Submitted by smartknowledgeu on 03/30/2016 22:43 -0400http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-03-30/why-did-911-commission-not-follow-money-lars-schallIn the below article, independent
investigative journalist Lars Schall explores the time-honored tradition
of following the money in an attempt to discover answers to yet
unanswered questions regarding the terrorist attacks of 9/11 in New York
City. Here is his report below.
Why Did The 9/11 Commission Not “Follow the Money”?
Lars Schall has put some material together that brings him to the
question why the time-proven approach to “follow the money” was
dismissed when it came the funding of the biggest terror attack on US
soil.
By Lars Schall
Bill:
Howdy! I am an investigative financial journalist from Germany,
who’s in the process of finishing a book trilogy on the topic of the
so-called “Deep State”. Related to that project, I examined the case of a
software program called the Prosecutor's Management Information System
(PROMIS), a database system developed by INSLAW Inc., a U.S. information
technology company, which was founded by William A. Hamilton, a former
analyst with the National Security Agency (NSA). Indeed, in mid-2012,
when he became aware of my research connected to PROMIS, Mr. Hamilton
contacted me to ask me for help with investigating some certain aspects
of the PROMIS case.'
Here’s a recent confirmation for this fact.
Lars:
I am pleased to confirm that I contacted you for help in investigating
aspects of the INSLAW Affair in which the U.S. Department of Justice
secretly misappropriated the PROMIS legal case management software from
INSLAW, Inc., one of its software vendors, and disseminated stolen
copies beyond the U.S. Department of Justice for U.S. and Israeli
intelligence database projects, including NSA's Follow the Money Project
for real-time electronic surveillance of wire transfers of money and
letters of credit through the banking system; Israel's sale of a version
of PROMIS equipped with a special data retrieval capability to foreign
intelligence and law enforcement agencies of both friendly and
adversarial governments worldwide to facilitate the theft of their
intelligence secrets while producing profits for intelligence insiders;
the CIA's deployment of PROMIS to virtually every component of the U.S
intelligence community as ’compatible database software’ for the
gathering and dissemination of U.S. intelligence information between and
among the entities that ’produce’ the intelligence information and the
entities that ’consume’ the intelligence product; the CIA's deployment
of PROMIS to the leading semi-conductor manufacturers in the world so
NSA could exercise real-time electronic surveillance of the
manufacturing and illicit sale of integrated circuits engineered for
advanced defense and military applications; and the sale by a Drug
Enforcement Administration (DEA) proprietary company in Cyprus to the
drug interdiction entities of Middle Eastern governments of a back-door
version of PROMIS so DEA could augment its own drug trafficking
intelligence information with the intelligence information stolen from
these Middle Eastern governments.
Bill Hamilton
Founder and President INSLAW, Inc.
Washington, D.C.
The Prosecutor’s Management Information System (PROMIS) was
originally developed by INSLAW for the US Justice Department. However,
according to Guy Lawson’s book entitled Octopus, that sophisticated
piece of software “had been so successful that the American intelligence
agency apparatus had secretly stolen the software to put it to use
covertly. The CIA had reconfigured the code and installed it in 32-bit
Digital Equipment Corporation VAX minicomputers. The agency had used
front companies to sell the new technology to banks and leading
financial institutions like the Federal Reserve. Hidden inside the
computer was a ‘trapdoor’ that enabled intelligence agencies to covertly
monitor financial transactions digitally for the first time. (…) In Bob
Woodward’s book Veil, former CIA director William Casey said the secret
money-tracking system had been one of his proudest achievements. (1)
In May 1998, Dr. Norman Bailey published a monograph entitled The
Strategic Plan That Won The Cold War, which references the importance of
NSA’s Follow the Money Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) mission and also
includes a Foreword written by William P. Clark, President Reagan’s
National Security Advisor in 1982 and 1983, extolling the role of
Reagan’s NSC staff in “bringing about the end of the cold war.” (2) Dr.
Bailey also acknowledged several years before on the public record while
being interviewed by the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) that NSA
undertook its so called Follow the Money Program.
While being interviewed by PBS for a July 12, 1989 television
documentary entitled Follow the Money, he stated that the Reagan White
House tasked the NSA in 1981 with implanting “powerful computing
mechanisms” in three major wire transfer clearinghouses: CHIPS (the
Clearing House Interbank Payment System) in New York City, which
reportedly records payments and settlements for foreign trade, foreign
exchange, and syndicated loans for its 139 member banks in 35 countries;
CHAPS in London, which reportedly performs similar functions for
Sterling-denominated transactions; and SIC in Basel, Switzerland, which
reportedly records the same types of transactions when they involve
Swiss Francs. Dr. Bailey described the new NSA SIGINT penetration of the
banking sector as giving the United States the capability to follow the
money flowing from foreign governments to international terrorists
through the international banking system, intercepting the fund transfer
messages from one bank to another as they occurred in real time. (3)
When he was interviewed for a July 23, 2008 article by Tim Shorrock
in Salon Magazine, Dr. Bailey was quoted as stating that INSLAW’s
“PROMIS was the principal software element used by the NSA” for its
real-time surveillance of bank transfers. (4)
In a personal message that I received in June 2013, Dr. Bailey told me:
“I was appointed Director of Planning and Evaluation on the staff
of the National Security Council at the White House in early 1981, when
Ronald Reagan took over the presidency. In that capacity I coordinated
national security planning throughout the government and evaluated the
results of operations undertaken as a result. One of the projects I
personally initiated was the tracing of the funding of activities
contrary to the national security interests of the United States back to
their sources. This activity was given the nickname ’follow the money’.
I worked especially with the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve
Board and the National Security Agency in carrying out this project
(which is very much ongoing today). During this period I visited the NSA
twice, and during my visits was told that the principal software
utilized for the purpose of tracing money movements was PROMIS. At that
time this meant nothing to me, as I was not a computer specialist, but
rather a financial and monetary economist. Only much later did I realize
that the NSA must have been given this software by the Department of
Justice, which had originally utilized it to track cases. I had little
to do with the Justice Department in my position, and even if I had
known that such a transaction had taken place I would have found nothing
wrong with it in principle, assuming the laws regarding patent
protection and payment for patented products had been processed
normally. That is absolutely all I know from personal experience: the
NSA began to use PROMIS software sometime in 1981.”
As mentioned before, in his book, Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA
1981-1987, Bob Woodward quotes CIA Director William Casey as claiming
that one of his proudest achievements as President Reagan’s CIA Director
was the
“penetration of the international banking system, allowing a
steady flow of data from the real, secret set of books kept by many
foreign banks …” (5)
Moreover, a June 5, 1986 email message from David Wigg to Colonel
Oliver North, originally classified SECRET/CODE WORD but later partially
declassified and released in redacted form as a result of the
Iran-Contra investigations, discusses a Reagan National Security Council
(NSC) staff proposal to expand NSA’s SIGINT penetration of the banking
sector to add another approximately 400 major commercial banks. The
email message reported on a meeting that same day with the two top
officials of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel to obtain a
legal opinion, binding on the Executive Branch and authorizing the
planned expansion. David Wigg, who had served as CIA Director Casey's
liaison from the CIA to the NSC staff before transferring to the NSC
staff, (6) described its objective as helping to
“track financial
flows through Syria, Libya, Iran, etc. through the 400 or so principal
banks that make up the interbank market; to notify and work with
European Govs. To fill gaps in our coverage and to cooperate with us in
freezing/seizing assets as appropriate (all on a confidential basis).” (7)
The use of NSA’s bank surveillance project in the fight against
international terrorism led to the decision by President Ronald Reagan
to bomb Libya. That decision was based on precise Follow the Money
SIGINT evidence that Libya had financed a terrorist attack in Germany
that killed an American soldier.
“The highly classified initiative,
known as ‘Follow the Money,’ had allowed the Reagan administration to
trace the Libyan government’s secret funding of a terrorist group that
had bombed a disco in Berlin in 1986, killing an American soldier and
wounding two hundred civilians.“ (8)
In the Preface of The 9/11 Commission Report, released in 2004, the 9/11 Commission writes near the very beginning:
“Our aim has not been to assign individual blame. Our aim has been
to provide the fullest possible account of the events surrounding 9/11
and to identify lessons learned.“
It looks as if the lesson learned is that you can ignore the funding
of a terror attack that kills more than 3.000 people on American soil,
while during the presidency of Ronald Reagan the U.S. Government took
the funding issue of a terror attack in Berlin extremely serious. Why do
I say so? Because in Chapter 5, the 9/11 Commission states with respect
to the funding issue of the 9/11 attacks:
"Ultimately the question is of little practical significance."
However, ask yourself, if you do not really investigate this
question, is “the fullest account of the events surrounding 9/11” still
possible? Interestingly enough, NSA’s Follow the Money mission exists
until today and was expended in recent years. According to the German
magazine Der Spiegel in 2013:
“Indeed, secret documents reveal that the main NSA financial
database Tracfin, which collects the ’Follow the Money’ surveillance
results on bank transfers, credit card transactions and money transfers,
already had 180 million datasets by 2011. The corresponding figure in
2008 was merely 20 million. According to these documents, most Tracfin
data is stored for five years.” (9)
Furthermore, Der Spiegel reported:
“Classified documents compiled by the US intelligence agency NSA (...)
show how comprehensively and effectively the intelligence agency can
track global flows of money and store the information in a powerful
database developed for this purpose.
’Follow the Money’ is the name of the NSA branch that handles these
matters. (…) Financial transfers are the ‘Achilles' heel’ of terrorists,
as NSA analysts note in an internal report. Additional fields of
activity for their ’financial intelligence’ include tracking down
illegal arms deliveries and keeping tabs on the increasingly lucrative
domain of cybercrime. Tracing international flows of money could help
reveal political crimes, expose acts of genocide and monitor whether
sanctions are being respected. (…) The classified documents show that
the intelligence agency has several means of accessing the internal data
traffic of the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial
Telecommunication (SWIFT), a cooperative used by more than 8,000 banks
worldwide for their international transactions. The NSA specifically
targets other institutes on an individual basis. Furthermore, the agency
apparently has in-depth knowledge of the internal processes of credit
card companies like Visa and MasterCard. (…) The collected information
often provides a complete picture of individuals, including their
movements, contacts and communication behavior. The success stories
mentioned by the intelligence agency include operations that resulted in
banks in the Arab world being placed on the US Treasury's blacklist.
(…) [T]he documents reveal the close involvement of the US Treasury in
selecting the program's spying targets. Indeed, according to the
documents, there is an exchange of personnel in which NSA analysts are
transferred for a number of months to the relevant department in the US
Treasury.“ (10)
This report by Der Spiegel certainly documents that the NSA and the
US Treasury are still interested in the financial activities related to
terrorism. This is underlined by the fact that the US Treasury
established in 2004 – the same year in which the 9/11 Commission Report
was released – a special branch called the Office of Terrorism and
Financial Intelligence (TFI), which oversees the Office of Terrorist
Financing and Financial Crimes (TFFC). Its mission: “to combat terrorist
financing domestically and internationally”. (11)
CNN stated in a detailed 2010 report that the US Treasury is:
“…one of the key players in the war on terrorism and smack in the
middle of nearly every major international conflict in which the United
States is involved. (…) Inside Treasury, the work is done by a
low-profile but high-impact unit known as the Office of Terrorism and
Financial Intelligence. (…) Treasury is the world's only government
finance agency with its own in-house intelligence unit. It has offices
as far flung as Riyadh, Islamabad, Kabul and Abu Dhabi. They're the ones
seizing or freezing assets of suspected bad guys -- from terrorists to
drug runners. They're a part of the U.S. intelligence apparatus, sharing
information with the CIA and the FBI, among others.
‘Treasury is the only finance ministry in the world to have an intel
shop that is very much focused on financial intelligence, getting access
to information about the networks that support terrorists, weapons
proliferation or narcotics traffickers,’ said David Cohen, assistant
secretary for terrorist financing. (…) The Office of Terrorism and
Financial Intelligence was put together six years ago following the big
federal agency shuffle that created the Department of Homeland Security.
The office has more than 700 attorneys, investigators, analysts and
financial experts. And the financial intelligence unit is housed with
other Treasury teams, such as the financial crimes unit, that need intel
on alleged dirty money transactions. (…) Sometimes the office's work
has drawn controversy. For example, since the Sept. 11 terrorist
attacks, Treasury has had access to a database of intra-European
financial transactions, despite protests about privacy violations.” (12)
Obviously, the U.S. Government disagrees with the 9/11 Commission in a
substantial way when it comes to the “practical significance" of this
specific issue, i.e. the financing of terrorism. In the 9/11 Commission
Report, they tell you not a single thing about the “Follow the Money”
program and its capabilities. Moreover, they give you no clue what the
U.S. intelligence agencies actually did to track down the financial
activities of the alleged 9/11 hijackers and their handlers. And they
even made a false statement when they wrote “that the National
Money-laundering Strategy Report for 2001 ’didn’t mention terrorist
financing in any of its 50 pages’, when in fact that report “mentions it
17 times”. (13)
When you see it through the prism of 9/11, isn’t it justified to ask
why the U.S. Government has a “Follow the Money” program at all, if the
funding of 9/11 was "of little practical significance"?
Maybe the answer to this question depends on which kind of story the
9/11 Commission had in mind that it wanted to tell the public. An
account as the following written by British investigative journalist
Nafeez Ahmed is for sure at odds with the “mythical historical
narrative” that 9/11 has become. He writes:
“In his book Intelligence Matters (2004), Senator Bob Graham, co-chair of the
Congressional Inquiry into 9/11, discusses the contents of a top secret
CIA memo dated 2nd August 2002 about two 9/11 hijackers, Khalid
Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi. The CIA memo concluded that there is
’incontrovertible evidence that there is support for these terrorists
within the Saudi government.’
The 28 page section of the Congressional report including discussion
of the CIA memo was classified, but some of its contents were leaked,
and related issues revealed in press reports. Early in 2000, when
Almidhar and Alhazmi arrived at Los Angeles airport, they were picked up
by a fellow Saudi, Omar al-Bayoumi, who gave them $1,500 in cash, moved
them into his apartment building, and helped them apply for flight
school. Al-Bayoumi worked for Dallah Avco, a Saudi-based airline chaired
by Prince Bandar’s father, Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz. The firm is a
major contractor for the Saudi Ministry of Defense and Aviation.
In the following months, al-Bayoumi and his associates received
regular cashier’s cheques of around $2,000 a month, totaling tens of
thousands of dollars. These came from Prince Bandar and his wife,
Princess Haifa bin Faisal. Both Bandar and his wife claimed the money
was donated for charitable purposes (one payment track was made after
one of al-Bayoumi’s associates requested assistance from the Saudi
embassy for thyroid treatment), and that they had no idea it was being
diverted to fund the 9/11 hijackers.
After 9/11, British authorities questioned al-Bayoumi in London about
the Saudi money trail to bin Laden’s hijackers. They had discovered
secret papers with the private phone numbers of senior Saudi government
officials concealed beneath the floorboards of his flat in London. The
investigation went nowhere: al-Bayoumi was soon released, and
disappeared into Saudi Arabia.” (14)
Fact is, you won’t find this addressed in any way in the final report
of the 9/11 Commission. The same is true when it comes to the
allegations against a man by the name of Omar Sheikh Saeed. Why should
anybody bother about this man?
Well, Nafeez Ahmed writes:
“In his memoirs, In the Line of Fire, Gen. Musharraf revealed
that Omar Sheikh Saeed was a MI6 agent who had executed certain missions
on behalf of the British intelligence agency, before travelling to
Pakistan and Afghanistan where he met Osama bin laden and Mullah Omar.
Sheikh Saeed was first recruited by MI6 while at the London School of
Economics, recounts Musharraf. The agency persuaded him to join
anti-Serb demonstrations during the Bosnia conflict, and later sent him
to Kosovo to join the jihad. Musharraf argues that at some point, Saeed
likely became ’a rogue or double agent.’
Musharraf’s claims are no doubt self-serving, deflecting from the
widely-reported fact that Sheikh Saeed was an ISI asset. But they chime
with other facts in the public record. Former US Justice Department
prosecutor John Loftus, for instance, who held top secret national
security clearances, has confirmed that MI6 was working with leaders of
the now banned British group al-Muhajiroun?—?Omar Bakri Mohammed, Abu
Hamza and Haroon Rashid Aswat (who would later become bin Laden’s
bodyguard)?—?to recruit British Muslims to fight in Kosovo in 1996.
Sheikh Saeed would have been part of that MI6-backed funnel. Others in
Musharraf’s government were convinced that Sheikh Saeed was also a CIA
asset. In a little-noted article on Saeed’s murky background in March
2002, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reported that: ’There are many in
Musharraf’s government who believe that Saeed Sheikh’s power comes not
from the ISI, but from his connections with our own CIA.’ Officials
believe that ’Saeed Sheikh was bought and paid for.’” (15) At the
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Brigadier Ijaz Shah, the former
Director-General of Intelligence Bureau of Pakistan, was “the handler
for Omar Saeed Sheikh, who was involved in the kidnapping of Wall Street
Journal journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002”, reported Pakistani security
specialist Arif Jamal. “Omar Saeed Sheikh surrendered to Brigadier Shah
who hid him for several weeks before turning him over to authorities.”
(16)
As Nafeez Ahmed explains:
“Brig. Shah’s connection to Omar Sheikh Saeed is deeply troubling.
Sheikh Saeed was not simply accused of murdering Daniel Pearl?—?he was
al-Qaeda’s finance chief during the 9/11 attacks. After 9/11, Indian
intelligence officials confirmed that then ISI director Gen. Mahmoud
Ahmad had ordered Omar Saeed to wire at least $100,000 to the chief 9/11
hijacker, Mohammed Atta. As I documented in my books The War on Truth
(2005) and The War on Freedom (2002), which was among 99 books selected
for the 9/11 Commissioners to use as part of their inquiries, multiple
US intelligence investigations corroborated the Indian allegations. US
authorities had further confirmed that Sheikh Saeed had wired as much as
$500,000 if not more to several of the 9/11 hijackers?—?all at the
behest of the ISI. Despite this, US authorities took no measures to
designate or extradite either Sheikh Saeed or his ISI boss, Mahmoud
Ahmad. As former British Cabinet Minister Michael Meacher observed: ‘It
is extraordinary that neither Ahmad nor Sheikh have been charged and
brought to trial on this count [of financing 9/11]. Why not?’” (17) And
John Newman, “a former executive assistant to the director of the NSA
who spent 20 years in the US Army Intelligence and Security Command,
pointed out that despite Sheikh Saeed’s kidnapping of British citizens
and related terror offenses, he faced no indictments from the US or
Britain, and was even able to travel back to London in January 2000. He
had also kidnapped American citizens, but faced no indictments from the
US until after 9/11.
‘Did the United States not indict Saeed Sheikh because he was a British
informant? Did the agency [CIA] receive information provided by Saeed
Sheikh from British or Pakistani intelligence?’ asked Newman
rhetorically at a 2005 Congressional briefing on the findings of the
9/11 Commission Report.
‘This would help explain why Saeed Sheikh was not indicted and
escaped justice for his crimes and traveled freely around England… If
the foregoing analysis has any merit, Western intelligence agencies were
receiving reports from a senior al-Qaeda source. Once again, however,
al-Qaeda had used Western intelligence to accomplish its own mission.
Saeed Sheikh was probably a triple agent.’ Ahmed Omar Sheikh Saeed’s
role in the 9/11 attacks on behalf of the head of the ISI, Newman noted,
was completely ignored by the 9/11 Commission Report.“ (18)
Another researcher is skeptical when it comes to the allegations that
Nafeez Ahmed is talking about. His name: Peter Dale Scott. The former
Professor for English at the University of California in Berkeley writes
in his book, The Road to 9/11:
“In October 2001, shortly after the catastrophic events of 9/11,
U.S. and British newspapers briefly alleged that the paymaster for the
9/11 attacks was a possible agent of the Pakistani intelligence service
ISI, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh (or Sheik Syed). There was even a brief
period in which it was alleged that the money had been paid at the
direction of the then ISI chief, Lieutenant-General Mahmoud Ahmad. (19)
The London Guardian reported on October 1, 2001, that ’U.S.
investigators believe they have found the ‘smoking gun’ linking Osama
bin Laden to the September 11 terrorist attacks. . . . The man at the
centre of the financial web is believed to be Sheikh Saeed, also known
as Mustafa Mohamed Ahmad, who worked as a financial manager for Bin
Laden when the Saudi exile was based in Sudan, and is still a trusted
paymaster in Bin Laden’s alQaida organization.’ (20) This story was
corroborated by CNN on October 6, citing a ’a senior-level U.S.
government source’ who noted that ’Sheik Syed’ had been liberated from
an Indian prison as a result of an airplane hijacking in December 1999.
The man liberated in this way was Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, a
notorious kidnapper raised in England and widely reported as a probable
agent of the ISI. (21) One newspaper, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review,
suggested he may have been a double agent, recruited inside al Qaeda and
the ISI by CIA. (22) Others have since argued that Saeed Sheikh worked
for both the United States and Britain, since ’both American and British
governments have studiously avoided taking any action against Sheikh
despite the fact that he is a known terrorist who has targeted U.S. and
UK citizens.’ (23)
Subsequent newspaper stories reported on the undoubted relationship
of Saeed Sheikh to the ISI, to FBI claims that he wired $100,000 to 9/11
hijacker Mohamed Atta’s bank account, (24) to a CNN report that these
funds came from Pakistan, (25) and to the uncontested statement that (as
later stated in the indictment of the so-called twentieth hijacker
Zacarias Moussaoui) ’on September 11, 2001, Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi
left the U.A.E. for Pakistan.’ (26)
The most sensational charge, alluded to earlier, came from Indian
intelligence sources: that Saeed Sheikh had wired the money to Atta at
the direction of Lieutenant-General Mahmoud Ahmad, then director of the
ISI." (27)
"All these important and alarming charges are ignored in the 9/11
Commission Report, in which the Saeed Sheikh born in London is not
mentioned. (28) Instead, the report assured its readers in a carefully
drafted comment that ’we have seen no evidence that any foreign
government—or foreign government official—supplied any funding.’ (29) It
was later reported, however, that ’the Pakistan foreign office had paid
tens of thousands of dollars to lobbyists in the U.S. to get
anti-Pakistan references dropped from the 9/11 inquiry commission
report.’ (30) The U.S. government and the mainstream media’s decisions
to drop the Saeed Sheikh story in October 2001 were clearly political.
On September 20, 2001, President Bush delivered his memorable ultimatum
to ’every nation, in every region. . . . Either you are with us, or you
are with the terrorists.’ There was probably no leader for which the
choice was more difficult, or the outcome more unpredictable, than
General Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan. But on October 7, Musharraf fired
his pro-Taliban ISI chief, General Mahmoud Ahmad, along with two other
ISI leaders. (31) As the historian John Newman, a former U.S. Army
Intelligence analyst, has commented: ’The stakes in Pakistan were very
high. As Anthony Zinni explained to CBS on 60 Minutes, ‘Musharaf may be
America’s last hope in Pakistan, and if he fails the fundamentalists
will get hold of the Islamic bomb.’ Musharaf was also vital to the war
effort, and was the key to neutralizing Islamists and rounding up Al
Qaeda operatives in Pakistan.’ (32)
A number of books, in reporting the Saeed Sheikh story, have focused
on the fact that General Ahmad was in Washington on 9/11, meeting with
such senior U.S. officials as CIA director George Tenet. (33) In my
opinion the mystery of 9/11 must be unraveled at a deeper level, the
ongoing groups inside and outside governments, in both Pakistan and
America, which have continued to use groups like al Qaeda and
individuals like Ahmad, for their own policy purposes. (…) They [the
relationships between these groups] are far too complex to be reduced to
two or three individuals. The ongoing collaboration of the ISI and CIA
in promoting terrorist violence has created a complex conspiratorial
milieu, in which governments now have a huge stake in preventing the
emergence of the truth.” (34)
The 9/11 Commission surely would have had the chance to address the
issue. But again, it decided the question was “of little practical
significance".
Let me remind you on the idea of “follow the money”. Fred Shapiro,
author of the book, The Yale Book of Quotations, wrote in 2011 for
example: "The forthcoming Dictionary of Modern Proverbs, to be published
by Yale University Press, quotes (...) a 1975 book by Clive Borrell and
Brian Cashinella, Crime in Britain Today: 'Mr. [James] Crane usually
offers this piece of sound advice to all new officers joining his fraud
department: ‘Always follow the money. Inevitably it will lead to an
oak-paneled door and behind it will be Mr. Big.’ It is a tip that has
paid off in scores of cases.'” (35)
The alternative catchphrase "Money trail" refers to the same idea of
following the movement of money, e.g. from one person to another, from
one organization to another, from one bank account to another, in order
to find out what is really happening. So, why did the 9/11 Commission
deem this tried and tested approach useless? Yours truly leaves the
silent answer to the reader's wisdom.
Best regards,
Lars Schall.
SOURCES:
(1) Guy Lawson: “Octopus – Sam Israel, The Secret
Market, and Wall Street’s Wildest Con”, New York, Crown Publishers,
2012, page 144. On the PROMIS saga see also Cherie Seymour: “The Last
Circle – Danny Casolaro’s Investigation into The Octopus and the PROMIS
Software Scandal”, Walterville, TrineDay, 2011.
the-cold-war
(3) For the transcript of the PBS documentary
“Follow the Money” see Lars Schall: “Follow the Money: The NSA’s
real-time electronic surveillance of bank transactions”, published at
LarsSchall.com on February 2nd, 2014 under:
http://www.larsschall.com/2014/02/02/follow-themoney-
the-nsas-real-time-electronic-surveillance-of-bank-transactions/
(5) Compare Elliot L. Richardson: “INSLAW’s ANALYSIS and REBUTTAL of the BUA REPORT:
Memorandum in Response to the March 1993 Report of
Special Counsel Nicholas J. Bua to the Attorney General of the United
States Responding to the Allegations of INSLAW, Inc.”, published here:
http://textfiles.com/law/rebuttal.txt
(6) David Wigg also earlier worked with William Casey when Casey headed the Export/Import Bank (1974-76).
(7) The National Security Archives at George
Washington University published a collection of White House emails that
Iran-Contra investigators had recovered from the Reagan National
Security Council IBM mainframe computer after the NSC staff had deleted
them as the Iran-Contra scandal began to unfold. See here:
http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/white_house_email/. The documents
were later also published as a book, see Tom Blanton (ed.):
"White House E-Mail: The Top Secret Computer Messages The Reagan/Bush
White House Tried to Destroy", New Press, New York, 1995. For an online
reference to the email message from David Wigg to Oliver North see J.
Orlin Grabbe: “Plot to Spy on Banks Outlined in White House Email”,
January 2, 1997, published at Mem Research under:
https://www.memresearch.org/grabbe/email.htm
(8) Guy Lawson: “Octopus”, loc. cit., page 144.
(9) See Laura Poitras, Marcel Rosenbach and Holger
Stark: “'Follow the Money': NSA Monitors Financial World”, published at
Spiegel Online on September 16, 2013 under:
(10) Ibid.
(11) Compare “U.S. Treasury Department Announces
New Executive Office for Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes”,
published at the website of the U.S. Treasury on March 3, 2003 under:
(12) Compare Jennifer Liberto: “Treasury's quiet war”, published at CNN on February 16, 2010
(13) Jim Hogue: “Follow the Money? God forbid”, published at Baltimore Chronicle on January 29, 2008 under:
http://www.baltimorechronicle.com/2008/012908Hogue.shtml.
Hogue points in this article at “an unusual surge in the currency
component of the M1 money supply” in the U.S. in July and August of 2001
that was “never investigated”. Related to this specific case see also
Lars Schall:
130913.html
(14) Nafeez Ahmed: “The bin Laden death mythology”, published at Insurge Intelligence on July 3, 2015 under:
(15) Ibid.
(16) Ibid. Ahmed writes: “Jamal refers to an
interview in 2000 with a Pakistani security official, who disclosed
Shah’s relationship with Ahmed Omar Sheikh Saeed on condition of
anonymity.”
(17) Michael Meacher: “The Pakistan connection”, published at “The Guardian” on July 22, 2004
(18) Nafeez Ahmed: “The bin Laden death mythology”, loc. cit.
The following footnotes from 19 to 33 are taken
from Peter Dale Scott: “The Road to 9/11 – Wealth, Empire, and the
Future of America”, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2007, pp.
334-335:
(19) Griffin, 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and
Distortions, 104–7; Ahmed, War on Truth, 137–44; and Peter Dale Scott,
“The CIA’s Secret Powers: Afghanistan, 9/11, and America’s Most
Dangerous Enemy, Critical Asian Studies 35, no. 2 (2003): 233–58.
Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions,
109–10. The investigators were later identified as the FBI (Wall Street
Journal, October 10, 2001; CNN, October 28, 2001; and Times [London],
November 16, 2001).
(21) For example, Daniel Klaidman, “Federal Grand
Jury Set to Indict Sheikh,” Newsweek, March 13, 2002: U.S. officials
suspect “that Sheikh has been a ‘protected asset,’ of Pakistan’s shadowy
spy service, the Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI.” The story was
enhanced by Indian intelligence sources with a more sensational claim:
that Saeed Sheikh had wired the money to hijacker Mohamed Atta at the
direction of Lieutenant-General Mahmoud Ahmad, the director of the ISI
at the time (Wall Street Journal,October 10, 2001). Indian sources later
downplayed this anti-Pakistani
allegation by suggesting that the money came instead from a ransom paid
to another terrorist, Aftab Ansari in Dubai, when a Kolkata businessman,
Partha Roy Burman, was kidnapped in July 2001 (B. Muralidhar Reddy,
“Omar Sheikh Arrested, Says Pearl Is Alive,” The Hindu, February 13,
2002).
(22) “Did Pearl Die Because Pakistan Deceived CIA?” Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, March 3, 2002,
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/s_20141.html
“There are many in Musharraf’s government who believe that Saeed
Sheikh’s power comes not from the ISI, but from his connections with our
own CIA. The theory is that with such intense pressure to locate bin
Laden, Saeed Sheikh was bought and paid for.”
(23) Ahmed, War on Truth, 142; cf. John Newman,
“Omissions and Errors in the Commission’s Final Report: Rep. McKinney
9/11 Congressional Briefing,” August 18, 2005,
225: “It is believed in some quarters that while
Omar Sheikh was at the LSE [London School of Economics] he was recruited
by the British intelligence agency MI6. It is said that MI6 persuaded
him to take an active part in demonstrations against Serbian aggression
in Bosnia and even sent him to Kosovo to join the jihad. At some point
he probably became a rogue or double
agent.”
(24) Maria A. Ressa, “India Wants Terror Spotlight on Kashmir,” CNN, October 8, 2001,
(25) “Sources: Suspected Terrorist Leader Was Wired Funds through Pakistan,” CNN, October 1, 2001,
http://archives.cnn.com/2001/US/10/01/inv.pakistan.funds/:
“As much as $100,000 was wired in the past year from Pakistan to
Mohamed Atta.” Subsequent developments lent weight to the Pakistani
connection, such as the arrest of Atta’s alleged controls, Ramzi
Binalshibh and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, in Pakistan.
(26) United States District Court for the Eastern
District of Virginia, Alexandria Division. United States of America v.
Zacarias Moussaoui, #108.
(27) “India Helped FBI Trace ISI-Terrorist Links,” Times of India, October 9, 2001; Wall Street Journal, October 10, 2001.
(28) The appendixes note, in a list of names, a
“Sheikh Saeed al Masri” as an “Egyptian; head of al Qaeda finance
committee.” Instead, following a previous reversal in the U.S. media,
the financial role attributed earlier to Sheikh Saeed is now given to
“Mustafa al Hawsawi,” the name (or pseudonym) used for the financial
transactions (9/11 Commission Report, 436). The only
reference to any Sheikh Saeed in the text says that the Egyptian (or Kenyan) Sheikh Saeed “argued that al
Qaeda should defer to the Taliban’s wishes” and not
attack the United States directly (9/11 Commission Report, 251). The
report treats Sheikh Saeed and al-Hawsawi as two people, whereas earlier
they had been identified in U.S. media reports as the same person.
(29) 9/11 Commission Report, 172.
(30) “Pakistan Weekly Spills 9/11 Beans,” Telegraph (Calcutta), March 13, 2006,
(31) Kamran Khan and Molly Moore, “Leader Purges
Top Ranks of Military, Spy Services,” Washington Post, October 8, 2001;
Thompson, Terror Timeline, 260–61. It was widely reported that Mahmoud
was let go for being too sympathetic to the Taliban (for example, Alan
Sipress and Vernon Loeb, “CIA’s Stealth War Centers on Eroding Taliban
Loyalty and Aiding Opposition,” Washington
Post, October 10, 2001).
(32) Newman, “Omissions and Errors in the Commission’s Final Report.”
(33) For example, Ahmed, War on Truth, 137–46; Griffin, 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, 103–9.
(34) Peter Dale Scott: “The Road to 9/11”, loc. cit., pp. 132-134.
(35) See Fred Shapiro: “Follow the Money”, published at Freakonomics on September 23, 2011
