to Yemen in 2004 and 2005 to study Arabic" and that he "was radicalized during his time in the U.K., where he had studied between his two stints in Yemen," charges that "senior British counterterrorism officials" dismiss, claiming "there was no evidence to back them up."

Why then, would Abdulmutallab's web browsing habits, cell phone conversations as well as "other forms of surveillance" on "targets of interest" to British spooks indicate a "lack of evidence"? It would seem to suggest just the opposite.

Indeed, Abdulmutallab had been in "close contact" with "a key suspect in an Al-Qaeda plot to murder British citizens," according to MP Patrick Mercer, the chairman of the parliamentary counter-terrorism committee. Mercer told The Sunday Times January 10, that the alleged airline bomber "had been in touch" with the suspect, currently a resident in a high-security British prison awaiting trial, "while both men were students in London."

Feeling the heat, Lewis has backtracked from his initial statement and now claims that information revealed Monday was simply a "routine exchange of information," and not specific warnings that "Abdulmutallab posed a terrorist threat."

This beggars belief. Indeed, the Brown government's climb-down is clearly intended to "disappear" inconvenient evidence from the official record, thus suppressing the actual content of MI5's security dossier on Abdulmutallab, and will only heighten suspicions that a transatlantic cover-up of the affair is in full-swing.

A Failure to "Integrate and Understand," or a Thin Tissue of Lies

Making the rounds of the Sunday talk shows last week, John O. Brennan, President Obama's top counterterrorism advisor, claimed that U.S. intelligence officials "had snippets of information" about the suspected bomber but "we didn't have any type of information that really allowed us to identify Mr. Abdulmutallab."

The Washington Post reported January 4 that Brennan mendaciously claimed, "We may have had a partial name. We might have had an indication of a Nigerian. But there was nothing that brought it all together."

Indeed, the 25-year CIA veteran and former CEO of The Analysis Corporation, the firm which built and maintained bloated watchlists for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence's National Counterterrorist Center, went so far as to cheekily proclaim "there is no smoking gun piece of intelligence out there that said he was a terrorist, he was going to carry out this attack against this aircraft," or that America's multibillion counterterrorist apparatus only had "bits and pieces of information."

Let's take a look at those informational "snippets" and summarize what is quickly emerging as growing evidence of U.S. foreknowledge of an imminent attack on an American passenger plane:

* May: the British government withdrew its student visa for Abdulmutallab, a graduate of the prestigious University College London and placed him on a watchlist, barring his entry into the UK. MI5, and presumably their MI6 military intelligence colleagues in Yemen, compiled a dossier on the would-be bomber, citing his "political involvement" with "extremist networks" that have enjoyed on-again, off-again ties with NATO military intelligence organizations across the decades. This information, as Brown government spokesperson Simon Lewis, who let the cat out of the proverbial bag, was shared with their American counterparts.

* August: U.S. intelligence agencies, including the CIA and NSA, intercepted cell- and satellite phone traffic which revealed that a Yemeni affiliate of the Afghan-Arab database of disposable Western intelligence assets, also known as al-Qaeda, were finalizing preparations for an operation that would utilize a "Nigerian."

* October: Newsweek revealed in their January 11 issue, that the dodgy cleric, the American-born Anwar al-Awlaki, who communicated extensively with the disturbed Ft. Hood shooter, Maj. Malik Nadal Hasan, posted "a provocative message on his English-language Web site: 'COULD YEMEN BE THE NEXT SURPRISE OF THE SEASON?'" According to Newsweek, "Al-Awlaki seemed to hint at an upcoming attack that would make Yemen 'the single most important front of jihad in the world'." The Washington Post reported in 2008 that al-Awlaki had extensive contacts with 9/11 hijackers Nawaf Alhazmi, Khalid Almihdhar, and Hani Hanjour and was suspected of having assisted the 9/11 plot. According to the Post, "three of the hijackers had spent time at his mosques in California and Falls Church." Despite, or possibly because, of these dubious connections "he was allowed to leave the country in 2002." According to the History Commons, it is only in 2008 that the U.S. government concludes that the shady imam "is linked to al-Qaeda attacks." However, Al-Awlaki's provenance as a new "terrorist mastermind" should be viewed with suspicion, given well-documented links known to have existed amongst the 9/11 hijackers and American, Saudi and Pakistani secret state agencies.

* October: the same month Al-Awlaki was hinting at a "surprise," Newsweek revealed that John O. Brennan "received an alarming briefing at the White House from Muhammad bin Nayef, Brennan's Saudi counterpart. Nayef had just survived an assassination attempt by a Qaeda operative using a novel method: the operative had flown in from the Saudi-Yemeni border region with a bomb hidden in his underwear. The Saudi was concerned because he 'didn't think [U.S. officials] were paying enough attention' to the growing threat." A familiar trope we've heard in the aftermath of other terrorist strikes.

* Early November: Newsweek published an exclusive report January 4, that two U.S. "intelligence agencies and the Department of Homeland Security circulated a paper within the government last fall that examined in some detail the threats that bombs secreted in clothing--or inside someone's body cavities--might pose to aviation security." According to information leaked to the newsmagazine by anonymous "national-security officials," the report "was prepared by the National Counterterrorism Center in conjunction with Homeland Security and the CIA," and that "one principal point of discussion in the document was whether the detonation of a bomb hidden in clothing on an airliner would have a different explosive effect than the detonation of a bomb secreted in a body cavity under similar circumstances." (emphasis added) This chilling report, prepared in the wake of intelligence information provided U.S. security agencies by Saudi Arabia's counterterrorism czar, should raise provocative questions. No other media outlet however, has followed the trail.

* November 19: Abdulmutallab's father, a prominent Nigerian banker and former high state official, visits the U.S. Embassy in Abuja, telling State Department and CIA officials he believes his son is a threat. A cousin tells The New York Times that the father told U.S. officials, "Look at the texts he's sending. He's a security threat." Although Embassy personnel promise "to look into it," the cousin told the Times that "they didn't take him seriously."

* November 20: the CIA prepares and files a report on Abdulmutallab that is sent to agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia "but not disseminated to other intelligence agencies," unnamed "officials" tell the Times. Embassy staff also wrote and sent a cable known as a "Visa Viper," to the State Department and National Counterterrorism Center and a security file is opened on the suspect.

* December 9-24: Abdulmutallab travels to Ghana from Ethiopia and pays cash, $2,831 to be precise, for a ticket on a Northwest Airlines flight from Lagos through Amsterdam to Detroit, landing on Christmas Day. "It is now known" The Independent on Sunday reported January 10, "that the Ghanaian hotel he listed on his immigration form was not the one where he was actually staying." According to IoS, although the FBI "has officers on the ground in Ghana and believe it is likely the terrorist may well have had his final al-Qa'ida briefing, and supplied with equipment and explosives, there," no steps are taken to apprehend the suspect. "All this" IoS comments, "was more than a month after his father, a wealthy Nigerian banker, had met officials at the US embassy in Abuja to share concerns about his son."

* December 22: during a White House Situation Room briefing Newsweek reports that "a document presented to the president titled 'Key Homeland Threats' did not mention Yemen, according to a senior administration official."

* December 25: Abdulmutallab boards Flight 253 in Amsterdam with only a carry-on bag for his international flight; the would-be lap bomber holds a 2-year entry visa into the United States. As is standard procedure, the Department of Homeland Security is notified an hour prior to departure that he is a passenger on the plane.

* December 25: the Los Angeles Times disclosed January 7 that "U.S. border security officials learned of the alleged extremist links of the suspect in the Christmas Day jetliner bombing attempt as he was airborne from Amsterdam to Detroit and had decided to question him when he landed." Homeland Security officials "declined to discuss what information reached the U.S. border officials in Amsterdam on Christmas Day." Despite suspicions by Customs and Border Protection agents, who had accessed NCTC's TIDE database, the flight crew is not notified of Abdulmutallab's presence aboard the airliner and additional security precautions therefore, are not made.

Preliminary White House Review: Crafting the Cover-Up

In remarks January 7 announcing the White House's preliminary review of alleged "intelligence failures" responsible for the near detonation of a bomb aboard Flight 253, President Obama said that "America's first line of defense is timely, accurate intelligence that is shared, integrated, analyzed, and acted upon quickly and effectively."

Echoing remarks made Tuesday, Obama reiterated the trope that the secret state "failed to connect the dots in a way that would have prevented a known terrorist from boarding a plane for America."

In a maneuver to deflect public attention from the glaring similarities between the 9/11 provocation and the near-tragedy Christmas Day over Detroit, Obama claimed that "intelligence reforms" instituted under the previous regime had "largely achieved" the goal of generating said "timely intelligence."

Leaving aside overwhelming evidence that secret state agencies and a Pentagon data mining program had amassed terabytes of data on the 9/11 hijack team, including detailed profiles and intelligence dossiers, and that the Bush administration had been repeatedly warned by elements within their own counterterrorism agencies as well as their foreign counterparts in Britain, Egypt, France, Germany, Italy, Jordan, Morocco and Russia, in other words possessed "timely intelligence" that an attack was imminent, the "connect the dot" meme, as with 9/11, is handmaiden to today's transparent cover-up.

The President then alleged that despite knowledge of the "al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen," and that secret state agencies had amassed considerable information on Abdulmutallab's ostensible Yemeni confederates, and that "we knew they sought to strike the United States and that they were recruiting operatives to do so," as with 9/11, "the intelligence community did not aggressively follow up on and prioritize particular streams of intelligence related to a possible attack against the homeland."

The preliminary review released by the White House presents an even more damning indictment of these purported "intelligence failures."

According to the declassified version of the report, "The U.S. Government had sufficient information prior to the attempted December 25 attack to have potentially disrupted the AQAP [Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula] plot--i.e., by identifying Mr. Abdulmutallab as a likely operative of AQAP and potentially preventing him from boarding flight 253."

The document further charges that "the Intelligence Community leadership did not increase analytic resources working on the full AQAP threat."

Despite evidence to the contrary, the administration claims that "the fundamental problems ... are different from those identified in the wake of the 9/11 attacks" and that "firmly entrenched patterns of bureaucratic behavior as well as the absence of a single component that fuses expertise, information technology (IT) networks, and datasets ... have now, 8 years later, largely been overcome."

However, as I documented last week in "The Strange Case of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab," as with 9/11, a similar pattern of concealing information from relevant counterterrorism officials who might have intervened and rescinded the suspect's U.S. visa, and thus preventing him from boarding Flight 253, were replicated.

Indeed, the CIA's Nigerian station had prepared a dossier on Abdulmutallab that included biographical details and texts handed over by the family, an analysis of NSA electronic intercepts, reports from their own on-the-ground operatives in Yemen that were sent to the agency's Langley headquarters "but not disseminated to other intelligence agencies," as The New York Times revealed December 31.

The CIA says it is now taking steps to "improve" its handling of "terrorist-threat" information. Agency spokesperson, George Little told the media that CIA Director Leon Panetta specifically ordered the Company to implement several "new measures," including "formally disseminating information on suspected extremists and terrorists within 48 hours," expanding "name traces" and "reviewing information" on individuals from "countries of concern" to determine whether the Agency should recommend "changes in status on U.S. government watch lists."

One would have thought these were precisely the policies already implemented after the September 11, 2001 attacks! And yet, here we are eight years later and the CIA, perhaps more concerned with protecting their intelligence assets--a motley crew of killers and sociopathic riff-raff that include neofascists, mafia kingpins, drug traffickers and terrorists--from scrutiny by law enforcement officials, have to be ordered by the reputed head of their Agency to protect something as trivial as the lives of airline passengers, is stark commentary on the state of affairs in an allegedly democratic republic!

It cannot be ruled out that the CIA was interested in recruiting Abdulmutallab as an asset. After all, the Nigerian youth came from a prominent family, was a graduate of an up-scale British university and was well-versed in the close relationships amongst British and Yemeni Islamist networks. Indeed Abdulmutallab, like MI6's man during the Yugoslav destabilization campaign of the 1990s, the reputed 9/11 bag man, ISI asset and al-Qaeda leader, Omar Saeed Sheik, a graduate of the London School of Economics, would seem to fit the bill quite nicely.

On the face of it, however you care to slice it, the "connect the dots" conspiracy theory floated by the White House doesn't pass muster.

Two separate agencies, the CIA and NCTC, had all the information required to identify the would-be bomber and yet both, if we are to believe the official narrative, failed to do so. This despite the inconvenient fact that NCTC was stood up precisely as a central repository to collate, fuse and "connect" each seemingly minute piece of intelligence, the "dots," flowing into the U.S. security apparatus.

The White House cover story, accepted uncritically by the media, suggest that a mass of disparate data points--raw intelligence--when taken separately, is not incriminating in and of itself. However, after each fragment is subjected to the massive data mining and analytic capabilities of the U.S. Government which "fuse" these datasets into a coherent whole, only then will a dodgy pattern emerge.

In Abdulmutallab's case however, each seemingly innocuous piece of information on its own should have set alarm bells ringing. That this didn't happen Christmas Day cannot be explained away as either incompetence or "firmly entrenched patterns of bureaucratic behavior" but rather, by conscious action, or if you prefer, sinister inaction by factions within America's secret state.

Conclusion

As of this writing, it is not yet possible to provide a comprehensive answer as to why these events unfolded as they did. I am however, certain of one thing: the Obama administration, the security agencies presumably under its control and the corporate media, johnny-on-the-spot when it comes to covering-up imperialism's multitude of crimes, are lying to the American people.

There are however, several preliminary hypotheses which can be advanced, all of which raise further troubling questions worthy of additional investigation.

Were the Christmas Day events a pretext to expand the "War on Terror" into yet another strategic petroleum chokepoint as analyst F. William Engdahl suggests in an excellent piece published by Global Research?

Nor can we dismiss out of hand the analysis offered by the World Socialist Web Site that the failed Christmas Day airline plot was a maneuver by extreme right-wing elements deeply embedded in the U.S. National Security State "to destabilize and undermine the Obama administration." To this can be added Richard Wolffe's provocative statement that factions within the secret state may have had their own "alternative agenda," and thus failed to act.

Add to the mix, the systematic outsourcing of intelligence and security functions to a host of giant defense firms, outside of democratic control; in other words, rightist grifters who answer to shareholders and not the American people, and suddenly another piece of Wolffe's "alternative agenda" comes into sharp focus.

Chock-a-block with ex-CIA officers, NSA analysts, FBI agents and U.S. Special Forces veterans of America's dirty wars who now staff the privatized U.S. security complex, in other words well-paid mercenaries who know a thing or two on how to run a clandestine operation, and we just might have another plausible theory why a "dot" or two was ignored Christmas Day.

Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly and Global Research, his articles can be read on Dissident Voice, The Intelligence Daily, Pacific Free Press, Uncommon Thought Journal, and the whistleblowing website Wikileaks. He is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military "Civil Disturbance" Planning, distributed by AK Press.


Tom Burghardt is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?c...&aid=16888

[Ed Jewett]

Friday, January 22, 2010

Flight 253 Cover-Up: "No Smoking Gun" Claims Undercut by New Disclosures



Nearly one month after passengers foiled an attempted suicide bomb attack aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253 as it approached Detroit on Christmas Day, new information reveals that the White House and U.S. security agencies had specific intelligence on accused terrorist, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, far earlier than previously acknowledged.

Along with new reports, evidence suggests that the administration's cover-up of the affair has very little to do with a failure by the intelligence apparatus to "connect the dots" and may have far more serious political implications for the Obama administration, and what little remains of a functioning democracy in the United States, than a botched bombing.

What the White House and security officials have previously described only as "vague" intercepts regarding "a Nigerian" has now morphed into a clear picture of the suspect--and the plot.

The New York Times revealed January 18 that the National Security Agency "learned from a communications intercept of Qaeda followers in Yemen that a man named "Umar Farouk"--the first two names of the jetliner suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab--had volunteered for a coming operation."

According to Times' journalists Eric Lipton, Eric Schmitt and Mark Mazzetti, "the American intelligence network was clearly listening in Yemen and sharing that information." Indeed, additional NSA intercepts in December "mentioned the date of Dec. 25, and suggested that they were 'looking for ways to get somebody out' or 'for ways to move people to the West,' one senior administration official said."

Clearly, the administration was "worried about possible terrorist attacks over the Christmas holiday." These concerns led President Obama to meet December 22 "with top officials of the C.I.A., F.B.I. and Department of Homeland Security, who ticked off a list of possible plots against the United States and how their agencies were working to disrupt them," the Times reports.

"In a separate White House meeting that day" the Times disclosed, "Mr. Obama's homeland security adviser, John O. Brennan, led talks on Yemen, where a stream of disturbing intelligence had suggested that Qaeda operatives were preparing for some action, perhaps a strike on an American target, on Christmas Day."

In mid-January, Newsweek reported that the "White House report on the foiled Christmas Day attempted airliner bombing provided only the sketchiest of details about what may have been the most politically sensitive of its findings: how the White House itself was repeatedly warned about the prospect of an attack on the U.S.," Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff disclosed.

According to the newsmagazine, "intelligence analysts had 'highlighted' an evolving 'strategic threat,'" and that "'some of the improvised explosive device tactics AQAP might use against U.S. interests were highlighted' in other 'finished intelligence products'."

However, the real bombshell came last Wednesday during hearings before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee when Bushist embed, and current Director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), Michael E. Leiter, made a startling admission.

CongressDaily reported on January 22 that intelligence officials "have acknowledged the government knowingly allows foreigners whose names are on terrorist watch lists to enter the country in order to track their movement and activities."

Leiter told the Committee: "I will tell you, that when people come to the country and they are on the watch list, it is because we have generally made the choice that we want them here in the country for some reason or another."

CongressDaily reporter Chris Strohm, citing an unnamed "intelligence official" confirmed that Leiter's statement reflected government policy and told the publication, "in certain situations it's to our advantage to be able to track individuals who might be on a terrorist watch list because you can learn something from their activities and their contacts."

An alternative explanation fully in line with well-documented inaction, or worse, by U.S. security agencies prior to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and now, Christmas Day's aborted airline bombing, offer clear evidence that a ruthless "choice" which facilitates the murder of American citizens are cynical pretexts in a wider game: advancing imperialism's geostrategic goals abroad and attacks on democratic rights at home.

Leiter's revelation in an of itself should demolish continued government claims that the accused terror suspect succeeded in boarding NW Flight 253 due to a failure to "connect the dots."

However, as far as Antifascist Calling can determine, no other media outlet has either reported or followed-up CongressDaily's disclosure; a clear sign that its explosive nature, and where a further investigation might lead, are strictly off-limits.

Taking into account testimony by a high-level national security official that terrorists are allowed to enter the country for intelligence purposes, one can only conclude that the alleged "failure" to stop Abdulmutallab was neither a casual omission nor the result of bureaucratic incompetence but rather, a highly-charged political calculation.

Bushist Embeds: Destabilizing the Obama Administration?

One subject barely explored by corporate media throughout the Flight 253 affair, is the unsettling notion that the aborted Christmas day bombing may have been a move by rightist elements within the security apparatus to destabilize the Obama administration, a course of action facilitated by the Obama government itself as we will explore below.

This is not as implausible as it might appear at first blush. When one takes into account the meteoric rise to power by the 40-year-old former Navy pilot and federal prosecutor, Michael Leiter's ascent tracks closely with his previous service as a cover-up specialist for the Bush-Cheney regime.

"In 2004, while working as a federal prosecutor," a New York Times puff piece informs us, "Mr. Leiter joined the staff of a commission, appointed by President George W. Bush, to examine intelligence failures leading up to the war in Iraq. That led to a series of jobs in the intelligence world, and in 2008, Mr. Bush appointed him director of the counterterrorism center."

A rather curious appointment, if Leiter were simply an ingénue with no prior experience in the murky world of intelligence and covert operations. However the former Navy pilot, who participated in the U.S. wars of aggression against the former Yugoslavia and Iraq seemed to have the requisite qualifications for work as an intelligence "specialist."

While attending Harvard Law School, Leiter served as a "human rights fellow" with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, the U.S.-sponsored kangaroo court that has prosecuted America's official enemies in the Balkans whilst covering-up the crimes of their partners.

Amongst America's more dubious "allies" in the decade-long campaign to destabilize socialist Yugoslavia were al-Qaeda's Islamist brigade, responsible for carrying-out hideous massacres in Bosnia and Kosovo, with NATO approval and logistical support, as Global Research analyst Michel Chossudovsky, and others, have thoroughly documented.

As Deputy General Counsel and Assistant Director of the President's Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States, the so-called "Robb-Silberman" cover-up commission, Leiter focused on what are euphemistically described in the media as "reforms" with the U.S. "Intelligence Community," including the stand-up of the FBI's repressive National Security Branch.

Prior to joining NCTC, Leiter was the Deputy Chief of Staff for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence under former NSA Director and ten-year senior vice president of the spooky Booz Allen Hamilton security firm, John "Mike" McConnell.

From his perch in ODNI, Leiter coordinated all internal and external operations for the Office, including relations with the White House, the Department of Homeland Security and the CIA.

Leiter's résumé, and his role in concealing Bush administration war crimes, predicated on ginned-up "intelligence" invented by Dick Cheney's minions in the Defense Department and the CIA, should have sent alarm bells ringing inside the incoming Obama administration.

As we have seen since Obama's inauguration however, rather than cleaning house--and settling accounts--with the crimes, and criminals, of the previous regime, the "change" administration chose to retain senior- and mid-level bureaucrats in the security apparatus; employing officials who share the antidemocratic ideology, penchant for secrecy and ruthlessness of the Bush administration.

While the Times claims his "unblemished résumé" has taken a hit over the Flight 253 plot, an interview with National Public Radio shortly before the Abdulmutallab affair, provides chilling insight into Leiter's agenda, particularly in light of his January 20 statement to the Senate Homeland Security Committee.

Presciently perhaps, the NCTC chief told NPR: "We're not going to stop every attack. Americans have to very much understand that it is impossible to stop every terrorist event. But we have to do our best, and we have to adjust, based on, again, how the enemy changes their tactics."

It becomes a painfully simple matter for "the enemy" to gain advantage and "change their tactics" when those charged with protecting the public actually facilitate their entrée into the country "for some reason or another"!

According to the Times, the White House has kept Leiter at the helm and that it came as "no surprise to Bush officials" because, get this, "Michael wasn't political," if we're to believe the carefully-constructed legend of former Bushist Deputy National Security Adviser Juan Zarate.

If the Bush-Cheney years tell us anything it's that appointments by the previous regime were ruthlessly political. As The Washington Post reported shortly after Obama's election, these appointments were made permanent across a multitude of federal agencies and departments, including the security apparat, in a cynical maneuver designed to reward Bush loyalists.

"The transfer of political appointees into permanent federal positions" the Post disclosed, "called 'burrowing' by career officials, creates security for those employees, and at least initially will deprive the incoming Obama administration of the chance to install its preferred appointees in some key jobs."

The Times reports that the White House has publicly defended Leiter "and aides to the president said Mr. Obama called to convey his support." Perhaps not so curiously, the allegedly "nonpolitical" NCTC Director "has been mentioned as a possible future head of the Central Intelligence Agency, and how he performs might help determine whether he remains on the fast track."

One can only wonder, how many other counterterrorist officials have "burrowed" their way into, and hold key positions in the current administration, ticking political time-bombs inside America's permanent shadow government.

Senate Whitewash Fuel Attacks on Democratic Rights

During Wednesday's Senate hearings, Obama's Director of National Intelligence, Admiral Dennis C. Blair, in keeping with the former Bush administration's assault on democratic rights, assailed the decision by the Justice Department to try the suspect in a court of law.

This is fully in line with the rhetoric of ultra-right Republicans and so-called "centrist Democrats" such as arch neocon Senator Joseph Lieberman.

Newsweek reports that new details "surrounding the Christmas Day interrogation of the bombing suspect aboard Northwest Flight 253 raise questions about the accuracy of testimony provided Wednesday by senior U.S. intelligence and Homeland Security officials."

Last week, the newsmagazine reported that "Obama administration officials were flabbergasted Wednesday when Director of National Intelligence Adm. Dennis Blair testified that an alleged Qaeda operative who tried to blow up a U.S. airliner on Christmas Day should have been questioned by a special interrogation unit that doesn't exist, rather than the FBI."

This theme was quickly picked-up by Senate Republicans.

The overarching sentiments expressed by this gaggle of war criminals and corporate toadies was not to demand accountability from the responsible parties, but to call for further attacks on Americans' democratic rights.

Republicans on the committee lambasted Obama's Justice Department for its decision to try Abdulmutallab in a civilian court. John McCain (R-AZ), the Republican party's failed candidate in the 2008 presidential election, said the decision was "a terrible, terrible mistake," while the execrable Jeff Sessions (R-AL) claimed that the hapless suspect should have been delivered to the U.S. military as an "enemy combatant."

Ranking Republicans on the committee, Susan Collins (R-ME) and John Ensign (R-NV) went so far as to imply that Abdulmutallab should have been tortured. Collins inquired: "how can we uncover plots" if accused criminal suspects are allowed to "lawyer up and stop answering questions?" Ensign, a staunch supporter of policies articulated by the Bush administration, particularly former Vice President and war criminal, Dick Cheney, argued that "limiting" CIA interrogators to the methods laid out in the Army Field Manual would allow terrorists to "train" in advance of interrogations.

But the harshest criticism of the administration came in the form of a stealth attack by Obama's own Director of National Intelligence, Admiral Blair.

The Wall Street Journal reported January 21 that "nation's intelligence chief said the man accused of trying to blow up an airliner on Christmas Day should have been questioned by a special interrogation team instead of being handled as an ordinary criminal suspect."

Rather than coming to terms and halting the Bush regime's practice of torturing so-called terrorist suspects, the Obama administration has compounded the crime by creating a secretive group of interrogators called the High-Value Interrogation Group or HIG.

Blair told the Senate that the administration had "botched" the handling of suspect Abdulmutallab, by, wait, not handing him over to a group that as of this writing, exists only on paper, a salient fact of which Blair was certainly knowledgeable!

In his testimony however, the DNI told the Homeland Security Committee that the HIG "was created exactly for this purpose--to make a decision on whether a certain person who's detained should be treated as a case for federal prosecution or for some of the other means."

Blair implicitly criticized the Justice Department's decision to uphold constitutional protections that guarantee a suspect a right to a trial in a court of law and not a one-way ticket to an American gulag. Blair said, "we did not invoke the HIG in this case; we should have. Frankly, we were thinking more of overseas people and, duh, you know, we didn't put it [in action] then."

Mendaciously, the DNI claimed "I was not consulted. The decision was made on the scene, [and] seemed logical to the people there, but it should have been taken using this HIG format, at a higher level."

Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff disclosed January 20 that "senior administration officials" told him that Blair was "misinformed on multiple levels" and that the DNI's assertions were "all the more damaging because they immediately fueled Republican criticism that the administration mishandled the Christmas Day incident in its treatment of the accused Qaeda operative as a criminal suspect rather than an enemy combatant."

Isikoff reported January 22 that Blair, Leiter and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano were asked about the decision to try Abdulmutallab and all gave the same answer when queried by right-wing Senator Susan Collins, the Committee's ranking Republican: "Were you consulted regarding the decision to file criminal charges against [suspect Umar Farouk] Abdulmutallab in civilian court?"

Leiter and Napolitano both replied: "I was not." According to Newsweek, Blair also said he was "not consulted" and claims that the government "should have" brought in the yet-to-be activated HIG "to conduct the questioning of the suspect."

As with every aspect of this strange affair, Newsweek reports, these statements are riddled with lies and mischaracterizations.

Isikoff writes that "all the relevant national-security agencies, including top aides to Blair and Napolitano, were fully informed about the plans to charge the suspect in federal court hours before he was read his Miranda rights and stopped cooperating."

Newsweek further reveals that a "key event" was a secure videoconference on Christmas Day "that included Leiter" and Jane Lute, DHS' No. 2 official and that "neither Leiter nor any of the other participants, including representatives from the FBI and the CIA, raised any questions about the Justice Department's plans to charge the suspect in federal court, the officials said."

"If you participate in a conference call and you don't raise any objections, that suggests you were consulted," said one senior law-enforcement official. Another added that "nobody at any point" raised any objections, either during the meeting or during a four-hour period afterward when Abdulmutallab was informed of his Miranda rights to be represented by a lawyer," according to Newsweek.

Ultra-right Senator Kit Bond (R-MO), the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a witting accomplice to the previous regime's high crimes and misdemeanors against the American people said, "That this administration chose to shut out our top intelligence officials and forgo collecting potentially life-saving intelligence is a dangerous sign."

It's a "dangerous sign" to be sure, for America's battered democracy.

An On-Going Cover-Up

As events continue to unfold and new information shreds the official story, is Leiter's chilling testimony that suspected terrorists are allowed to enter the United States "because we have generally made the choice that we want them here in the country for some reason or another," merely a banal slip or something far more sinister that betrays the real order of things in post-democratic America?

Relevant questions begging for answers include: Who made the decision not to "connect the dots"? Are right-wing elements and holdovers from the previous administration actively conspiring to destabilize the Obama government? Was the attempted bombing a planned provocation meant to incite new conflicts in the Middle East and restrict democratic rights at home?

As with the 9/11 attacks, these questions go unasked by corporate media. Indeed, such lines of inquiry are entirely off the table and are further signs that a cover-up is in full-swing, not a hard-hitting investigation.

In truth, what we are dealing with here as we stagger into the second decade of the 21st century, is not a "conspiracy" per se but a modus operandi as the World Socialist Web Site has argued, rooted in a bankrupt system quickly reaching the end of the line.

[Peter Presland]

Kurt Haskell and his wife were witnesses to the 'Sharply Dressed Man' (SDM) incident. They are not letting go and the authorities appear to be doing their level best to discredit them. In spite of the disclaimer that he clearly feels necessary to preface it, the following is a pretty impressive resume of what they witnessed that connects a few dots. Their web site is worth a visit too, though predictably enough they are now being accused of 'seeking celebrity status' because of it etc etc.

Please note that in this article, I am not claiming that the U.S. Government knew Mutallab had a bomb or intended to hurt anyone on Flight 253 when the U.S. Government let him board.


Since our flight landed on Christmas Day, Lori and I have been doing everything in our power to uncover the truth about why we were almost blown up in the air over Detroit. The truth is now finally out after the publication of the following Detroit News article:
http://detnews.com/article/20100127/NATI...estigation
Let me quote from the article:

“Patrick F. Kennedy, an undersecretary for management at the State Department, said Abdulmutallab’s visa wasn’t taken away because intelligence officials asked his agency not to deny a visa to the suspected terrorist over concerns that a denial would’ve foiled a larger investigation into al-Qaida threats against the United States.
“Revocation action would’ve disclosed what they were doing,” Kennedy said in testimony before the House Committee on Homeland Security. Allowing Adbulmutallab to keep the visa increased chances federal investigators would be able to get closer to apprehending the terror network he is accused of working with, “rather than simply knocking out one solider in that effort.”

Now it all becomes apparent. Let me detail everything we know about the “Sharp Dressed Man” (SDM).
1. While being held in Customs on Christmas Day, I first told the story of the SDM.
2. My story has never changed.
3. The FBI visited my office on December 29, 2009, and showed me a series of approximately 10 photographs. None were of the SDM. I asked the FBI if they brought the Amsterdam security video to help me identify the SDM, but they acted as though my request was ridiculous. The FBI asked me what accent the SDM spoke in and I indicated that he had an American accent similar to my own. I further indicated that he wore a tan suit without a tie, was Indian looking, around age 50, 6′0″ tall and 250-260 lbs. I further indicated that I did not believe that he was an airline employee and that he was not on our flight.
4. During the first week of January, 2010, Dutch Military Police and the FBI indicated that over “200 Hours” of Amsterdam airport security video had been reviewed and it “Shows Nothing”.
5. The mainstream media picked up the “Shows nothing” story, which slanders my story. After visiting my office twice for a flight 253 special, Dateline NBC and Chris Hanson indicated that my story was “Unsubstantiated rumor dispelled as myth” and our story did not air during the tv special.
6. On January 2, 2010, I receive a call from a flight 253 passenger who indicated to me that it may be in my best interest to stop talking publicly about the SDM because he believes I am “wrong” in what I saw. He did not make any claim that he saw the SDM boarding gate incident at all. This call was made out of the blue after he made a “revelation” of this event on January 1, 2010. I later discover that this caller has ties to the U.S. Government.
7. On January 20, 2009, current Director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), Michael E. Leiter, made a startling admission. Leiter indicated that: “I will tell you, that when people come to the country and they are on the watch list, it is because we have generally made the choice that we want them here in the country for some reason or another.”
8. On January 22, 2010, CongressDaily reported that intelligence officials “have acknowledged the government knowingly allows foreigners whose names are on terrorist watch lists to enter the country in order to track their movement and activities.”
CongressDaily also reported, citing an unnamed “intelligence official” that Michael E. Leiter’s statement on January 20, 2010, reflected government policy and told the publication, “in certain situations it’s to our advantage to be able to track individuals who might be on a terrorist watch list because you can learn something from their activities and their contacts.”
9. On Janury 22, 2009, ABC News published an article that shoed a change of position in the government’s official story. Please see the following blog post for more information:
http://haskellfamily.blogspot.com/2010/0...unted.html
The U.S. government provided no explanation for the reason my story was initially discounted.
10. The SDM could not be from Al Qaeda. When speaking at the counter in Amsterdam, the SDM said the following “He is from Sudan, we do this all the time”. Who is “we”? If it is Al Qaeda, you surely don’t make such a statement to an airposrt security official.
11. The SDM could not be from airport security. The SDM did not dress in any secuirty uniform and did not appear to have any security badge. The SDM did not speak with a Dutch accent. The SDM dressed in a suit coat and pants. If the SDM was a higher up security official, he would not have to convince the ticket agent to let Mutallab on the plane without a valid passport. Instead, he would just order her to do it.
12. Could the SDM have been a U.S. Government official? He dressed in a suit and not a security uniform. Check. He indicated we do this all the time. Could “we” be the U.S. Government? Check. He spoke Enlish with an American accent. Check. Would he need to convince the ticket agent that this was a normal procedure to allow boarding without a passport? Check. Would he have the ability to obtain such clearance? Check. Could he enter this security area even though he wasn’t a passenger? Check. Would the ticket agent likely refer this request to a manager? Check. Would the U.S. Government not want this information public and try to hide it? Check.
13. The Amsterdam security video has not been released. A much more minor airport security violation occurred at the Newark New Jersay airport several days after the flight 253 incident. That video was released shortly thereafter.
14. Senators Levin and Stabenow, as well as Congressman Dingle, all refuse to discuss the matter with me.
With the information we already knew and the admission from the above referenced Detroit News article, we have evidence and claims made by government officials that the U.S. Government wanted Mutallab to proceed into the U.S. in order to obtain information on other terrorists involved with him. Once we take this statement and add it to my eyewitness account of a “Sharp Dressed Man” escorting Mutallab through the boarding process and allowing him to baord without a valid passport we can make the connection that the “Sharp Dressed Man” was a U.S. Government offical/agent.
The reasoning behind the following events now becomes very clear:
1. The reason Mutallab got through security despite the numerous warnings for months before our flight.
2. The reason why there have been so many lies from the U.S. Governemnt attempting to discredit my eyewitness account.
3. The reason why the Amsterdam airport security video is being hidden from the public.
4. The reason why the government is proposing a “Failed to Connect the Dots” account of the failure. The truth is too damning.
5. The reason why Mr. Wolf of the Obama administration indicated on the Keith Olberman Show that the White House was investigating a possible “intentional act” from within the U.S. Government as the reason for the Christmas Day attack.
6. The explanation for the cameraman and why he hasn’t been identified (Obviously, he was another U.S. Government agent) whose job was to film Mutallab for some governmental purpose.
7. The reason for the lax security after landing, which can be attributed to foreknowledge of the possible suspects involved.
8. The reason for the failure to search or secure the plane and passengers after landing, which can also be attributed to foreknowledge of the possible suspects involved.
9. The corporate media’s attempt to bury my eyewitness account.
10. Carl Levin’s, Debbie Stabenow’s and John Dingle’s intentional avoidance of my story and failure to return my calls/emails.
11. Janet Napolitano’s statement that “The System Worked”. From her point of view it probably did as this WAS PART OF THE SYSTEM!

[Ed Jewett]

Celebrity status?!

:call2::driver:hakehands:

Does this portend a Deep Politics drama show?

War on Terror: Special Victims Unit

[Peter Lemkin]

It was just announced the underwear bomber is now 'cooperating fully' with the US authorities.....there are many ways that could happen...but I doubt any are not suspect or legal....:afraid: