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Science & Technology
Fauci interview - 'Something Clearly Went Wrong'
2023-04-30
[Daily Reckoning] Billed as the most in-depth interview yet, the New York Times published a very long piece that contains some rather startling admissions, claims, and defenses from Anthony Fauci, the face of lockdowns and shot mandates.

The author and interviewer is David Wallace-Wells, who before (and now after) Covid specialized in writing about climate change, invokes every predictable trope. So there was a sense in which this interview was a lovefest between the two. Still it netted some interesting results.

Here are my top-ten picks of Fauci quotes.

1. Fauci: "Something clearly went wrong. And I don’t know exactly what it was. But the reason we know it went wrong is that we are the richest country in the world, and on a per-capita basis we’ve done worse than virtually all other countries."

This seems promising but one quickly realizes that there is an axiom among the people responsible for lockdowns. They were completely correct in their thinking. The problem was not enough centralization, prior planning, or resources.

Also there was too much disinformation and non-compliance, leading to a low vaccine uptake compared with other countries. The vaccines are the miracle and the greatest achievement of the pandemic, a point on which they admit no argument.

This is also the conclusion of a thing called The Covid Crisis Group (funded mostly by the Charles Koch and Rockefeller Foundations) which has released the new book Lessons from the Covid War: An Investigative Report. There is no PDF. You have to buy it. The lead author is the well-known fixer Philip Zelikow, who wrote the 9-11 Commission report.

Included among the team is none other than Carter Mecher, who bears more responsibility for school closings than anyone else. Also there is Rajeev Venkayya, the one-time Bush administration official who is widely credited with having invented the very concept of lockdowns.

It’s their story and they are sticking to it.

2. Fauci on vaccine mandates: "Man, I think, almost paradoxically, you had people who were on the fence about getting vaccinated thinking, why are they forcing me to do this? And that sometimes-beautiful independent streak in our country becomes counterproductive. And you have that smoldering anti-science feeling, a divisiveness that’s palpable politically in this country."

If you didn’t think you needed the vaccine or didn’t trust it, Fauci proclaims that you are responsible for divisiveness and anti-science feeling. The "independent streak" is called freedom, which for him is the real problem. The lesson for next time? Hard to know. Maybe he thinks the mandates should have been enforced with more energy.

3. Fauci on the economics of the lockdowns: "The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is not an economic organization. The surgeon general is not an economist. So we looked at it from a purely public-health standpoint.

It was for other people to make broader assessments — people whose positions include but aren’t exclusively about public health. Those people have to make the decisions about the balance between the potential negative consequences of something versus the benefits of something."

There we go with the great divide between public health and real life, as if one does not impact the other. Public health cared not for economics — the science of human cooperation — and, sadly, the economists were too often unschooled on public health. The compartmentalization of speciality fields played into the haphazard totalitarianism we experienced.

But there’s more — a lot more. Read on to see Fauci’s other important quotes, and what they really mean.

Fauci: ’Don’t Blame Me’
I was just the highly compensated USG bagman.
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Home Front: WoT
Pentagon Attempts to Block Book on Afghan War
2010-09-10
On the eve of Sept. 11, Fox News has learned the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency has attempted to block a book about the tipping point in Afghanistan and a controversial pre-9/11 data mining project called "Able Danger."

In a letter obtained by Fox News, the DIA says national security could be breached if "Operation Dark Heart" is published in its current form. The agency also attempted to block key portions of the book that claim "Able Danger" successfully identified hijacker Mohammed Atta as a threat to the United States before the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

Click here to read the full DIA letter (pdf)

Specifically, the DIA wanted references to a meeting between Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer, the book's author, and the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, Philip Zelikow, removed. In that meeting, which took place in Afghanistan, Shaffer alleges the commission was told about "Able Danger" and the identification of Atta before the attacks. No mention of this was made in the final 9/11 report.

In a highly unusual move, the DIA is now negotiating with the publisher, St. Martin's Press, to buy all 10,000 copies of the first printing of the book to keep it off shelves -- even after the U.S. Army had cleared the book for release.
Atta was the alleged ringleader of the Sept. 11 hijackers and piloted American Airlines Flight 11 into the World Trade Center.

Shaffer spoke to Fox News before he was asked by the military not to discuss the book. He confirmed efforts to block the book and other details.

The documents and exclusive interviews, including an Army data collector on the Able Danger Project, are part of an ongoing investigation by the documentary unit "Fox News Reporting" which uncovered new details about American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and efforts by the FBI to track and recruit him for intelligence purposes after 9/11.
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Home Front: WoT
US government doesn't know how to handle Islamists
2010-02-07
After the worst military base massacre in U.S. history, officials acknowledged that they failed to "connect the dots" -- the shooter had been corresponding with an imam tied to al-Qaeda and had condemned the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as a war against Islam. But Fort Hood gunman Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan wasn't the only one working on a Texas Army base the day of the shooting who had links to radical Islamists.

At Fort Bliss, an experienced military trainer was teaching soldiers about his Muslim faith. He, too, had denounced government counterterrorism efforts, and public records show he and some of his closest associates had ties to terrorism suspects. But when The Dallas Morning News first inquired about the instructor, Louay Safi, military officials praised him. Only later did they say that Safi had been suspended from working on military bases pending a continuing criminal inquiry.

Safi is a senior official of the Islamic Society of North America, the country's largest Muslim organization. ISNA has been consulted for years by Washington and is described as a partner in the fight against terrorism. In addition to serving as ISNA's communications director, Safi runs its program certifying Muslim chaplains for work in the U.S. military and prison system. He publicly denounces terrorism and advocates peace.

Safi was also named by government prosecutors as an unindicted co-conspirator in one terrorism case in 2005. His last two employers were implicated in other government terrorism investigations while he worked for them. He was never charged, nor included among the targets of those investigations. But Safi has called the widespread raids on Muslim organizations after 9/11 "a campaign against Islam" -- a term that 9/11 Commission director Philip Zelikow says is part of "the jihadi narrative."

Safi has also complained that Muslims are treated differently from Christians and Jews when they do wrong. They are unfairly identified by and questioned about their religion, he says, treatment that can lead to isolation and aggression. "The extremist ideology responsible for violent outbursts is often rooted in the systematic demonization of marginalized groups," Safi said in an Internet posting after the Fort Hood shooting.

Some view Safi's rhetoric as incendiary. Zuhdi Jasser is a Navy veteran who founded the American Islamic Forum for Democracy and has spoken publicly about the dangers of politicizing Islam. He said Safi's "separatist mindset of the world against Muslims" is the "mindset that created Hasan."

Safi would not answer most questions from The News. But in a brief interview, he said the legal assaults on him and his associates even as Washington sought their advice represented the government's divided approach to Islam. "There are those who are prejudiced and would like to deny Muslims their rightful place in this country," Safi said, "and there are people who are more open-minded. It's as simple as that."

Safi's case, however, is anything but simple. It illustrates not only the divisions in dealing with Islam but also the difficulty in knowing which dots to connect. "You have a schizophrenic government and a schizophrenic institution," Zelikow said, referring to ISNA. "The schizophrenia cuts right into how the government views the whole Fort Hood affair. We don't know whether to treat him [Hasan] as part of an international conspiracy or as a lone wolf who happened to have gotten solace from a radical imam."
Much, much more at link. Well worth reading.
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Home Front: Politix
McCain's foreign policy advisers from rival camps
2008-04-10
So-called pragmatists worry that they are being outmaneuvered by neocons

Sen. John McCain has long made his decades of experience in foreign policy and national security the centerpiece of his political identity and suggests he would bring to the White House a fully formed view of the world. But now one component of the fractious Republican Party foreign policy establishment — the so-called pragmatists, some of whom have come to view the Iraq war or its execution as a mistake — are expressing concern that McCain might be coming under increased influence from a competing camp, the neoconservatives, whose thinking dominated President Bush's first term and played a pivotal role in building the case for war.

The concerns have emerged in the weeks since McCain became his party's presumptive nominee and began more formally assembling a list of foreign policy advisers. Among those on the list are several prominent neoconservatives, including Robert Kagan, an author who helped write much of the foreign policy speech that McCain delivered in Los Angeles on March 26, in which he described himself as "a realistic idealist." Others are security analyst Max Boot and former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton.

Prominent members of the pragmatist group, often called realists, say they are also wary of the McCain campaign's chief foreign policy aide, Randy Scheunemann, who was an adviser to former Sens. Trent Lott and Bob Dole and who has longtime ties to neoconservatives. In 2002, Scheunemann was a founder of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq and was an enthusiastic supporter of the Iraqi exile and Pentagon favorite, Ahmad Chalabi. "It maybe too strong a term to say a fight is going on over John McCain's soul," said Lawrence Eagleburger, a secretary of state under President George H.W. Bush, who is a member of the pragmatist camp. "But if it's not a fight, I am convinced there is at least going to be an attempt. I can't prove it, but I'm worried that it's taking place."

McCain, who is aware of the concerns, said this week that he took foreign policy advice from a wide variety of people. "Some of them are viewed as 'more conservative,' quote," he said, adding, "but I do have a broad array of people that I talk to, and hear from, and read what they write."

The worry about McCain is centered among a group of foreign policy realists who have long been close to him and who lost out to the hawks in the intense ideological battles of the first term of the current White House. The group includes former Secretary of State Colin Powell and Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser to President George H.W. Bush.

Although the concerns at this point are focused more on access to McCain than on major policy differences, there have been some substantive areas of dispute. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was said to have been disturbed by McCain's hard-line attitude toward Russia and Russian President Vladimir Putin in the March 26 speech, according to someone who has spoken recently with Kissinger. "I have no comment on that paragraph," Kissinger said when asked directly. "You have to take my judgment from what I have written. But I am a strong supporter of the senator."

Similarly, Scowcroft is said to have expressed reservations about McCain's call for creating a League of Democracies as a complement to the United Nations. An associate of Scowcroft's said he viewed it as an effort to diminish the United Nations — a target of scorn among neoconservatives.

Philip Zelikow, a former top adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice who is not working for McCain, said it was not surprising that there were worries among the realists about the presumptive Republican nominee. "It's partly because McCain hasn't settled himself in one camp," said Zelikow. " ... But if you're in McCain's position, is it in his interest to settle the argument now? It's in his interest to embrace the largest number of Republicans and not declare that he is in favor of one faction or another."
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China-Japan-Koreas
The Plan That Moved Pyongyang
2007-02-20
By Philip Zelikow

In 2006, the headlines from North Korea were depressing. Pyongyang was headed down the path of escalation: missile tests in July, testing a nuclear weapon in October. Now, 2007 has opened with encouraging news -- a breakthrough in Beijing. In effect, the agreement announced last week was answering the bomb test with a successful test of diplomacy. But this deal makes more sense if we understand the broader strategy, set in motion some time ago, that is starting to play out.

In 2005, the United States energized its flagging North Korea efforts on two tracks. One was diplomatic, the other defensive. The diplomatic strategy was never just about North Korea. The Korean Peninsula has repeatedly been a battleground for the great powers in Northeast Asia. The United States, particularly Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her deputy, Robert Zoellick, saw a way to break this mold: China, Japan and Russia were flexing new diplomatic muscle. The North Korean problem could be an opportunity to unite potential rivals in common effort, an enterprise without precedent in Northeast Asia.

The defensive approach responded to North Korea's outlaw strategy for economic survival. Protecting the integrity of the international financial system was just one of the ways to show the North's leaders that trafficking in contraband was not a sustainable solution to their problems.

By late 2005, both policies had been set in motion. In September, Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill and his counterparts from South Korea, North Korea, China, Japan and Russia had negotiated a joint framework for comprehensive diplomatic action. Meanwhile, enforcement actions that had been pending against North Korea's partners in money laundering, such as Macau's Banco Delta Asia, were rolled out.

Then the Bush administration paused. It had been preparing to follow up with new diplomatic initiatives, but the administration was uncertain and divided about how much further to go until North Korea moved. As for the North Koreans, they were indeed hit hard as members of the international financial community became increasingly reluctant to handle their suspect transactions. Furious, they boycotted the six-party talks and tried to advertise their own strength, a course that culminated in the nuclear test last October.

After that test, Rice leaned hard on the regional diplomatic relationships she had nurtured. First -- and fast -- came U.N. Security Council Resolution 1718, the most potent action against North Korea that the United Nations had taken since 1953, when the Korean War was suspended.

Having shown the North that it had underestimated regional solidarity, the United States next moved to change the dynamic, to break the cycle of escalation. That month, Chinese President Hu Jintao and President Bush came to a strategic understanding about North Korea. They agreed that diplomacy needed to be given another chance. But the diplomacy couldn't just be a gloss, busywork that only gave the appearance of action.

To turn this strategic understanding into policy, Rice developed a two-stage strategy. First the six parties would move quickly to offset the nuclear test with unprecedented commitments from the North Koreans to stop and reverse their nuclear development and to bring back the system of monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Some called this an "early harvest" -- testing whether the ground could yield anything fruitful.

If it did, then in the second stage the six parties would follow up. But rather than returning to the old, painful pattern of piecemeal nuclear bribery, the diplomacy would have to move simultaneously on multiple fronts: scrapping the nuclear program, building normal economic cooperation, tackling the normalization of relations and -- perhaps most engaging -- getting at the unresolved issues of the Korean War.

Thus, later in October, Rice shuttled across Northeast Asia to reassure allies and win support for this diplomatic design, especially in Beijing.

Pressure had its place. So did diplomatic ingenuity. One Chinese official said to Rice, "It is better to play with two hands." And talking with the North Koreans would not be a problem, Rice concluded, if doing so did not undermine the vital regional foundation and if the North Koreans actually had something to say.

Last week's deal, skillfully negotiated by Rice and Hill with their counterparts, delivers a plan for the "early harvest." A "good, initial step" was Rice's careful phrase. The broader context in which the agreement was reached helps explain what she meant. The United States and its negotiating partners have successfully carried out a diplomatic test.

The next two months will show whether the design remains valid. Rice has agreed to a six-party meeting of foreign ministers, including the North Koreans. We will see whether the Bush administration and its counterparts can launch the second stage, when the desired outcomes to be produced from this diplomacy may finally come into view.

The writer is a history professor at the University of Virginia. From 2005 until 2007 he was counselor of the State Department.
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Israel-Palestine-Jordan
Rice to Livni: No link between Palestinian track and Iran
2006-09-19
Washington is not linking Israeli progress on the Palestinian track with forming an international coalition against Iran, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni in New York Monday. During their meeting, one of a host of talks Livni held with world leaders on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly session, Rice said the US continued to view the Palestinian issue and the Iranian problem as separate.

According to officials in Livni's office, Rice - not Livni - raised the issue, and she did it in the presence of Philip Zelikow, one of her top advisers, who seemed to indicate linkage last week in a speech to a conference organized by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. In that speech, Zelikow said there was a need to form a "coalition of builders" to confront the Iranian threat, an alliance composed of the US, Europe and moderate Arab states. He indicated that progress on the Israeli-Palestinian track was an essential element for the Arabs and Europeans to get on board the efforts to stop Iran. "It is an essential ingredient for forging the coalition. I would say it is an essential ingredient for Israel," Zelikow said, adding, "It is an essential glue that binds all these things together."

He said that when building coalitions, there was a need to address concerns of other members, in this case the Europeans and Arabs. During the Livni-Rice meeting, the second between the two in a week, Livni spoke of the need for the international community to remain firmly behind the demands that in order for the Palestinian Authority to gain legitimacy, it needed to accept the international community's three benchmarks: recognizing Israel's right to exist, forswearing terrorism and accepting previous agreements.
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International-UN-NGOs
Holbrooke: Annan to bail out Bush
2006-06-28
In a little-noticed announcement in President Bush's news conference on June 14, the day he returned from Iraq, he said that he would send two personal emissaries to New York to consult with U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan on the political and economic future of Iraq. The next day, still with remarkably little public attention, Philip Zelikow, the counselor of the State Department, and Deputy Treasury Secretary Robert Kimmitt met with Annan and his deputy, Mark Malloch Brown, at the secretary general's Sutton Place residence. There was no one else present.
So let's guess who leaked to Clintonista Holbrooke...
The two presidential envoys asked Annan to use his unique "convening powers" to help organize international meetings that would lead (by this fall, the Americans hope) to the unveiling of a new "Iraq Compact" -- an agreement between the Iraqi government and major international donors that would commit Baghdad to a series of political and economic reforms in return for substantially more international aid. (Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki called Annan the same day to make an identical request.)

It is, however, impossible not to note the irony and the implications of what has happened in the past two weeks between Washington and the United Nations. Once again, an administration that has underfunded, undersupported and undermined the United Nations has turned to it, almost in desperation, for help.
Or asked it to demonstrate that it is useless. All depends on how things turn out.
The lesson should be clear: Despite the enormously self-destructive actions of many other member states, especially the group of developing nations called the G-77, the United Nations still serves U.S. foreign policy interests in many important ways. That's not clear yet. Not only Iraq but also Iran, Darfur, Afghanistan and the difficult negotiations just started over Kosovo's final status -- all issues of vital importance to the United States -- have now ended up in the United Nations. to little or no effect in each case. To weaken this institution further, as has happened in recent years, serves no clear American national security interest. To strengthen it would make it more valuable to the United States and to every nation that seeks conflict resolution, stability and economic progress. With the maneuvering over the selection of Annan's successor underway, it is time for Washington -- and this must include Congress -- to put behind it a sorry period of confusion and offer the United Nations more support, both financial and political, in return for the things it needs in Iraq and elsewhere.
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Home Front: WoT
What Are These Guys Hiding?
2005-12-08
WHAT DID the 9/11 Commission know and when did they know it? That's what I want somebody with subpoena power to ask about Operation Able Danger. Or, as ex-FBI Director Louis Freeh said to me this week, "Why is the 9/11 Commission talking about hurricanes and tunnels and all these other things when it looks like they may have missed the single most important fact with respect to Sept. 11?"

Freeh was answering my request for a response to comments made by Lee Hamilton and Tom Kean on "Meet the Press" last weekend.

Operation Able Danger was an intelligence data-mining process that, according to several participants, identified Mohamed Atta well in advance of 9/11 as a potential bad guy. One of those individuals, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, has told me that in the summer of 2000, government lawyers prevented Able Danger representatives from getting the information about Atta to the FBI.

"We didn't make it to the FBI, and that was the problem," he told me. "We had information initiated by the Army. It was what they call 'open source' information which suggested that some of those bad guys, including Atta and three of his associates, were themselves associated with the Brooklyn cell. That was information that the lawyers said, 'Ah, they are here legally,' and put stickies over their faces."

The response of government lawyers to the identification by Able Danger of Mohamed Atta was to put a Post-it note over his face, literally taking him off the government radar screen.

Fast-forward two years after 9/11. Shaffer is in Afghanistan. His intelligence work would earn him a Bronze Star. While he was in Afghanistan, the word went out that the 9/11 Commission was coming to town and anyone with info about events of significance pre-9/11 should make themselves known. He did, to no less than the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, Philip Zelikow. He told me that he told Zelikow about Able Danger and Atta. "My bottom line to them was that through a data-processing exercise, we were able to identify two of the cells which conducted the 9/11 attack to include Atta."

You'd think that the Atta revelation would have been one of the most significant aspects of the work of the 9/11 Commission. Instead, it wasn't even mentioned in the 664-page final report.

Rep. Curt Weldon has appropriately been on the warpath asking why the 9/11 Commission was silent about Able Danger. And he wants to know what happened to the chart that was presented in the summer of 2000 - the one that got the "stickies." Weldon is not the only one asking questions. So too is Freeh, who wrote a widely circulated Wall Street Journal article on the subject last month. Tim Russert asked the commission co-chairs to respond to Freeh.

Hamilton told Russert: "Look, we looked at Able Danger very, very carefully. We do not think there was anything there of great significance. Now, something could come out in the future. I don't know. But in Mr. Freeh's article he did not present any new evidence at all. "Our investigators were informed about Able Danger. We requested all of the documents relating to Able Danger. We reviewed these documents. We had investigators meet with some of these people in Afghanistan and other places. The bottom line is that they can furnish no documentary evidence to support their charges that they had a chart, for example, with Mohamed Atta's name on it."

Kean agreed: "We had an awful lot of people coming forward, 50 or 60, saying they saw Mohamed Atta here, they saw Mohamed Atta there; they had this and that. There was absolutely no evidence to back this up.
"There still isn't any evidence to back it up. If people want to look into it, they're welcome to. We still haven't seen the evidence to indicate it. We saw every file. The Pentagon denies it. They say they haven't gotten any information."

Freeh called the response of Hamilton and Kean "silly." He said the Able Danger participants who have come forward "are not informants or criminals who have to prove their case. They are intelligence officers who had that job to perform." "I take exception to this notion that it was fully investigated. The longest period of time they had was 10 days... "How could you fully investigate, with all due respect to Mr. Hamilton who is not an investigator, a fact of that potential significance within 10 days?" Freeh asked.

"As for me reviewing new evidence, that is not my job. It was the 9/11 Commission job to go out and not only find, but to fully and fairly evaluate evidence, and how could they do that in 10 days, it is ridiculous," Freeh said.

While I was interviewing Freeh, Weldon called. He was much more blunt. "Lee Hamilton has just lied to the American people. They did NO investigation."
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Israel-Palestine-Jordan
Exiled militants return to Gaza
2005-12-02
Several Palestinian militants who either fled or were expelled by Israel have returned to Gaza via the recently re-opened Rafah border crossing. The entry of as many as 15 members of Hamas, including one of its founders, has angered Israel. Israeli Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz has warned his government will close two crossings it controls if militants continue to enter via Rafah. The crossings into Israel are vital for trade between Gaza and the West Bank.

The Hamas members allowed to return via Rafah include one of the group's founders, Ahmed al-Malah, and Fadel Zahhar, a brother of Hamas leader in Gaza, Mahmoud Zahhar. Fadel Zahhar returned to Gaza after 14 years in exile, having been expelled to Lebanon by Israel in 1991. Palestinian officials insist that anyone with a Palestinian identity card can enter Gaza from Rafah.

Israel closed the crossing in September shortly after withdrawing from Gaza, citing concerns that it would be used to smuggle weapons and militants from Egypt into the Palestinian Territories. On Thursday, Mr Mofaz threatened to expel Gaza from a vital customs agreement that allows it to trade with the Palestinians in the West Bank. "If it doesn't improve and the Palestinians don't co-operate we will close the Erez and Karni crossings," he said. "They will become international crossings in all senses, and I really hope that the Palestinians understand the significance of this step."

Israel has also complained that the Palestinian Authority is not letting it monitor the Rafah crossing as agreed. Israel allowed the border to re-open only if they could watch real-time footage on television screens from a base a few kilometres away.

The US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, has responded to the developments by sending a senior envoy to monitor the agreement she brokered last month. State Department Counsellor Philip Zelikow will examine the operation of the crossing. He will also discuss upgrading the Erez and Karni crossings and running bus and lorry convoys between Gaza and the West Bank.
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Home Front: Politix
What you didn't know about the 9/11 commission on Iraq/al-Qaeda
2005-08-30
Ahmed Hikmat Shakir is a shadowy figure who provided logistical assistance to one, maybe two, of the 9/11 hijackers. Years before, he had received a phone call from the Jersey City, New Jersey, safehouse of the plotters who would soon, in February 1993, park a truck bomb in the basement of the World Trade Center. The safehouse was the apartment of Musab Yasin, brother of Abdul Rahman Yasin, who scorched his own leg while mixing the chemicals for the 1993 bomb. When Shakir was arrested shortly after the 9/11 attacks, his "pocket litter," in the parlance of the investigators, included contact information for Musab Yasin and another 1993 plotter, a Kuwaiti native named Ibrahim Suleiman. These facts alone, linking the 1993 and 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, would seem to cry out for additional scrutiny, no?

The Yasin brothers and Shakir have more in common. They are all Iraqis. And two of them--Abdul Rahman Yasin and Shakir--went free, despite their participation in attacks on the World Trade Center, at least partly because of efforts made on their behalf by the regime of Saddam Hussein. Both men returned to Iraq--Yasin fled there in 1993 with the active assistance of the Iraqi government. For ten years in Iraq, Abdul Rahman Yasin was provided safe haven and financing by the regime, support that ended only with the coalition intervention in March 2003.

Readers of The Weekly Standard may be familiar with the stories of Abdul Rahman Yasin, Musab Yasin, and Ahmed Hikmat Shakir. Readers of the 9/11 Commission's final report are not. Those three individuals are nowhere mentioned in the 428 pages that comprise the body of the 9/11 Commission report. Their names do not appear among the 172 listed in Appendix B of the report, a table of individuals who are mentioned in the text. Two brief footnotes mention Shakir.

Why? Why would the 9/11 Commission fail to mention Abdul Rahman Yasin, who admitted his role in the first World Trade Center attack, which killed 6 people, injured more than 1,000, and blew a hole seven stories deep in the North Tower? It's an odd omission, especially since the commission named no fewer than five of his accomplices. Why would the 9/11 Commission neglect Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, a man who was photographed assisting a 9/11 hijacker and attended perhaps the most important 9/11 planning meeting? And why would the 9/11 Commission fail to mention the overlap between the two successful plots to attack the World Trade Center? The answer is simple: The Iraqi link didn't fit the commission's narrative.

AS THE TWO SIDES in the current flap over Able Danger, a Pentagon intelligence unit tracking al Qaeda before 9/11, exchange claims and counterclaims in the news media, the work of the 9/11 Commission is receiving long overdue scrutiny. It may be the case, as three individuals associated with the Pentagon unit claim, that Able Danger had identified Mohammed Atta in January or February 2000 and that the 9/11 Commission simply ignored this information because it clashed with the commission's predetermined storyline. We should soon know more. Whatever the outcome of that debate, the 9/11 Commission's deliberate exclusion of the Iraqis from its analysis is indefensible.

The investigation into the 9/11 attacks began with an article of faith among those who had conducted U.S. counterterrorism efforts throughout the 1990s: Saddam Hussein's Iraq was not--could not have been--involved in any way. On September 12, 2001, the day after the attacks, George W. Bush asked Richard Clarke to investigate the attacks and possible Iraqi involvement in them. Clarke, as he relates in his bestselling book, was offended even to be asked. He knew better.

Philip Zelikow, executive director of the 9/11 Commission, started from the same assumption. So did Douglas MacEachin, a former deputy director of the CIA for intelligence who led the commission's study of al Qaeda and was responsible for the commission's conclusion that there was "no collaborative operational relationship" between Iraq and al Qaeda. (Over the course of the commission's life, MacEachin refused several interviews with The Weekly Standard because, we were told, he disagreed with our understanding of the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda.)

From the evidence now available, it seems clear that Saddam Hussein did not direct the 9/11 attacks. Few people have ever claimed he did. But some four years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and one year after the 9/11 Commission released its final report, there is much we do not know. The determination of these officials to write out of the history any Iraqi involvement in terrorism against America has contributed mightily to public misperceptions about the former Iraqi regime and the war on terror.

HERE IS WHAT WE KNOW TODAY about Ahmed Hikmat Shakir. In August 1999, Shakir, a 37-year-old Iraqi, accepted a position as a "facilitator" at the airport in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. A "facilitator" works for an airline and assists VIP travelers with paperwork required for entry and other logistical issues. Shakir got the job because someone in the Iraqi embassy in Malaysia wanted him to have it. He started that fall. Although Shakir officially worked for Malaysian Airlines, his contact in the Iraqi embassy controlled his schedule. On January 5, 2000, Shakir apparently received an assignment from his embassy contact. He was to escort a recent arrival through immigration at the airport. Khalid al Mihdhar, a well-connected al Qaeda member who would later help hijack American Airlines Flight 77, had come to Malaysia for an important al Qaeda meeting that would last at least three days. (Shakir may have also assisted Nawaf al Hazmi, another hijacker, thought to have arrived on January 4, 2000.)

Malaysian intelligence photographed Shakir greeting al Mihdhar at the airport and walking him to a waiting car. But rather than see the new arrival off, he hopped in the car with al Mihdhar and accompanied him to the meeting. Malaysian intelligence has provided its photographs to the CIA. While U.S. officials can place Shakir at the meeting with the hijackers and several high-ranking al Qaeda operatives, they do not know whether Shakir participated actively. (Also present at the meeting were Hambali, al Qaeda's top man in South Asia, and Khallad, later identified as the mastermind of the attack on the USS Cole.) The meeting concluded on January 8, 2000. Shakir reported to work at the airport on January 9 and January 10, and then never again. Khalid al Mihdhar and Nawaz al Hazmi also disappeared briefly, then flew from Bangkok, Thailand, to Los Angeles on January 15, 2000.

Shakir, the Iraqi-born facilitator, would be arrested six days after the September 11 attacks by authorities in Doha, Qatar. According to an October 7, 2002, article by Newsweek's Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman, "A search of Shakir's apartment in Doha, the country's capital, yielded a treasure trove, including telephone records linking him to suspects in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and Project Bojinka, a 1994 Manila plot to blow up civilian airliners over the Pacific Ocean." (Isikoff, it should be noted, has been a prominent skeptic of an Iraq-al Qaeda connection.)

Shakir had contact information for a lot of bad people. As noted, one was a Kuwaiti, Ibrahim Suleiman, whose fingerprints were found on the bombmaking manuals U.S. authorities allege were used in preparation for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Suleiman was convicted of perjury and deported to Jordan. Another was Musab Yasin, the brother of 1993 Trade Center bomber Abdul Rahman Yasin. Yet another was Zahid Sheikh Mohammed, brother of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the September 11 attacks, now in U.S. custody. Shakir also had an old number for Taba Investments, an al Qaeda front group. It was the number long used by Mahmdouh Mahmud Salim, the highest-ranking Iraqi member of al Qaeda. According to testimony from al Qaeda informants, Salim maintained a good relationship with Saddam's intelligence service.

Despite all of this, the Qatari authorities released Shakir shortly after they arrested him. On October 21, 2001, Shakir flew to Amman, Jordan, where he hoped to board a plane to Baghdad. But authorities in Jordan arrested him for questioning. Shakir was held in a Jordanian prison for three months without being charged, prompting Amnesty International to write the Jordanian government seeking an explanation. The CIA questioned Shakir and concluded that he had received training in counter-interrogation techniques. Shortly after Shakir was detained, Saddam's government began to pressure Jordanian intelligence--with a mixture of diplomatic overtures and threats--to release Shakir. They got their wish on January 28, 2002. He is believed to have returned promptly to Baghdad.

I have discussed Shakir with nine U.S. government officials--policymakers and intelligence officials alike. The timeline above represents the consensus view. Two weeks before the 9/11 Commission's final report was released to the public, the Senate Select Intelligence Committee released its own evaluation of the intelligence on Iraq. The Senate report added to the Shakir story.
"The first connection to the [9/11] attack involved Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, an Iraqi national, who facilitated the travel of one of the September 11 hijackers to Malaysia in January 2000. [Redacted.] A foreign government service reported that Shakir worked for four months as an airport facilitator in Kuala Lumpur at the end of 1999 and beginning of 2000. Shakir claimed he got this job through Raad al-Mudaris, an Iraqi Embassy employee. [Redacted.] Another source claimed that al-Mudaris was a former IIS [Iraqi Intelligence Service] officer. The CIA judged in "Iraqi Support for Terrorism," however, that al-Mudaris' [redacted] that the circumstances surrounding the hiring of Shakir for this position did not suggest it was done on behalf of the IIS."
A note about that last sentence: The Senate committee report is a devastating indictment of the CIA's woefully inadequate collection of intelligence on Iraq, and its equally flawed analysis. It is of course possible that the CIA's judgment about al Mudaris is correct, but the bulk of the report inspires no confidence that it is. Consider the three new facts in this brief summary. One, Shakir himself told interrogators that an Iraqi embassy employee got him the job that allowed him to help the hijacker(s). Two, that Iraqi embassy employee was Raad al Mudaris. Three, another source identified al Mudaris as former Iraqi Intelligence.

All of this information was known to the U.S. intelligence community months before the 9/11 Commission completed its investigation. And yet none of it appeared in the final report. Two footnotes are the sum total of what the 9/11 Commission had to say about Ahmed Hikmat Shakir. Here is the more substantive, footnote 49 to Chapter 6, on page 502 of the 567-page report:
"Mihdhar was met at the Kuala Lumpur airport by Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, an Iraqi national. Reports that he was a lieutenant colonel in the Iraqi Fedayeen turned out to be incorrect. They were based on a confusion of Shakir's identity with that of an Iraqi Fedayeen colonel with a similar name, who was later (in September 2001) in Iraq at the same time Shakir was in police custody in Qatar."
The report is sourced to a briefing from the CIA's counterterrorism center and a story in the Washington Post. And that's it. Readers of the 9/11 Commission report who bothered to study the footnotes might wonder who Shakir was, what he was doing with a 9/11 hijacker in Malaysia, and why he was ever "in police custody in Qatar." They might also wonder why the report, while not addressing those questions, went out of its way to provide information about who he was not. Such readers are still wondering.

There is no doubt the 9/11 Commission had this information at its disposal. On the very day it released its final report, commissioner John Lehman told me that Shakir's many connections to al Qaeda and Saddam's regime suggested something more than random chance. So how is it that the Senate Select Intelligence Committee report contains a substantive account of Shakir's mysterious contribution to the 9/11 plot, while the 9/11 Commission report--again, released two weeks later--simply ignores it?

We now know even more about Shakir's Iraqi embassy contact, Raad al Mudaris. The post-Saddam Iraqi government launched its own, secret investigation of al Mudaris and his activities. Al Mudaris was a "local employee" of the Iraqi embassy in Kuala Lumpur. That is, he was an Iraqi already living in Malaysia when he began working officially for the embassy. Although Shakir named him as his Iraqi embassy contact and another source noted his affiliation with the Iraqi Intelligence Service, the U.S. government never arrested al Mudaris. He continued his nominal employment at the Iraqi embassy in Kuala Lumpur even after the Iraq war, outliving the regime that had employed him. He left that position early last fall, shortly after he was named publicly in the Senate Select Intelligence Committee report. A senior Iraqi government official tells The Weekly Standard that al Mudaris still lives in Malaysia, a free man.

BY THE END OF LAST WEEK, the demands for more information on Able Danger had reached fever pitch. The Pentagon claimed to have launched an aggressive investigation into the project. 9/11 Commission co-chairman Thomas Kean was demanding more information on Able Danger from the National Security Council. And Senator Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, fired off a hard-hitting letter to FBI director Robert Mueller demanding answers to a series of questions about the Pentagon unit and its interactions with the FBI.

Answers about Able Danger would be nice, but it is surely long past time for answers on Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, Abdul Rahman Yasin, and Musab Yasin. The 9/11 Commission itself and other relevant bodies should reexamine Shakir's role in the 9/11 plot and his connections to the 1993 World Trade Center plotters. The Bush administration should move quickly to declassify all of the intelligence the U.S. government possesses on Shakir and the Yasin brothers. The Senate and House intelligence committee should demand answers on the three Iraqis from the CIA, the DIA, and the FBI.

Here are some of the questions they might ask:
* Ahmed Hikmat Shakir was arrested in Doha, Qatar, just six days after the 9/11 attacks. How was he apprehended so quickly? Was the CIA monitoring his activities? What did the 9/11 Commission know about this arrest? And why wasn't it included in the 9/11 Commission's final report?

* Who identified Shakir's Iraqi embassy contact, Raad al Mudaris, as former Iraqi Intelligence? Is the source credible? If not, why not?

* Have other detainees been asked about Ahmed Hikmat Shakir? If so, what have they said?

* What do the former employees of the Iraqi embassy in Malaysia tell us about Ahmed Hikmat Shakir and Raad al Mudaris?

* Has anyone from the U.S. government interviewed Raad al Mudaris? If so, how does he explain his activities?

* Have the names Ahmed Hikmat Shakir and Raad al Mudaris surfaced in any of the documents captured in postwar Iraq from the Iraqi Intelligence headquarters in Baghdad?

* How long was the phone call between Ahmed Hikmat Shakir and the safehouse shortly before the 1993 World Trade Center attack?

* Does the U.S. government have other indications that Ahmed Hikmat Shakir and the 1993 World Trade Center bombers were in contact, either before or after that attack?

* Vice President Dick Cheney has spoken publicly about documents that indicate Abdul Rahman Yasin was provided safe haven and financing upon his return to Iraq in 1993. The FBI is blocking declassification of those documents, despite the fact that Yasin is on the FBI Most Wanted Terrorist list. Why?

* Before Operation Iraqi Freedom, Abdul Rahman Yasin, Musab Yasin, and Ahmed Hikmat Shakir were all believed to be in Iraq. Where are they today?
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Syria-Lebanon-Iran
Iran is the #1 state sponsor of terrorism
2005-04-28
The U.S. State Department says in a new report that Iran was the "most active" state sponsor of terrorism last year, putting the Tehran government atop a group of six countries cited in the department's annual report on terrorism that remain subject to U.S. sanctions.

The U.S. government also released new figures indicating a large amount of terrorist activity worldwide in 2004 but officials insisted it did not mean a sharp increase from previous years.

The State Department report, issued yesterday, says Iran continues to use terrorism as an instrument of state policy, most notably in anti-Israeli activities.

The report says Iran provided funding, safe haven, training, and weapons for Lebanon-based Hezbollah and Palestinian terrorist groups Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command.

State Department counselor Philip Zelikow told reporters of a range of alleged pro-terrorist activities by the Iranian regime.

"Iran and Syria are of special concern for their direct, open and prominent role in sponsoring Hezbollah and Palestinian terrorist groups, for their unhelpful actions in Iraq, and, in Iran's case, the unwillingness to bring to justice senior Al-Qaeda members detained in 2003."

Iran in the past has not denied offering moral and political support to groups like Hezbollah and Hamas, but has said it did not provide material aid to them. It regularly accuses Washington of sponsoring state terrorism by Israel against Palestinians.

In addition to Iran and Syria, the countries on the U.S. terrorism list are Cuba, North Korea, Sudan, and Libya. The State Department report says Sudan and Libya would remain on the list despite taking "significant steps" to cooperate in the global war on terrorism in 2004. Iraq was dropped from the list in October.

The list requires the U.S. government to control sales of items with military and civilian applications, limits U.S. aid, and requires Washington to vote against loans from international financial institutions.

Overall in 2004, Zelikow cited improving international cooperation on counterterrorism measures and said "we are winning the war on terrorism." But he warned against complacency and noted the attacks in Beslan, Russia, and Madrid highlight the struggles that remain.

"Terrorism remains a global threat from which no nation is immune, despite ongoing improvements in U.S. homeland security, our campaigns against insurgents and terrorists, and the deepening counterterrorism cooperation among the nations of the world, international terrorism continued to pose a significant threat to the United States and its partners in 2004," Zelikow said.

This year's report was released amid controversy over allegations the State Department planned to exclude statistics to avoid criticism of the effectiveness of antiterror measures.

The administration decided that the new National Counterterrorism Center would release the statistics. The center said there were 651 terrorist attacks worldwide in 2004 that killed 1,907 people. That compares with State Department figures announced in 2004 showing 208 attacks that caused 625 deaths in 2003.

In Iraq, a comparison of the figures shows 22 terrorist incidents in 2003 increased to 201 in 2004 and the number of killed rose from 117 in 2003 to 554 in 2004.

But U.S. officials said the increase is mainly due to more thorough methods used to compile data on terrorist attacks.

The acting director of the counterterrorism center, John Brennan, told reporters it is incorrect to measure two sets of figures compiled through much different means.

"It does not necessarily represent a sharp increase in the number of terrorist attacks," Brennan said. "What's the sharp increase is in the number of incidents being reported now annually, as a result of much more rigorous research and identification of all these incidents."

The report said that Al-Qaeda remained the primary terrorist threat to the United States despite success in arresting several top leaders and weakening its operational capability.
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Home Front: WoT
9/11 Commission Noticed That US Border Controls Are a Joke
2004-09-11
From National Review OnLine, an article by K. Lloyd Billingsley, editorial director of the Pacific Research Institute.
... 9/11 and Terrorist Travel: Staff Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United States was released on August 21, a Saturday and the same day the 9/11 Commission disbanded. In a strange disclaimer, executive director Philip Zelikow says the report "does not necessarily reflect" the views of the commissioners. .... 9/11 and Terrorist Travel confirms that government ignorance, incompetence, and arrogance facilitated Islamic terrorists in their quest to murder Americans. ....

All 19 of the hijacker applications were incomplete in some way, with data fields left blank and questions not fully answered. Every application should have been round-filed. Yet U.S. officials approved 22 of the 23 hijacker visa applications. Of the 15 Saudis, four got their visas after the creation of the Visa Express Program in June 2001. Eight other conspirators tried to get visas during the course of the plot. Three succeeded, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11. Mushabib al Hamlan, one of the other two, did not participate. Mohamed al Kahtani, the other, ran into an inspector with Army experience, who thought Kahtani acted like a "hit man" and refused him entry. This unnamed inspector is one of the rare heroes of this report, but readers will get the feeling that many others would have waved Kahtani through.

The 9/11 crew knew how to work the ropes and beat a system so porous it doubtless reinforced their conviction that they operated under divine guidance. They received assistance from three illegal Salvadorans, who helped four 9/11 operatives use fraudulent documentation to obtain Virginia identification documents. That vignette should help dispel the notion that massive illegal immigration carries no negative consequences.
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