JFK and 911

[Swamp Gas]

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Part 1


JFK and 9/11
Insights Gained from Studying Both

by Dr. Peter Dale Scott

Global Research, December 20, 2006

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The assassination of John F. Kennedy took place 43 years ago on Friday, November 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas. The following text is the transcript of a lecture delivered by Peter Dale Scott in Dallas on November 18, 2006.

To view the webcast of Peter Dale Scott's lecture, click here



DALLAS – November 18, 2006. [posted December 20, 2006. Revised version December 21, 2006]

When I first imagined doing this talk I thought: well, I probably knew more at this stage about 9/11 than most people here, who are professionally concerned with JFK. But in preparing this talk, which I only began last Monday, has been a real learning experience for me. Taking a lot of things which I had already knew about each, but which I had never really put together before -- when I did they gave me a clearer view of what was happening behind the scenes in both operations. Because certain things repeat themselves. [1]

These things that repeat themselves include what we might call external features – which you are very familiar with in the JFK case - the ability of the government to establish a guilty party or parties immediately, and the press and media consumption of that product to the exclusion of all other possibilities.

Eventually, in both cases a commission is set up – the Warren Commission in 1963 and the 9/11 Commission this time in 2003.

And the starting point for both commissions is to validate what was already decided by the FBI on the day in question. That is the first of the common features that I would like to look at a bit more closely because it sort of hit me between the eyes when I thought about the two together.

Now if you remember the case of Oswald (and I have to do this from memory here, so correct me if I am wrong about the details) within fifteen minutes of the assassination and

long before Oswald was picked up in the Texas Theater, they put out on the police network and possibly other networks, a description of the killer – five foot ten – 165 pounds (WR 5; 17 WH 397), which exactly matches what is in his FBI file, exactly matches what’s in CIA documents about him.[2]

One of the problems is it doesn’t match the actual height and weight of the man picked up and charged, which is more like five foot nine and 140 pounds.[3] And it’s also very suspect because as far as we can trace the origins of this exact fit with the FBI file, it’s attributed to Howard Brennan[4] – who saw someone two blocks from here in the sixth

floor window, from the waist up. So you’ll have to figure out how they were able to get that exact measurement. It appears someone had already decided who was going to be charged before the police found Oswald in the Texas Theater.

Now the parallel to that for 9/11 is, I have to say, even more astounding, because of Richard Clarke, who was director for counter-terrorism activities in the White House, and a very important eyewitness. His book Against All Enemies is almost totally ignored by the 9/11 Commission, and it had to be ignored by the Commission because it is at odds, in many important respects, with what the 9/11 Report says (which I will get back to). But he tells us that at 9:59 am on September 11, which is the time when the second tower collapses, the North Tower, the FBI already had a list of the alleged hijackers.[5]

This is extraordinary in the first place because the FBI always says about itself that it doesn’t do much intelligence in the field of terrorism; its specialty is criminal investigation afterwards. They had the names of hijackers at 9:59; at 9:59 am Flight 93 had not yet crashed. And even more astonishingly, if we believe the 9/11 Report (which of course on this point I do not believe), NORAD, which was searching for the hijacked planes, wasn’t aware that Flight 93 had been hijacked until 10:08, which is nine minutes later.

("I don't buy the idea that we didn't know what was coming," a former FBI official with extensive counter-terrorism experience has since said. "Within 24 hours [of the attack] the Bureau had about 20 people identified, and photos were sent out to the news media. Obviously this information was available in the files and somebody was sitting on it.")[6]

So it’s worth thinking about that for a moment, the two events together. And then in the other cases that we know about, how the identity of the person who is ultimately going to be identified as the culprit is established at the very beginning - Sirhan Sirhan, the bag with the gun that identifies James Earl Ray – it isn’t investigative work AFTER the assassination, that finds these people, it is just following up what is already there, from the very beginning.

As I say that is the first thing that strikes my mind about the similarities between the two events. And then we come to what I call the internal continuity of content. Historically I was first drawn to this because in the news of the Watergate break-in in the New York Times, on June 17, 1972, which I remember quite vividly, there was Frank Sturgis, alias Frank Fiorini. I had already written about him in The Dallas Conspiracy a year before, because of his role in perpetuating false Oswald stories, what I now call Phase One Oswald stories, linking Oswald falsely to Cuba [7]

I could go on and on about that, but I just wanted to say, in the new paperback edition of Lamar Waldon’s book Ultimate Sacrifice, we find validation of a very old story that Hunt and McCord, who we may loosely call two of the Watergate burglars, certainly the two who were controlling the fate of the rest, worked together in 1963.[8]

This is an old charge, which was largely forgotten, but is revived in this book, and in my mind credibly. I’ll just put myself on record that I was not impressed with the hardbound edition of Ultimate Sacrifice, and only this week just began reading my copy of the paperback edition. And I have issues with a lot of the things in there, but I am convinced it has to be taken seriously. Whether or not he is right about his central thesis, he is more right about the supporting details that he has gathered for it and his book has the advantage of being thoroughly documented. The quality of the documentation goes up and down, but there is a great deal of it.

THE WHITE HOUSE COMMUNICATIONS AGENCY

Now I want to come to a common denominator between what happened in 1963 and what happened in 2001. It is not often discussed, but by coincidence, I think it is being discussed right now in the other place, as we call it [i.e. the Lancer Conference], the role of the White House Communications Agency. You are all JFK researchers. How many of you have ever asked yourself about the role of the White House Communications Agency – WHCA on 11/22/63–? Anybody?

Rex![9] (laugh) Well I am indebted to Rex [Bradford], who of course is administering the web site of the Mary Ferrell Foundation. There are quite a few documents there, and I am going to draw on those documents. That is what’s so wonderful about the Mary Ferrell Foundation, you never have to go to the National Archives again, you just give a few touches of the fingers on the keyboard and you get these things.

It’s going to help us with what I consider a very crucial and unresolved question of 9/11, and I’m sorry I have to telescope here. My big question and the focus of my forthcoming book - The Road to 9/11 - out of that huge book with 14 chapters, there are only two on 9/11 itself, and both of them are looking almost exclusively at what Dick Cheney did between 9 am and 10:39 on that morning -- because there are different accounts of it, and interestingly there are different accounts from Dick Cheney himself, incompatible accounts.

I believe it is a very important issue because either he was in the bunker, what we call the PEOC under the White House, or not, when two crucial orders were made, a Stand Down order that got all the planes down on the ground, that came out of the bunker, and a Shoot Down order, to shoot down any remaining hijacked planes. (At this point there was only one – Flight 93, which of course is the plane that should not have been shot down, according to the official version, because the passengers were taking care of the problem themselves.)

And there is no doubt, everybody agrees, including the 9/11 Report, that both these orders occurred. There is no doubt that the first was at 9:42.[10] However there is great confusion as to whether the second order was around 9:45-9:55 (Richard Clarke says it was before Air Force One took off at 9:54);[11] or when the Report indicates: probably about 10:15, which of course is after Flight 93 had already crashed.[12]

Now when did Dick Cheney go into the PEOC? He spoke to Tim Russert on “Meet the Press” five days afterward, on September 16, and said he got there before the plane, if that is what it was, flew into the Pentagon, which was at 9:37. And I believe what he said on September 16.

Then he was interviewed by Newsweek, and that appeared in Newsweek on December 31; and it is the basis for the story in the 9/11 Report: that he “arrived”, and that’s the Report’s word, in the bunker “shortly before 10 [am], perhaps at 9:58.”[13]

You notice if that was the case, he was not present for either order, though we have many sources to say that he was there for the first, and the only coherent reading of Richard Clarke’s book is that he transmitted to Clarke the shoot down order sometime before 9:54.

What I think happened -- and this is where we will get back to JFK -- is that Cheney did indeed arrive quite early in the bunker, as Norman Mineta, who was also there, testified. (There’s a very interesting story there that I can’t get into here.)[14] And THEN Cheney left, and this is the interesting thing, he left the bunker, went back into the tunnel leading to the bunker – and from the tunnel he made the crucial phone call to Bush and perhaps an even more crucial phone call to Rumsfeld, which Rumsfeld has referred to but which the Report ignores, which was about three things:

1) protecting Air Force One, which was irrelevant;

2) orders (disputed) about planes, which may have involved the shoot-down order;

3) Continuity of Government.[15]

I wish I could get into this -- it is the heart of my book: instituting COG, Continuity of Government (which I call Change in Government, because it is often called a plan for the suspension of the U.S. Constitution – and that is a pretty accurate summary of it).[16]

How many of you did know that it was actually instituted on 9/11? That is perhaps one of the most important things that happened on 9/11, and it happened because of this phone call, and there is no record of the phone call.[17] And I think it’s pretty obvious that there is no record of the phone call because he wasn’t in the bunker where people were taking notes and logs were being kept. He went to a back channel from a secure phone somewhere else. There’s no question, everyone agrees, even Cheney himself, that he used a secure phone in the tunnel at this time.[18]

Now this matter could be resolved by going to the records of the White House Communications Agency. They kept logs. The Secret Service kept logs. And we have logs from that day that which record a trivial phone call at 9:15 am and another trivial phone call at 10:15 am.

But Thomas Kean, the commission chairman, complained publicly that the logs were not complete.[19] We have the equivalent of an 18 minute gap, which some of you will remember from the Watergate investigation.[20] The 9/11 Commission does not present any records from the logs for the time of the phone call, either because they never saw them, possibly because the logs had been massaged and cleansed and purged before they got to them, possibly because the commission purged them themselves or, and this is what I believe, and I think you should think about very seriously, because the phone in the tunnel was a back channel for which normal logs were not kept, possibly because it was a higher classification because it involved Continuity of Government.

And one of the things I would press for is for Congress -- when we start suing for the records that don’t get released in 2009[21] – to get released all of the documents pertaining to COG. I believe these will tell us about warrant-less wiretapping, about the building of detention camps for large numbers of undesirable people like US, and so on and so on. I think this is a very important topic.[22]

Let me see where I am from my notes here. Anyway, so I noticed this gap. First of all by the way, I had a researcher contact the press officer of the WHCA and they very helpfully said to put in a FOIA request. Well, the poor old ARRB wasn’t able to obtain significant documents from the WHCA, so I didn’t bother to try on my own.[23] I did go however, to their web site, and what I read there was, and this is a direct quote now: “WHCA was …a key player in documenting the assassination of President Kennedy.”[24]

Well, this struck me as extremely interesting! Because I don’t know who they documented it for; but on the basis of my research, they didn’t document it for the Warren Commission. Because the Warren Commission never got their records. And neither did the ARRB. And there is actually a section of the ARRB Report where they say – and I think they were much too limited in their curiosity, but it came to their attention that edited phone calls out of Air Force One flying back to Washington were, in of all places, the LBJ Library. Well then they figured if the edited records are at the LBJ Library we should get the unedited set released. Their report said, though, “The WHCA could not produce any records.”[25]

What they really should have asked for, and I believe this would have documented the assassination, were WHCA records BEFORE the shots were fired, leading up to the moment the shots were fired, but as I said, they only requested records from Air Force One, which is to say some time after.

However a few documents from 1963 were released. (And this is the beauty of the Mary Ferrell Foundation: you can read them there.) And what we read there is remarkably resonant to what I found out in respect to 9/11. In the post-shooting period, the regular switchboard in Washington was out of touch with Dallas, and the only way they could communicate was to patch though to Fort Worth, which in turn would then patch through to Dallas. But at the same time there was a back channel, just like I was talking about 9/11. The back channel was set up at Parkland Hospital, through the Secret Service, and the main WHCA switchboard was unaware of it.[26]

And this is what really gets interesting, because in 9/11 I became fascinated with the WHCA channel – which in effect was the Secret Service channel, so the Secret Service knew everything of what was happening on 9/11 immediately, including what was on the screens at FAA or NORAD. That information was going directly and immediately to the Secret Service and therefore of course to Cheney, who had a Secret Service agent with him. That I think will turn out - I make this prediction, that if we ever get to the next layer of what happened on that day, we will become extremely interested in that Secret Service network with the White House Communications Agency. And I say it involves two levels, you will find a regular channel set of communications and the back channel, where the significant action is happening.

What was really interesting, to judge from the reports they filed in 1963, the WHCA regulars were completely unaware that a back channel was operating.

I read this from the Mary Ferrell Foundation site: “Direct communication was set up immediately, outside of Emergency Room (at Parkland), with Mr. Behn” (the Special Agent in Charge of the White House Secret Service detail.) So it wasn’t even a back channel back to the WHCA but it went to the head of the Secret Service detail in his office in Washington, “which became the Washington Command Post and Clearing House.”[27]

Now what do we know of what’s happening at that Command Post on that day? Almost nothing. But from what I learned from 9/11, that is where we should look to learn more about JFK. And I think potentially, and here I am only speculating, that if we ever get the pre-shot WHCA records, we will learn more about why Secret Service Agent Winston Lawson, for example, stopped right in front of the TSBD where a man was having a so-called epileptic fit, which led to the Dallas Police ordering a direct pathway for an ambulance to be open to Parkland Hospital.[28]

So when the shooting of the president occurred, the President’s car was like a pea in a pea shooter, there was only one easy way to go - the path to Parkland was open while access was blocked, so the epileptic could arrive. For those of you who know the story, there was a man who when he got there, got off the stretcher and said he felt fine and didn’t have an epileptic fit at all. He had changed history, he had affected history, but he hadn’t had an epileptic fit.[29]

[Swamp Gas]

Part 2


DRUGS

I was thinking of two or three more points. Here’s a broader one, where now you say, “There he goes again…” on the question of drugs.

In Deep Politics, and especially in Deep Politics II (which thanks to Rex, is about to be reissued I believe, and will be available shortly from the Mary Ferrell Foundation), I discuss the importance of the Mexican drug traffic as a factor – which was

1) connected to Jack Ruby;[30]

3) connected to the Mexican DFS, which taped Oswald in Mexico City;

3) protected in effect by the CIA, which intervened at least once in an American court to prevent a DFS smuggler from being indicted;[31]

4) connected to Richard Cain, this multifaceted mob and law enforcement figure, who was the chief link between Sam Giancana and the Mexican establishment. And he may have very well, as I say in Deep Politics II, - his specialty was wiretapping, and it’s conceded publicly that he did wiretapping in Mexico of foreign embassies in Mexico City for the Mexican government, which certainly sounds pretty relevant to the over hearing of the man identifying himself as Lee Oswald, and also some of the Cubans, we’ll come back to them again, the Cuban students, particularly Cubans students who were involved in drug trafficking.[32]

At that point, when I first wrote this I had not yet looked at the new version of Ultimate Sacrifice; and realized that the Mexican drug connection is, if anything, even more important in Waldron’s book than it is in mine, which may explain my new partiality to want to take that book seriously. He brings in people like, for example the French Connection, and whoever he was (Jean) Souêtre or (Michael Victor) Mertz, who was reportedly in Dallas November 22, 1963.[33] He ties those people to Marcello, and to Trafficante and to Rosselli and there are more people, I could give the rest of my talk on that theme, but I won’t.

Now the current position of the George W. Bush administration and how they feel about drug traffickers. How many are following the case of Luis Posada Carriles?

Nobody denies he is a terrorist, he boasts to being a terrorist. He blew up an airliner in 1976 and he once boasted of bombing a Cuban resort in 1998 which resulted in the death of a tourist. He actually had an interview with an American journalist to try to draw publicity to this fact; and he complained no newspaper had covered it, and he said, in effect, “What’s the point of killing tourists if the tourist traffic is going to continue?”[34]

Later he was ultimately picked up for trying to assassinate Castro in Panama in the year 2000.

Well we now know how tolerant the Reagan/Bush I administration was towards him because Bush Sr. arranged for Felix Rodriguez to be running the Ilopango Base in El Salvador, who turned around and gave a job to Luis Posada Carriles, who was still wanted for these crimes, but was now on the run. When that closed down in the 1990s, and now I am quoting from a Mexican journalist for Por Esto, “Posada Carriles was protected in Guatemala, Belize and Mexico by narco-traffickers in the Central American cartel headed by Otto Herrera García, an associate of the major Mexican trafficker Ismael Zambada.”[35] The State Dept website says of Otto Herrera García: “In 2001, alone, his organization moved approximately 12 metric tons of cocaine, and may have the ability to smuggle as much as 2 tons of cocaine into the United States each month.”[36]

Well you would think that Posada would be in the bad graces of the American government, but No! He was smuggled into this country and the man who smuggled him in, who clearly committed a crime, has not been arrested for any crime. And when Posada once again called attention to himself, and got himself detained, he once again asked for asylum, and I think he will get it. Because the US government has either to extradite him, which I guarantee they won’t do, or prosecute him, or release him. At this point the clock is ticking, and they have three months left on how long they have to decide what to do with him.[37]

They know how long they have to decide on what do with him. The reason they cannot prosecute him is because when he came back, the FBI in Miami decided not to prosecute him and destroyed all of the Luis Posada Carriles files. The man who did this is a Cuban-American whose father came out of that exile network where they all knew each other and protect each other and such protection exist. And I am in such a burn over this.[38]

Orlando Bosch, who was a co-conspirator in blowing up the plane, and was able to pay for an acquittal in Latin America, came back without a record, was sponsored for US citizenship and obtained it, championed by Jeb Bush.[39]

And then shortly before, - and this gives me even more of a burn, shortly before 9/11 occurred, the two men who are confessed killers of former Chile Ambassador to U.S. Orlando Letelier and Ronnie Moffitt right in Washington, who it took years to get them convicted because of the interference from George Bush, Sr., they were finally convicted. And after serving seven years for this spectacular terrorist assassination, they were, I don’t know they were was paroled or pardoned, but anyway they were let out of jail by the George W. Bush administration, after serving only seven years.

So those Cuban exiles still have their claws into the intelligence-security-justice network that is so interwoven with them – and that is going to be the theme of the second half of my talk.

Well, so drugs are still a factor with intelligence, and the question is, now that we are facing al Qaeda, what is the relationship of al Qaeda to Drugs? And is it similar to what I think was drugs in being in the background of the John F. Kennedy assassination?

Well there are two takes on this. Let me give you first of all, what the British Parliament was told on October 4, 2001 and that is that “al Qaeda’s activity includes substantial exploitation of the drug trade from Afghanistan.”[40]

Now let’s look at what the 9/11 Commission said on the same subject. They didn’t have to say anything about drugs by the way, but they went out of their way to say this: “While the drug trade was a source of income for the Taliban, it did not serve the same purpose for al Qaeda, and there is no reliable evidence that Bin Laden was involved in or made his money through drug trafficking.”[41]

And this was after the US Central Command reported that in December, 2003 a dhow (Arab sailing vessel) was intercepted near the straight of Hormuz carrying almost two tons of hashish, valued at up to $10 million dollars. And the CentCom statement said that there were, and I quote, “clear ties” between the shipment and al Qaeda.[42] If that is true, then why did the 9/11 Report go out of its way to say that there is no evidence of a connection between Bin Laden and drug trafficking?

I want to close this part of my talk with the allegations of Sibel Edmonds. Unfortunately we don’t really know what they are because she is under a gag order. For reasons of state she is not able to tell the public what she told the FBI. She was a whistleblower, who naively did what a whistleblower should do in the name of protecting the American public order, and got fired for it. And she is still fighting to appeal her case. She can’t speak out, but she has talked here and there. And my friend Daniel Ellsberg is very interested in her case; and very recently he summed up what she is saying for KPFA, my local Pacifica radio station. This is Ellsberg’s summary of what Sibel Edmonds is saying:

Al Qaeda, she’s been saying to Congress, is financed 95% by drug money, drug traffic to which the U.S. government shows a blind eye, has been ignoring because it very heavily involves allies and assets of ours, such as Turkey, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, Afghanistan - all of the Stans, in a drug traffic where the opium originates in Afghanistan, is processed in Turkey and delivered to Europe where it furnishes 96% of Europe’s heroin by Albanians, either in Albania or Kosovo, Albanian Muslims in Kosovo, basically the KLA Kosovo Liberation Army (which we backed heavily in that episode at the end of the century, that’s last century) ---–

[I will interrupt at this point. In my book, I’m sure I think I quite adequately document that:

A) That the KLA or its leaders were deeply involved in drug trafficking and have used the NATO intervention as a way to consolidate a drug route through Kosovo.[43]

B) That they were very heavily involved with al Qaeda. Al-Zawahiri’s brother came to organize KLA matters and al-Zawahiri himself may have come to Kosovo.[44]

C) At the same time key KLA leaders were allied with PMCs – Private Military Corporations -- notably MPRI. There are war crimes attributed to KLA leaders who in Croatia worked hand in glove with MPRI.[45]

I’m cutting out a lot here that is relevant. But to continue with Ellsberg’s account of what Sibel Edmonds says:] “Suitcases of cash were delivered to the Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert at his home near Chicago from Turkish sources, knowing that a lot of that is drug money.”[46]

These are very serious charges that were aired to some extent in some in Vanity Fair.[47] And they are so important that the media, predictably, ignored them. And I’m drawing attention to what she is saying not because what she is saying can be proven, but these charges are very serious and not just pertinent to 9/11 alone, but to the whole fabric of how this country is run.

I consider this a top priority for testing the honesty and credibility of the new Democratic leadership in Congress. Will they pursue these matters? I hope that by hook or by crook you will try and put pressure on the new Democratic Congress to deal with these matters, so that we get a proper investigation of them for the first time.

And to close this section, whatever is the extent of what she is describing, it’s not just her. There was another witness, Indira Singh, who was talking at a 9/11 conference up in Canada; and she said, “I was told that if I mentioned the money to the drugs around 9/11 that would be the end of me.” [48]

This is a woman who has nothing to do with Sibel Edmonds, but alluded to the same thing in the background of 9/11.[49] And we need to learn more about that. And I suspect that whatever the situation is, it’s something which goes back to at least as far as 1963, and would then explain the same background for the Kennedy assassination.

One thing we can say with confidence: the flow of Afghan heroin west through Turkey is a problem that can be traced back to the CIA’s involvement with Pakistan’s ISI intelligence service, with the drug-linked Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), and with Islamist Afghan mujahedeen like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in the 1980s.[50]

In fact the web of influence she describes corresponds closely to BCCI’s influence in the 1980s, when the head of BCCI used to boast to the leader of Pakistan about BCCI’s role in getting aid for Pakistan approved by the US Congress.[51]

The ISI continued to be implicated in drug trafficking after the shutdown of BCCI in July 1991.

In an unusually frank interview in September 1994 – which he later denied – the former Pakistani prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, disclosed that General Aslam Beg, the army chief of staff, and the ISI boss [from 1990 to 1992], Lieutenant-General Asad Durrani, had proposed raising money for covert foreign operations through large-scale drug deals….The ISI’s involvement in the Sikh separatist movement was recognized in a 1993 CIA report on Pakistan’s drug trade, which stated the heroin was being used to fund its purchases of arms.”[52]

Prominent in ISI’s covert foreign operations at this time were Arab Afghan terrorists supporting the drug trafficker Hekmatyar in Afghanistan, of whom I am about to say much more.

[Swamp Gas]

Part 3

DOUBLE-AGENTS: 1) OSWALD

This was all preliminary stuff – now I get to the real stuff – double-agents.

In Deep Politics I explored at some length the possibility that Lee Harvey Oswald was, as Silvia Odio had heard, a possible (and this is a quote) “double agent…trying to infiltrate the Dallas Cuban refugee group.”[53]

I went back and looked to see what I had to say about this in Deep Politics, and I must say in the light of 9/11, it blew my mind. I’m going to read from my own book, something that I had forgotten.

The preceding chapter considered the possibility that Oswald was associated with anti-Kennedy Cubans in order to investigate them on behalf of a federal agency. But we saw it alleged that Oswald was a double agent collaborating with some of these groups, either (as I suspect) because he or his handlers shared their goals [that is, anti-Kennedy goals], or possibly because he or his handlers had been “turned” by those they were supposed to investigate. Such a possibility was particularly likely with targets, like Alpha 66, about which the government itself was conflicted, of two minds.[54]

Remember that Alpha 66 in early 1963 conducted a series of raids, not just against Cuba, but against Soviet ships in Cuba. It was obviously trying to shipwreck the US – Soviet understanding on Cuba, and really, in a sense was trying to torpedo the whole Kennedy policy of détente with the Soviet Union. And so there is no ambiguity about the total disapproval of the Justice Department (which cracked down on them and made a public announcement that they had to cease), and also the continuing support for Alpha 66 from the CIA.[55]

Now Waldron says David Atlee Phillips – and I don’t know if there really is any evidence on David Phillips in 1963 -- had an Alpha 66 connection at some point.[56] I don’t know it was Phillips, but it was certainly a group that was close to Phillips, and may I add, extremely important in this book, the paperback edition of Ultimate Sacrifice.

Let me read one more paragraph from my book Deep Politics:

Here it is relevant that Alpha 66, although anti-Kennedy, was being used operationally by military intelligence. There are signs, though complex and inconclusive, that Oswald’s strange and self-incriminating behavior in New Orleans and Dallas was staged to be documented in the secret files of military intelligence.[57]

And here I will summarize this very briefly. I go into how when he was arrested he volunteered – he asked for an FBI agent. (This is an experiment we could all do – get ourselves arrested for a misdemeanor, and then say we’d like the FBI to come and interview us. This is what Oswald did. How many of us are going to get the FBI to come down on Saturday morning to talk to us?)

Well anyway, Oswald had no trouble doing this, and he also talked to the police. In both cases he was talking about A. J. Hidell, and in both cases that information ended up somehow, via the FBI agent with Army Intelligence, and via Police Captain Martello with Naval Intelligence. So Oswald was enriching the files on himself in a way that would contribute to his death in Dallas in November 1963.[58]

Well, what is so arresting about the connection here to 9/11?

DOUBLE-AGENTS: 2) ALI MOHAMED

Because I want to talk about another double-agent – an unmistakable and very important one: Ali Mohammad. How many people have heard of the name Ali Mohammad before today? Almost nobody. Well listen to this, as it is important. There is a quite a lot about him on now on my web site because I’ve been talking about him.

It is striking that he was undeniably working for US Army Special Forces, working with the CIA, almost certainly admitted to this country on a CIA visa, and in his last years certainly working with the FBI. He was actually detained in Canada by the RCMP, and he said, phone this number and you will release me; and they phoned the San Francisco office of the FBI, and sure enough they released him immediately.[59]

And that meant he was able to go to Kenya, photograph the Kenyan embassy, and deliver the photographs personally to Bin Laden, who told Ali Mohammad where to plant the bomb.[60]

And there is this new book: in fact it arrived the day before I caught a plane to come to Dallas, so I haven’t had a very good read of it, but I’ve been following Peter Lance. It is Peter Lance’s book, Triple Cross – How Bin Laden’s Master Spy [that’s Ali Mohammad] Penetrated the CIA, the Green Berets and the FBI and Why Patrick Fitzgerald Failed to Stop Him.

This is a very interesting story and there’s quite a lot more on my web site.[61] What is particularly important here is that Ali Mohamed was not only protected under the George W. Bush administration - but from as early as 1989 when the FBI SOG (Special Operations Group) in New York photographed him training terrorists in terrorist activities – sharpshooting, etc.[62]

I’m going to name the names of some of his disciples,[63] and you can remember them for sixty seconds and then you can forget them:

El Sayyid Nosair, who went on to murder Meir Kahane, the Jewish racist, almost immediately, was trained in sharp shooting by Ali Mohammad;

Mohammed Salameh, who went on to participate in the first WTC bombing in 1993;

and finally there’s a man called (Clement) Rodney Hampton-El, who is the one American-born black Muslim in the group, who at one point clearly had US Army backing. He was allowed to go to Fort Belvoir, where an Army major gave him a list of Muslims in the US Army whom he could recruit to go to Bosnia.[64]

Ali Mohamed was training these Islamists to fight in Afghanistan. So you might say: Well of course we were fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, so it makes sense that it was okay for them to approve this kind of activity. The problem is the Soviets had totally withdrawn from Afghanistan by February 1989, and all of this training was going on in late 1989, at a time when the U.S. government, to paraphrase what I just said about 1963, was of two minds about what to do in Afghanistan.

Remember that Gorbachev was now the President of Russia, and that the State Department, and I believe the White House, attached a lot of importance from Reagan’s last years on to working with the Soviet Union.

The man the Soviets left in charge of Kabul, his name was Najibullah,[65] said in effect, “You may not like me in the West, but I’m the best you are going to get, and if you get rid of me you will have a nation of drug traffickers,” which is essentially what we now have de facto in Afghanistan. His prediction was entirely correct. The CIA was way off base here.

The CIA were backing Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whom some people call the leading heroin trafficker in the world, to get rid of this secular, anti-Islamist government in Kabul, which we would I think, we would pay an awful lot of money to get back at this stage as preferable to what we have.[66]

Meanwhile a State Department official, Edmund McWilliams, objected that “Pakistani intelligence and Hekmatyar were dangerous allies,” and that the United States was making an important mistake by endorsing ISI’s puppet Afghan interim government.[67] But Ali Mohamed’s training, both in Afghanistan and later around New York, was precisely designed to strengthen the Arab Afghans in Brooklyn who intended to go support Hekmatyar.[68]

So this was a conflicted program and the fact that Ali Mohammad was part of it earned him protection. And there is so much I’m not telling you about how he was actually flying to Afghanistan and fighting while he was on the US Army payroll, which is a definite no-no. And his commanding officer didn’t like it, but there was nothing he could do about it because Ali Mohammad was apparently being directed by another agency.[69] And you can only guess what that other agency would have been.

Well anyway, the new book by Peter Lance confirms that Ali Mohammed was one of al Qaeda’s top trainers in terrorism –yes, top trainers in terrorism, including top training in hijacking: how to bring on box cutters, where to sit in the plane.[70] (And that’s not against the Soviets, because you couldn’t hijack a Soviet plane, because no civilians ever got on a Soviet plane in Afghanistan.)

Mohamed has also been called one of the primary sources for the infamous August 6, 2001, Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) entitled `Bin Laden Determined To Strike In U.S.’"[71] At the heart of that August 6 PDB was unmistakably a disguised double reference to Mohamed himself.[72]

To sum up: Mohamed was a top trainer. He was an operative for the CIA and the Army, and in my book I write that in 1990 his trainees intended to help the CIA support the drug trafficker Hekmatyar in Afghanistan, even after the Soviets withdrew.

Back in 1990 the FBI knew these people were involved in conspiratorial activity. As I said, they photographed, they videotaped Ali Mohamed training these people. Then very shortly afterwards, Nosair went out and shot Meir Kahane, and because of his own lack of cool, ended up being shot himself and arrested.[73]

The police and the FBI told the public that he was, and we’ve heard this kind of language before, a “lone, deranged gunman.”[74] who, and this is the FBI speaking, “acted alone.”[75]

Here you have a guy who was part of a tolerated conspiracy, and when it went public (I don’t think they anticipated the killing of Kahane) that is the government response.

First of all they knew he wasn’t alone because they had film of him training these other people. All of his trainees were members of the al-Kifah Center in Brooklyn, which served as the main American recruitment center for the network, which after the Afghanistan war, became known as al Qaeda. And it has been said that the murder of Kahane was the first al Qaeda attack in America.

The al-Kifah Center was headed at the time, by the Blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, who like Ali Mohamed, had been admitted to the US on a CIA visa, despite being on a State Department watch list.[76] And as he had done earlier in Egypt, he issued a fatwa that permitted his followers to rob banks and kill Jews.[77]

Now in November 1990, three of Mohamed’s trainees conspired together to kill Meir Kahane, the racist founder of the Jewish Defense League. The actual killer, El Sayyid Nosair, was caught by accident almost immediately; and by luck the police soon found his two co-conspirators, Mahamud Abouhalima and Mohammed Salameh, waiting at Nosair’s apartment.

So they had the other two conspirators, and this is also what they found at Nosair’s house, and I am quoting,

There were formulas for bomb making, 1,440 rounds of ammunition, and manuals from the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg marked ‘Top Secret for Training’ [May I say those manuals were supplied by Ali Mohamed – the double-agent, and became the basis for the al Qaeda’s own manual, which was mostly written by double-agent Mohamed] along with classified documents belonging to the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. The police found maps and drawings of New York City landmarks like the Statue of Liberty, Times Square – and the World Trade Center. The forty-seven boxes of evidence they collected also included the collected sermons of blind Sheikh Omar, in which he exhorted his followers to “destroy the edifices of capitalism.”[78]

So all three – Nosair, Abouhalima and Salameh -- had been trained by Mohamed. The FBI had photographed them, and if they had moved on and seized all three of them we probably would not have had the first World Trade Center bombing. And we almost certainly would not have had the so called Landmarks Conspiracy, where there was a plot to blow up other landmarks you just heard mentioned, like the Statue of Liberty.

The police on the case thought at the beginning that they were facing a conspiracy.[79] And yet only hours after the killing, Joseph Borelli, Chief of NYPD detectives, struck a familiar American note and pronounced Nosair a “lone deranged gunman.” And some time later, he actually told the press - and this is the real giveaway, that “There was nothing at Nosair’s house, nothing that would stir your imagination. Nothing has transpired that changes our opinion that he acted alone.”[80]

So if 47 boxes of incriminating evidence is remembered by this man as “nothing,” then he either has an astonishingly bad memory, or perhaps this is how the US law enforcement system treats people who are marginally attached to intelligence operations, covert operations, even controversial operations which are opposed by other elements of the US government.[81]

Now Borelli himself was not acting alone in this matter. His position was also that of the FBI, who said they too believed “that Mr. Nosair had acted alone in shooting Rabbi Kahane.” “The bottom line is that we can't connect anyone else to the Kahane shooting," an FBI agent said.[82]

So there is an MO here. And I want to go back to what I was saying at the very beginning. To end up having an unsolvable crime, somebody has pre-selected a candidate or candidates. And the ideal pre-selected candidate will be one about whom the truth will never emerge, because of the candidate’s controversial involvement in previous covered-up operations. This will ensure that an institutional cover-up, already in place, will be extended to cover the new crime, even if it is a major one.

Oswald was one such pre-selected candidate. Those conspiratorially involved with Ali Mohamed and with 9/11 would also seem to fit the same description. That is what struck me most when I went back to compare the two events, or meta-events: the killings of Kennedy and of Meir Kahane. Both Oswald and Nosair were quickly declared “lone” assassins, to protect someone or something else.

I should make clear that with respect to 9/11, I have certain knowledge of only one fact: that there has been and continues to be a massive cover-up. I have not yet assimilated the earlier cover-up of Ali Mohamed in 1990 into my theory of what happened in 2001. But I commend this to you as something which merits further investigation.

In this talk I’m not getting into the question of conspiracy. But of course there has to be a conspiracy theory about 9/11.You cannot say 9/11 was someone acting alone. To avoid a serious “conspiracy theory,” the best you can come up with is something like “19 lone nuts acting together.”

Just in case you don’t remember it, the FBI identified these names before 10 o’clock on that morning. And within two weeks there were five, six or seven people, in various places (nearly all turned out to be pilots, by the way) who said, “That’s my name;” “Yes, I went to that flight school;” two or three even said “That’s my photograph that was published.” But they also said “It’s not me,” -- and you had to sympathize with their logic -- “It’s not me because I’m still here and I’m still alive.” And it was bad enough that the Saudi government raised the issue with the United States government.[83] In response to these problems, FBI Director Robert Mueller acknowledged on September 20, 2001, that the identity of some of the suicide hijackers was in doubt.[84]

How many of you have looked at the 9/11 Report? You’re a virgin audience here. The 9/11 Report has a great deal to say about the 19 hijackers, but it’s never hinted that there had ever been a shadow of suspicion as to who they really are. Which is just one of the many indications this was not a very profound investigation.

And like the Warren Commission Report, they already knew were they had to end up; because it had been pre-defined for them. They already knew. But it is the combination I want you to think about. The truth about the predesignated culprit or culprits is unpursuable because he/they were part of an operation too embarrassing to disclose. Which in the case of 9/11 is a scandal. I mean these people could have been stopped back in 1990, and they weren’t.

And I haven’t gone into the Patrick Fitzgerald part of it. This is a very important book, Triple Cross. And Lance has another book, A Thousand Years for Revenge, which is almost as important.

My final words are words that I have said I think on many occasions, and are a propos on many subjects:

That when we look at something like the JFK Assassination, or 9/11, throw in Iran-Contra – or the bombing of Letelier, we are looking at meta-events. Meta-events, unlike most events, are not treated normally in the US press; but are what John [Judge] called this morning a hidden history. And they are reserved for a special kind of treatment, and that requires, among other things, a special kind of audience, people like you.

Because we stumble upon it somewhere, in this case with JFK, we are open to the fact that it happens elsewhere. And like I said before and will say so again, and my final words to you is to understand any of these events in real depth, you have to go beyond bullet angles at Dealey Plaza, and films from the same place, and look at what is on-going in this country.

And I’ll remind you again of the possible involvement of the drug traffic. And to get to any kind of level where we can cope and deal with these kinds of problems in our country, we have to see the continuity and deal with it every time it surfaces.

Because if we don’t deal with it this time, and we probably won’t, it will surface again.

Thank you very much.



Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is a poet, writer, and researcher. His chief poetry books are the three volumes of his trilogy Seculum: Coming to Jakarta: A Poem About Terror (1989), Listening to the Candle: A Poem on Impulse (1992), and Minding the Darkness: A Poem for the Year 2000. In addition he has published Crossing Borders: Selected Shorter Poems (1994). In November 2002 he was awarded the Lannan Poetry Award.


An anti-war speaker during the Vietnam and Gulf Wars, he was a co-founder of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at UC Berkeley, and of the Coalition on Political Assassinations (COPA).

His poetry has dealt with both his experience and his research, the latter of which has centered on U.S. covert operations, their impact on democracy at home and abroad, and their relations to the John F. Kennedy assassination and the global drug traffic. The poet-critic Robert Hass has written (Agni, 31/32, p. 335) that "Coming to Jakarta is the most important political poem to appear in the English language in a very long time."

Peter Dale Scott’s website is www.peterdalescott.net.