But this week, land surveyors happened upon it — a piece of a plane’s landing gear, apparently belonging to one of the two jets that slammed into the twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001, the police said.

On Wednesday, around 11 a.m., the surveyors called 911 to say they had found a piece of damaged machinery. What the police discovered was a component about 5 feet high, 3 feet wide and about 17 inches in depth. It was lodged in the narrow gap between 50 Murray Street, a residential building, and 51 Park Place, which is empty. There, it had been “out of sight and out of mind for over a decade,” the Police Department’s chief spokesman, Paul J. Browne, said on Friday.

That area is inaccessible from the street, Mr. Browne said, adding that a tiny door opens into the corridor from a neighboring building.

“The odds of it entering that space at exactly that angle that would permit it to squeeze in there,” he said, “it had to come in at almost precisely the right angle.”

Investigators are working under the assumption that the piece is “a portion of the landing gear of one of the two planes destroyed on 9/11,” Mr. Browne added.

He noted that the artifact bore a Boeing serial number and that personnel from the Police Department’s aviation unit had identified it as part of a landing gear. He also noted that it was found near where other wreckage from the jetliners was found shortly after the attacks.

Speaking later on Friday, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly did not completely rule out the possibility that the component had been lowered to the spot where it was discovered (some rope was entwined with it).

On Sept. 11, the landing gear assembly of one of the planes crashed through the roof of 45-47 Park Place, then a Burlington Coat Factory and now used as a prayer space for Muslims.

Park Place is about three blocks north of the World Trade Center site, and 51 Park Place is next to 45-47 Park Place and included in a plan by a developer to create a mosque and community center. The developer, Sharif El-Gamal, said in a statement that his company, Soho Properties, was cooperating with the authorities “to make sure this piece of evidence is removed with care as quickly and effectively as possible.”

The police secured the area as they would a crime scene, Mr. Browne said. It is possible that the medical examiner’s office will decide to sift through the soil there in search of human remains, he said.

Mr. Browne said he could not remember the last time a large piece of wreckage from the attack was discovered.

On Park Place, the police presence attracted a few curious passers-by. But the area bustled with the normal Friday ebb-and-flow of commuters. Men in suits sipped beers inside the nearby Dakota Roadhouse, seemingly unaware of the action outside.

Van Vanable, 63, an iron worker, said the discovery of the artifact was a reminder that healing “is an ongoing process.” Still wearing a red hard hat, Mr. Vanable had just finished a shift installing paneling at 1 World Trade Center, he said, adding that more than a decade ago, he had spent months helping to clean up the wreckage at ground zero.

Julie Turkewitz contributed reporting.

The post More 9/11 Airplane Debris Discovered appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

With an uncharacteristic lack of journalistic and historical integrity, Maddow points to the 9/11 Commission Report as fact while making absolutely no mention of the Jersey Girls who were also widows of victims and the primary motivating force behind the creation of the 9/11 Commission Report due to the inadequacy of the official account.

The post Rachel Maddow Trashes 9/11 Truth appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

In another email 10 hours later, Burton indicates that the body was in fact buried at sea:

Down & dirty done, He already sleeps with the fish….

** Fred’s Note: Although I don’t really give a rats ass, it seems to me
that by dropping the corpse in the ocean, the body will come back to haunt
us….gotta be violating some sort of obscure heathen religious rule that
will inflame islam? I was sleeping thru that class at Langley.

The US Govt needs to make body pics available like the MX’s do, with OBL’s
pants pulled down, to shout down the lunatics like Alex Jones and Glenn
Beck.

Did Fred Burton really know as much as he seemed to want his co-workers to believe?

The post Stratfor Emails: Bin Laden Brought to US Before Sea Burial appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

The secretive program was federally funded, with the NYPD using White House grants meant to target “drug trafficking” to spy of Muslim college students across the northeast, as well as to eavesdrop on conversations between “Muslim-looking” people in Newark, New Jersey grocery stores.

Kelly insisted the policy was in keeping with “what we know about the way radical Islam works,” and that politicians who had expressed concern about the privacy implications of mass surveillance based on presumptive religious beliefs were “pandering.”

A New York Times article reveals the climate of fear the policy has provoked among local Muslims, who fear being targeted by police even worse if they are caught discussing the policy with the news media. There remains hope that the policy will eventually be abandoned, but the current indications are that targeting innocent Muslims is a winning issue for those wanting to appear “tough on terror” and that means in the near term the policy may have gotten less secret, but no less aggressive.

The post NYPD Commissioner Uses 9/11 to Justify Mass Spying appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

The method of disposal of the Sept. 11 remains, which has not been previously disclosed, was limited to what the report said were “several portions of remains” that could not be identified from the Pentagon attack and the crash site in Shanksville, Pa. The report said the remains were cremated and placed in containers provided to a biomedical waste disposal contractor, who then incinerated them and put them in the landfill.

“We don’t think it should have happened,” John Abizaid, the retired general who led the panel, told reporters as he discussed the findings at the Pentagon.

The practice was also used for some unidentified remains of the nation’s war dead, a fact first disclosed late last year. The practice has since been stopped and the ashes are now put in urns and buried at sea.

The disclosure about the Sept. 11 victims came as the independent panel concluded that the mortuary, the entry point for the nation’s war dead, should have more oversight, training of employees and inspections. “These problems need to be corrected right away,” General Abizaid said.

The panel did not address a central issue in the scandal at the mortuary: whether the Air Force should have further disciplined three mortuary officials who had displayed what the Air Force termed “gross mismanagement” for losing body parts of two service members and then doing nothing to correct sloppy practices. The decision about what to do about the officials has been left to Michael Donley, the secretary of the Air Force, who has a news conference scheduled for later Tuesday.

The disclosure about the Sept. 11 victims’ remains came about only in passing, in a brief mention on Page 6 of the report and in a further brief mention in the report’s appendix. General Abizaid, who said his task had been to make recommendations and not investigate past practices, offered no detail about the disposal of the Sept. 11 victims’ remains beyond the sparse mentions in the report.

The panel, which was only asked to look into practices at the mortuary, found what it called a “lack of clear command authority and supervision, lack of command and technical oversight, unclear relationships among coordinating organizations” and other bureaucratic problems. Among other recommendations, it said that embalmers should have the most up-to-date training and suggested there be more of them.

In November, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta asked the panel to review practices at the mortuary after the Air Force made a public assessment of “gross mismanagement” at the mortuary and disclosed that the mortuary had lost body parts.

At that time the Air Force disciplined but did not fire three senior mortuary officials. Col. Robert H. Edmondson, the former commander of the Air Force Mortuary Affairs Operations Center, who left his position as part of a regular rotation last year, received a letter of reprimand, effectively ending any further promotions. Trevor Dean, Colonel Edmondson’s former deputy, and Quinton R. Keel, the former mortuary director, both civilians, were demoted and moved to lesser jobs at Dover, although not in the mortuary.

At the same time, a watchdog agency, the Office of Special Counsel, released a scathing report on the mortuary and said the three should have been fired. In a letter to the White House in November, Carolyn N. Lerner, the head of the office, said that Mr. Keel and Mr. Dean had exhibited a pattern of “negligence, misconduct and dishonesty” and that there had been a “failure of leadership” by Colonel Edmondson.

Last month, the Office of Special Counsel released another report saying that officials at the mortuary — it did not name them — had retaliated against four employees after the employees raised concerns about the mishandling of service members’ remains. In a 39-page report, the agency detailed what it called reprisals against the four employees over a 17-month period in 2009 and 2010.

The post 9/11 Victims Remains Dumped in Landfill appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

The low-ranking health department employees were punished for helping Dr Shakil Afridi, who was assigned by the CIA to set up a fake vaccination scheme in Abbottabad, ahead of the 3 May US military operation that found and killed the al-Qaida leader there.

In July last year, the Guardian revealed that Afridi was hired by the American spy agency, which was trying to establish whether Bin Laden was living inside a compound to which it had tracked an al-Qaida “courier”.

Afridi used unwitting local health visitors to go house to house to vaccinate Abbottabad residents for hepatitis B, with the aim of getting inside the suspected Bin Laden home and extracting DNA from one of his children. The al-Qaida leader had habitually lived with many members of his large family even while on the run. The scheme, apparently unsuccessful, was run in the weeks before the 3 May raid.

The fate of Afridi, who was arrested by the Pakistan military’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency in late May last year, and remains in their custody, has added to a break-down in relations between Washington and Islamabad. American officials are pressing Pakistan to free Afridi, to allow him to travel to the US, where he would be resettled. However, he faces possible treason charges at home for working for a foreign intelligence agency.

The sacked health workers would have known nothing of the true purpose of the vaccination programme. They include all the 15 of the women health workers employed in Nawa Sher, the district of Abbottabad where Bin Laden had lived, plus two more senior health officials in the town. Among the fired employees is a nurse known as Bakhto, whose full name is Mukhtar Bibi. She is believed to have got inside the bin Laden compound with the vaccination programme.

Afridi was a senior health official posted in a part of the tribal area, far from Abbottabad, which was way outside his jurisdiction. He travelled to Abbottabad and used the health workers there without the knowledge of the senior Abbottabad administration.

Zafeer Ahmed, in charge of health services for Abbottabad, said that the 17 were dismissed for breaking the rules.

“There was negligence as these workers did not have permission from the provincial government or the health department to work with Shakil Afridi,” said Ahmed. “I was ordered by the provincial government to take action against them.”

A provincial government inquiry into the affair is on-going and higher ranking health officials could be disciplined in future.

No Pakistani official has been held responsible for failing to detect Bin Laden’s presence in the country.

The sacked women health workers would be paid little but would probably have been dependent on government employment to make ends meet for their families.

The CIA scheme, as well as having grave consequences for Afridi, and now triggering the dismissal of health officials, has damaged vaccination programmes throughout Pakistan, including for polio, as it greatly added to wild rumours that the medicines are actually an American conspiracy to sterilise Pakistanis.

Afridi was earlier this month reportedly removed from his post, while his wife was separately dismissed from her government job, running a girls’ college in the north west.

In January this year, the former CIA chief, Leon Panetta, now the US Defence Secretary, publicly called for Afridi’s release, acknowledging his role for the first time in the hunt for Bin Laden. American officials believe that Afridi should be lauded for his services, not punished.

“I am very concerned about what the Pakistanis did with this individual [Afridi]. This was an individual who, in fact, helped provide intelligence that was very helpful with regard to this operation,” Panetta had said.

The post Health Workers Linked to CIA's bin Laden Kill Plot Fired appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

In defense of their monitoring of Muslim student associations (or “MSAs” in police parlance) NYPD spokesman Paul Brown gave the AP a list of 12 people who were arrested or convicted worldwide who were once members of MSAs. “As a result, the NYPD deemed it prudent to get a better handle on what was occurring at MSAs,” Browne told the outlet via email, and noted that the surveillance was conducted from 2006-2007.

But the whitewater rafting trip occurred in April of 2008, and was sponsored by a Muslim student association. 18 students went on the trip to upstate New York, and the undercover noted, “In addition to the regularly scheduled events (Rafting), the group prayed at least four times a day, and much of the conversation was spent discussing Islam and was religious in nature.” As the AP dutifully points out: “Praying five times a day is one of the core traditions of Islam.” Hmm, wasn’t that in a training video or something that the NYPD used?

“I see a violation of civil rights here,” the chaplain of the Muslim Student Association at Syracuse says. “Nobody wants to be on the list of the FBI or the NYPD or whatever. Muslim students want to have their own lives, their own privacy and enjoy the same freedoms and opportunities that everybody else has.”

NYPD Commissioner and Mayor Bloomberg have insisted that the NYPD doesn’t racially profile or spy on anyone who doesn’t deserve it: “We don’t do it ethnically, we do it geographically,” Kelly told the City Council at a hearing in October. Yet none of the reports prepared by the NYPD mention any of the students committing a crime. “It forces me to look around wherever I am now,” one of the students on the rafting trip says.

Below is a copy of a secret report on MSA’s conducted by the NYPD and obtained by the AP.

Nypd Msa Report

The post NYPD Spied on Muslims at Yale, Undercover on Rafting Trip appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

Gen. Keith Alexander, the director, provided his assessment in meetings at the White House and in other private sessions, according to people familiar with the gatherings. While he hasn’t publicly expressed his concerns about the potential for Anonymous to disrupt power supplies, he has warned publicly about an emerging ability by cyberattackers to disable or even damage computer networks.

Gen. Alexander’s warning signals a growing federal concern over the capabilities of Anonymous, a loose affiliation of so-called hacktivist computer programmers who have launched a raft of high-profile cyberassaults against U.S. government and corporate targets such as Visa Inc., MasterCard Inc. and eBay Inc.’s PayPal service.

So far, the attacks have primarily served to embarrass companies and organizations, and cybersecurity experts differ on the extent of the threat posed by Anonymous.

The group has never listed a power blackout as a goal, but some federal officials believe Anonymous is headed in a more disruptive direction. An attack on a network would be consistent with recent public claims and threats by the group. Last week, for instance, Anonymous announced a plan to shut down the Internet on March 31, which it calls Operation Global Blackout.

Experts consider the likelihood of an Internet blackout to be low. The Internet should be able to absorb the attack the group outlined, said Richard Bejtlich, chief security officer at computer-security company Mandiant. The announcement, however, shows the network’s intent to wage more destructive attacks.

Similarly, any attack by Anonymous directed at the power grid is likely to inflict limited damage but would be certain to sow alarm, especially if Anonymous took credit publicly.

Grid officials said their systems face regular attacks, and they devote tremendous resources to repelling invaders, whether from Anonymous or some other source. “The industry is engaged and stepping up widely to respond to emerging cyber threats,” said one electric-industry official. “There is a recognition that there are groups out there like Anonymous, and we are concerned, as are other sectors.”

Another industry official noted that the electric grid has a number of backup systems that allow utilities to restore power quickly if it is taken out by a cyberattack or other event.

Intelligence officials believe that, for now, the cyber threat to the power grid is relatively limited. The countries that could most quickly develop and use cyber means to destroy part of the grid—such as China and Russia—have little incentive to do it. Those who might have more incentive, like Iran or North Korea, don’t have the capability.

U.S. intelligence officials already have found what they say is evidence of Chinese and Russian cyberspies snooping in computer systems that run the electric grid, possibly in preparation for a conflict with the U.S. The governments of China and Russia have denied any involvement.

A stateless group like Anonymous doesn’t yet have that capability, officials say. But if the group’s members around the world developed or acquired it, an attack on the power grid would become far more likely, according to cybersecurity experts.

“It’s a real threat,” said James Lewis, a cybersecurity specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who is currently researching the group. “You want to occupy Wall Street? How about turn Wall Street off? Even for a day.”

Gen. Alexander’s discussions stemmed from a broader policy concern over how to deter adversaries in cyberspace, a former official said. Groups like Anonymous are particularly difficult to deter because they are, indeed, anonymous and don’t have clear interests that can be used to deter aggression in cyberspace in the way a country’s government would.

Other officials at the White House meeting, which was headed by John Brennan, deputy national security adviser, said it would take a little more time for Anonymous to obtain such a capability, closer to three to five years, the former official said. But all agreed it would likely be a threat in the next few years.

Possible scenarios discussed, the former official said, included one in which a foreign government developed the attack capability and outsourced it to a group like Anonymous, or if a U.S. adversary like al Qaeda hired hackers to mount a cyberattack.

That threat was described to lawmakers at a hearing last week. “A near-peer competitor [country] could give cyber malware capability to some fringe group,” said Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Some hacker, next thing you know, could be into our electrical grid. We have to get after this.”

White House spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said she couldn’t discuss details of internal deliberations, but she said the administration “has made cybersecurity a top priority, and we are working tirelessly to protect ourselves from the threats we face, whether they come from other nations, cyber criminals, or from stateless activist hacker groups.”

The NSA declined to comment.

The post NSA: Al Qaeda Might Hire Anonymous appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

The FBI says the operation was a “lengthy and extensive” one, and their agents pretended to be members of al-Qaeda, furnishing the arrested man with a phony suicide vest they had created and told him to attack Capitol Hill with it.

After receiving the FBI-created non-explosive vest, the man went to a local mosque to pray, and was arrested shortly thereafter on Constitution Avenue, not far from the Capitol building.

The FBI insisted that Congressmen were never in any danger from the manufactured plot, assuring everyone that it was “all very controlled.” Arrests in such “attacks” are fairly common. The FBI approaching someone, usually after an offhand comment made on Facebook, and then giving them fake explosives before arresting them, seems to be standard operating procedure.

The post FBI Arrests DC Muslim After Another Phony ‘Terror Plot’ appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

Wiki Editor Helps Reveal Pre-9/11 Mistakes

The post Slashdot: "Wiki Editor Helps Reveal Pre-9/11 CIA Mistakes" appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.