A former State Department
security officer has given CounterPunch a detailed memoir and
documents that point to very curious conduct by the CIA, Secret
Service and FBI in the Philippines following warnings
of an assassination bid on President Clinton during his November
12/13, 1994 visit to Manila.
In a revelation missing from the official investigations of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the FBI placed a human source in direct contact with Osama bin Laden in 1993 and ascertained that the al Qaeda leader was looking to finance terrorist attacks in the United States, according to court testimony in a little-noticed employment dispute case.
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A Pakistani linked to that
Manila plot, and also to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence
(ISI) agency may still be at large. The security officer charges a
U.S. cover-up of possible involvement by the Pakistani ISI in the
9/11/01 attack on the Trade Towers. Although given
these same leads, the Official 9/11
Commission failed to investigate them.
This past December, Sam
Karmilowicz finished a 21-year career as an officer in the U.S. State
Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security. Back in 1994 he was
working as an Assistant Regional Security Officer at the U.S. Embassy
in Manila, when John D. Negroponte was the ambassador. These days,
Negroponte is the U.S. Director of National Intelligence.
On the morning of
September 18, 1994, Karmilowicz recalls, "the U.S.
embassy received a telephone call from an anonymous person (who spoke
with a distinct middle eastern accent) concerning his knowledge of an
assassination plot against President William Clinton, who was
scheduled to visit Manila that coming November.
The embassy switchboard
relayed that and a subsequent call to Karmilowicz, and the caller
provided him the name of a Pakistani businessman, Tariq
Javed Rana, as being one of the leaders of the
plot. The source told Karmilowicz that Rana was facilitating the
importation of explosives and operatives into the Philippines to
complete the mission by paying bribes to Philippine government
officials of the Immigration and Customs bureaus. He said the bribes
were paid in counterfeit U.S. Currency.
The first call was
promptly reviewed in the embassy that same day by members of the
embassy emergency action committee (EAC) chaired by Raymond
Burghardt, the Deputy in Charge of Mission under Negroponte.
The FBI, Secret Service, CIA, DEA, and
DIA were all members of the committee.
At the conclusion of the EAC meeting, embassy law enforcement
and intelligence officials were instructed to inform the Philippine
authorities and to initiate an investigation to determine the
credibility of the threat. (Burghardt went on to become US
ambassador to Vietnam and now heads the East-West Center, based in
Honolulu.)
"A few weeks
afterwards", Karmilowicz says, "
high ranking officers of the CIA and Secret Service came into my
office and informed me that they had conducted an investigation
concerning the threat and concluded that the allegations against the
Pakistani, Rana, were a hoax in order to have the
police harass him. They offered no motive or information as to why
such a ‘hoax’ would be perpetrated or who might be behind it.
"While all this was
going on, I was supervising and managing the embassy’s surveillance
detection unit responsible for the security of our housing compounds
and annexes, including looking for suspicious persons or activity. I
was also assigned the task of coordinating and providing protective
security arrangements for visiting dignitaries and VIPs. As such, I
had a professional responsibility to know whether the Pakistani
suspect, and or any of his accomplices, was a credible threat against
U.S. persons and/or interests in the Philippines. "The U.S. law
enforcement and intelligence agencies may have dismissed this
intelligence data as a hoax while secretly following up the leads …
or they may just have been incompetent and let the future 9-11
terrorist masterminds slip through their fingers. Either way, they
seem to have been incompetent because, if they were secretly
monitoring these suspected (later confirmed) terrorists, then
they obviously did a poor job of it."
A few days before that
first call, the Pakistani man named in the plot, Tariq
Rana, had been featured in the Philippine press,
which reported that he was a suspect in an illegal drug manufacturing
ring. In response to these allegations, the public affairs section of
the Pakistani embassy in Manila issued a number of statements
vigorously denying the allegations against their national, claiming
that he was a law-abiding citizen and a close relative of
members of Pakistan’s parliament and military establishment.
Shortly after he issued these statements the Pakistani public affairs
officer was recalled to Pakistan.
President Clinton arrived
in Manila on November 12, 1994, and his two-day visit passed without
incident. Then, one week before Pope John Paul II’s visit to Manila
in mid-January, 1995, police claimed a fire occurred in Room
603 of the Dona Josefa apartment building in Manila and that
they discovered bomb-making chemicals and other evidence during a
search of the apartment. Several people of Middle Eastern origin were
staying in the apartment at the time of the fire and one of these
persons was later identified as Ramzi Yousef, the 1993 World
Trade Center bomber. Yousef is the nephew of Khaled
Shaikh Muhammad, who was arrested in 2003. Muhammad subsequently
disclosed under interrogation that he had planned the 9/11 attacks
with Yousef in Manila at that time.
Ramzi Yousef fled the
Philippines immediately after the apartment fire, and was arrested in
Pakistan a month later. In 1998, Agence France Press (AFP) reported
that Yousef confessed to federal authorities while in prison that he
had in fact planned to assassinate Clinton when the president was
visiting the Philippines but gave up because of tight security.
Secret Service sources also report that large sums of counterfeit
U.S. currency were entering the Philippines during the time of the
plot. Clearly, the information passed to Karmilowicz was accurate and
not a hoax as claimed by the CIA and Secret Service.
In conjunction with the
fire at Yousef’s apartment, the Philippine press also reported that
a similar fire occurred at the business establishment of Tariq Rana.
An article in the Manila Chronicle indicated that the police found
the same chemicals in both fires – chemicals that are used to make
nitroglycerin. Yousef used nitroglycerin to bomb Philippines Airlines
Flight 434 on December 11, 1994 as a test run for the so-called
"Bojinka"plot. The explosion tore out a two square foot
portion of the fuselage and ripped almost in half the body of 24-year
old Haruki Ikegami, a Japanese businessman occupying the seat under
which the bomb was placed. The bomb used on Flight 434 had one-tenth
the power of the bombs he planned to use in the first phase of his
Bojinka project, which was to simultaneously bomb 11 American
aircraft over the Pacific Ocean.
Rana was arrested in April
1995 by Philippine authorities and charged with business fraud,
although his current whereabouts are unknown. (As of 2006)
Not all the al-Qaeda
operatives successfully escaped arrest following the January 6,
1995 fire at the Dona Josefa apartment building.
According to Peter
Lance’s book Cover Up, Ramzi Yousef instructed one of his
accomplices, Abdul Hakim Murad, to return to Dona Josefa during the
early morning hours on the day of the fire to retrieve his laptop
computer, which contained all the details of the Bojinka plot, plus
other incriminating information. The Philippine police, who had
staked out the building, subsequently arrested Murad and transported
him to Camp Crame, the headquarters of the Philippine National Police
Intelligence Group (PNP). During the period of Murad’s captivity,
Lance says Murad "was harshly treated, perhaps even tortured,
forced to ingest massive quantities of water".
Murad remained in
Philippine custody until on or about May 11, 1995, when he was
rendered to the U.S. to face criminal charges. However, before the
rendition, the U.S. embassy sent Karmilowicz to Camp Crame to pick-up
an envelope containing evidence that the PNP had collected from
Murad. Upon his return to the embassy, Karmilowicz was instructed to
transcribe the chain of evidence and to express mail the materials to
a U.S. Justice Department Office in New York City. Mike
Garcia and Dietrich Snell, the Assistant U.S. Attorneys who
prosecuted Murad, almost certainly had access to the materials that
Agent Karmilowicz sent to the Justice Department, although it is
unknown what, if anything, was done with the evidence.
Pakistan’s
ISI and, indirectly, the CIA had much closer ties to the Taliban and
al-Qaeda than the American public was allowed to know. It is common knowledge that Osama bin Laden may be hiding in the
rugged Pakistani mountains bordering Afghanistan. However, most
Americans probably are not aware or do not remember that major
al-Qaeda players Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Shaik Mohammed were both
hiding in Pakistan when they were captured in 1995 and 2003,
respectively, as was Mir Aimal Kasi, the assassin who attacked CIA
employees in their cars outside CIA headquarters in Langley, VA in
1993.
Pakistan had been playing
a double game until the events of September 11 forced the situation.
Pakistan had supported the rise of the Taliban in the power vacuum
left by the departure of the Soviet occupation army at the end of the
1980s. Pakistan supported and even used al-Qaeda terrorist training
camps to train its own operatives for use in the Kashmir dispute.
There are other examples of Pakistan’s possible links to terrorism
and infiltration of the ISI by al-Qaeda, such as the alleged
funneling of money from ISI director General Ahmad Mehmoud to 9/11′s
Mohammed Atta. The Wall Street Journal reporter, Daniel Pearl, was
kidnapped and murdered in Karachi, Pakistan while he was
investigating these al-Qaeda-ISI links.
Karmilowicz went on from
his tour of duty on Manila to Washington, then Beirut, and a later
posting in Quito, Ecuador, where he was involved in a
fracas which resulted in the death of an Ecuadorian national.
Exonerated after a State Department investigation he served in
Washington, finally leaving the service at the end of 2005.
During the spring of 2004,
Karmilowicz says, "I contacted Maria Ressa, the CNN Jakarta
Bureau Chief after I read a book that she published in December 2003
entitled Seeds of Terror. According to her research, the Pakistani
suspected of plotting to kill President Clinton was a close associate
of Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed during the time that these
persons were hatching the plot to use airline carriers as
missiles to attack the U.S." Ressa also told Karmilowicz
that her sources in the Philippine intelligence and police bureaus
suspected that this Pakistani was an associate of the Pakistani
Inter-Services Intelligence agency. The story has often been told of
how a smoky accident in Yousef’s apartment happened to draw police
attention, and though Yousef escaped, his laptop provided disclosed
that this attacks were nearly ready for execution.
The story is true as far
as it goes, she told Karmilowicz, but the Philippine authorities were
not quite so asleep at the wheel. The explosion aboard Philippine
Airlines flight 434 had placed the police on heightened alert with
the pope’s visit just a few weeks away. Yousef had called the
Associated Press, claiming that Abu Sayyaf was responsible, which
suggests Filipino suspects, but Avelino "Sonny" Razon of
the Presidential Security Group (PSG) tasked with security for the
pope’s visit was tipped to watch for Middle Easterners.
"The PNP (Philippine
National Police), particularly the PSG ,was on heightened alert
because in December 1994, we received reports that a group of Middle
Eastern personalities would be coming over to the Philippines to
assassinate the Pope," Razon said. "The PSG had one man in
particular under surveillance — Tareq Javed Rana, a Pakistani
suspected of supporting international terrorists with drug money.
They were on the right track. He was a close associate of Ramzi
Yousef. While under surveillance, Rana’s house in Paranque, a
suburb of Manila, burned down. An official police report would later
say the PSG believed the "conflagration was caused by
combustible chemicals such as those used for making an improvised
explosive device [IED]."
Ressa’s book suggested
that the PNP did not begin its surveillance of Rana until December
1994, several months after the U.S. embassy had alerted the
Philippine authorities that Rana was named as a suspect to
assassinate President Clinton. This raises the question:
why wasn’t Rana investigated earlier;
or, if he was investigated, why do certain people now want to deny
this?
In 2004, Karmilowicz
and his attorney contacted Richard Ben-Veniste of the official 9/11
Commission, suggesting that the leads from 1994 about Rana pointed to
possible ISI complicity and that these leads be followed up.
But the Commission never called him to testify. These days,
Karmilowicz (living in Alexandria, VA, and seeking a security job in
a Fortune 500 firm), is scathing about the conduct of the interagency
taskforce in the U.S. embassy in Manila.
What I think this story
reveals is that the 9-11 Commission and
the U.S. government deliberately withheld information from the U.S.
public (and everyone else for that matter) that linked al-Qaeda
operatives to persons who had close ties to Pakistani government
officials, including members of Pakistan’s ISI. One
can only guess whether that was to save embarrassment or to hide
illegal conduct. One thing is for certain, i.e., the
FBI, Secret Service, and CIA have deceived, and continue to deceive,
the public concerning Rana’s connection to al-Qaeda and the facts
regarding the 9-11 attack.
One of the standouts in
this spin of lies is Neil Herman, a former FBI official
who was involved in the Bojinka investigation and a former supervisor
of the FBI’s Joint Terrorist Task Force in New York. Herman was
quoted in an August 5, 2004 New York Times article entitled, Qaeda
Strategy is Called Cause for New Alarm by Eric Lipton and Benjamin
Weiser, which reported:
Even though the
large-scale jetliner attack over the Pacific never happened, it is
clear that the elaborate planning was an unappreciated
warning of the sophistication and
determination of the terrorists.
"It showed the
government back in the mid-1990′s how detail-oriented these
individuals were," said Mr. Herman, the former FBI official, who
was involved in the Bojinka investigation. "It also showed that
there was an active network, although, of course, we
were unable to determine the extent of the network back then."
Another
prominent figure suspected of quashing the truth is Dietrich L.
Snell, the Senior Counsel and Team Leader of the Official 9-11
Commission. Peter Lance writes extensively in his
books Cover Up and 1000 Years for Revenge |link
this| about Snell’s shenanigans in
cherry-picking evidence and excluding credible witness testimony,
including information collected by the Defense Department’s Able
Danger Unit concerning pre-9/11 sightings of Mohammed Atta,
one of the nineteen suspected hijackers. These allegations are now
resurfacing in the news. The Associated Press (AP) reported on
February 15, 2005 that U.S. Representative Curt Weldon, the vice
Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee advised the public that
the Able Danger Unit had identified Atta
more than a dozen times before the September 11, 2001,
terrorist attacks. Weldon also reportedly said the secret team found
"a problem" in Yemen two weeks before the deadly al-Qaeda
attack on the USS Cole in 2000, of which the ship commander was not
told. Former (unidentified) members of the 9/11 Commission reportedly
dismissed Weldon’s findings.
My experience in the
Philippines also appears to overlap Snell’s involvement in the
Murad case that Snell prosecuted. The Cooperative Research 9-11
Timeline (www.cooperativeresearch.org)
contains a very peculiar account entitled: Early
1998:Prosecutors Turn Down Deal That Could Reveal Bojinka Third Plot.
The entry said: "Abdul
Hakim Murad, a conspirator in the 1995 Bojinka plot with Ramzi
Yousef, Khalid Shaik Mohammed, and others, was convicted in 1996 of
his role in the Bojinka plot. He is about to be sentenced for that
crime. He offers to cooperate with federal prosecutors in return for
a reduction in his sentence, but prosecutors turn down his offer.
Dietrich Snell, the prosecutor who convicted Murad, says after 9-11
that he doesn’t remember any such offer. But court papers and
others familiar with the case later confirmed that Murad does offer
to cooperate at this time. Snell claimed he only remembers hearing
that Murad had described an intention to hijack a plan and fly it
into the CIA headquarters. However, in
1995 Murad had confessed to Philippine investigators that this would
have been only one part of a larger plot to crash a number of
airplanes into prominent U.S. Buildings, including the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon, a plot that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed later
adjusts and turns in the 9-11 plot. While Philippine
investigators claim this information was passed on to U.S.
intelligence, it’s not clear just which U.S. officials may have
learned this information and what they did with it, if anything. [New
York Daily News, 9/25/01] Murad is sentenced in May 1998 and given
life in prison plus 60 years. [Albany Times Union, 9/22/02] After
9-11, Snell goes on to become Senior Counsel and a team leader for
the 9-11 Commission. Author Peter Lance later calls Snell "one
of the fixers, hired early on to sanitize the Commission’s final
report." Lance says Snell
ignored evidence presented to the Commission that shows direct ties
between the Bojinka plot and 9-11, and in so doing covers up Snell’s
own role in the failure to make use of evidence learned from Murad
and other Bojinka plotters. [FrontPage Magazine,
1/27/05].
I know who the
intelligence officials were at the U.S. embassy at the time of
Murad’s arrest and interrogation. These are the same officials who
discounted the threat information I received about Rana. Do these
people have something to hide? You bet they do!
Peter Lance was entirely
correct when he told CNN anchor Lou Dobbs in a December 5, 2005
interview that the 9-11 Commission was essentially "a whitewash"
and that it intentionally limited its
investigation to 1996-forward. He said the
Commission moved the plot’s origin "to 1996 from 1994"and
in so doing omitted information that linked Mohammed Atta to the
terrorists responsible for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade
Center. (WHY) Lance said Congress should put Dietrich Snell
under oath to find out why the 9-11 staffer prevented the Able Danger
information from getting to the 9-11 Commission.
Clearly, the 9-11
Commission’s decision to use 1996 as the date that the 9-11 plot
originated was also designed to omit the information that I obtained
concerning Tariq
Rana, and the connection he had with
the al-Qaeda operatives who conceived the 9-11 plot.
Given these revelations,
how can the American public trust a government that has rationalized
its own failure or complicity to protect this nation by
implementing draconian measures (e.g. the Patriot Act, illegal
wiretapping, and abductions and torture) – measures that
have stripped its citizens of the rights and protections for which
this country was founded. And what have these measures bought us but
a seemingly endless war of attrition with an adversary that grows
stronger and more lethal everyday.
Karmilowicz says, "my
experience in the Philippines shows the U.S. government has
compartmentalized information,
not so much to protect sources and methods of an investigation or
intelligence operation, but in order to
cover-up its gross incompetence or its complicity in illegal and
questionable activities conducted by, or against, foreign powers."
At some point, (most likely after President Clinton concluded his
visit to the Philippines) the CIA and Secret Service realized that
Rana and his associates were a threat after all, but they kept this
information from Agent Karmilowicz.
Karmilowicz says, "Keeping
that information to themselves is a breach of the no-double-standard
policy [where one agency can't respond to a perceived threat without
notifying the other agencies and the American public]."
And even worse,
Karmilowicz believes, "this breach of policy has now become the
norm in the post 9-11 world, whereby the State Department has now
been co-opted by CIA and the Defense Department to allow people to be
abducted and killed rather than apprehended. In one case I
suspect that because information was compartmentalized, an attack may
have been allowed to proceed in Jeddah in December 2004, and five
people were killed." [See Counter Punch 'The Origins of
the Rendition Program: Does the CIA Have the Right to Break Any Law,
January 2006]. Karmilowicz likes to remind us how John
Negroponte, the former Chief of Mission in the Philippines, who
directed and approved the efforts of the various agencies at post,
"was rewarded for his complicity in this cover-up, appointed the
Director of National Intelligence, the person who approves
secret renditions, eavesdropping, and the abduction and assassination
of terrorist suspects".
Karmilowicz cites AP’s
Mathew Barakat and Peter Yost as reporting that Rob Spencer, the U.S.
prosecutor in the Moussaoui trial in federal court in Alexandria,
gave an opening statement to the jury in which he claimed that if
Moussaoui had come clean — i.e., informed the law enforcement
establishment of his knowledge of the 9-11 plot - in 2001, the FBI
would have been able to use his records to locate 11 of the 19
September 11 hijackers, including all four pilots. Spencer also said
the government would have kept those conspirators off airplanes and
would have altered airport screeners to confiscate small knives and
boxcutters. "Who in their right mind",
Karmilowicz says, "would believe such a statement given what I
observed and experienced in the Philippines?"
WAKE UP AMERICA!!!....Its
"OUR" country!!!
Love "Light" and
Energy
_Don
Facilitators: United
States Government, Ali Mohamed, and Osama bin Laden
Ali Mohamed:
Osama bin Laden:
