Timing is everything. The US President announced killing of Osama bin Laden just as Wikileaks completed its publication of Guantanamo files. Was it coincidence? If not, what was the connection?

An answer to this question is directly connected with the cross and double cross accusations exchanged in the murky world where the intelligence services meet mainstream media.

Publication of the US secret papers, the Guantanamo Files, was done almost simultaneously by two competing media groups.

• One was the Wikileaks of Julian Assange and their partners The Washington Post, The Daily Telegraph, the French Le Monde.
• Another one was The New York Times, The Guardian, the Israeli Haaretz.

The Guardian said of the files: “They were obtained by the New York Times, who shared them with the Guardian, which is publishing extracts today, having redacted information which might identify informants. The New York Times says the files were made available to it not by Wikileaks, but “by another source on the condition of anonymity”.

Haaretz made more of it: “A few media outlets, including The New York Times, the Guardian and Haaretz, obtained the documents from an independent source without the help of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who is under house arrest in Britain awaiting his appeal not to be extradited to Sweden, where he faces charges of rape and sexual assault.” The Guardian’s David Leigh twitted “double-crossing Assange!”

Now we’ll give you the story behind the story: who crossed and double crossed whom, which information was redacted and how did it lead to OBL?

In the beginning, the source was one; allegedly Private First Class Manning or whoever it was who got it and transferred to the Wikileaks of Julian Assange. The entire file is still far from being published – a big part of it was encrypted and uploaded as Julian Assange’s Insurance file. Assange published two tranches of that: the War Diary: Afghanistan War Logs and War Diary: Iraq War Logs. He prepared publication of the third tranche: a huge collection of the State Department cables (Cablegate: 250,000 US Embassy Diplomatic Cables) in the Guardian.

At that point, the data river forked. The treasure trove was copied by a Wikileaks German employee,Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who went AWOL after this appropriation. Domscheit-Bergmade a deal with David Leigh of the Guardian which then cold-shouldered Assange, declared the deal ‘void’, and shared the data with Bill Keller, editor of the NY Times. They published the cables after redacting them, or should we say “censoring” – removing everything the secret services demanded to remove. We wrote about it at length here in CounterPunch.

Julian Assange succeeded in regaining some lost ground: he established new partnerships, with the Daily Telegraph and others. The cables were being published all the time. And then Assange learned that the Guardian and theNew York Times planned to publish the Guantanamo files. There was no time to lose: in a few days, the Wikileaks team prepared the files and began to upload. So did the competitors, possessing the Domscheit-Berg appropriated copy. This was the double-cross.

Julian Assange succeeded in regaining some lost ground: he established new partnerships, with the Daily Telegraph and others. The cables were being published all the time. And then Assange learned that the Guardian and the New York Times planned to publish the Guantanamo files. There was no time to lose: in a few days, the Wikileaks team prepared the files and began to upload. So did the competitors, possessing the Domscheit-Berg appropriated copy. This was the double-cross per Leigh.

The Guardian and the New York Times have a big and skilful staff, a lot of research, rich archives. But they decided to play ball with the secret services of their countries, redacting information which might identify informants. What a hutzpah! Sometimes, the identity of “informants” is more important than the information.

For instance in the file of Adil Hadi al Jaz’iri Leigh and Keller removed the name of the informant

To their misfortune and to our advantage, at this time the Wikileaks and the Guardian/NY Times were not a loving couple but two competing enterprises. And the Wikileaks published this file in full, warts and all. 
Here is the name in full:

Abu Zubaydah the informer was the subject of intensive research, available here that makes clear: this unfortunate man was tortured by the CIA, with permission of  US medics and Bush administration, to the point of the total collapse of his personality. He was one of the High Value Detainees; all of them suffered tortures beyond our ability to comprehend. Information they provided was not only unacceptable in court, it was of nil value because they said everything their tormentors wanted in order to gain a moment of peace.

Andy Worthington wrote: Since then, more and more compelling evidence has emerged to demonstrate that Abu Zubaydah was indeed nothing more than a “safehouse keeper” with mental health problems, who “claimed to know more about al-Qaeda and its inner workings than he really did”… “The United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered.” Further confirmation was also provided that his torture yielded no significant information and led only to vast amounts of the intelligence agencies’ time being wasted on false leads. A year ago, summing up the results of Zubaydah’s torture, a former intelligence official stated, bluntly, “We spent millions of dollars chasing false alarms.”

Removal of his name by the Leigh-Keller gang was not “caring about informers”, it was caring about the torturers.

However the most important redactions by Leigh and Keller were directly dictated by the US intelligence services. The name of Nashwan Abd Al Razzaq Abd Al Baqi, or by another name, Abd al Hadi al Iraqi or by his number IZ-10026 was edited away from the file of Abu al-Libi (US9LY-010017DP) and elsewhere. This file is available in a redacted version of the Guardian and in the uncut version of Wikileaks. Comparison shows to what extent all the traces of al Iraqi were removed. It was not connected to “caring about informers”, for al Libi was dead, having allegedly committed suicide in a Libyan jail just before the arrival of the US Ambassador in Tripoli. The file of al Iraqi is missing in all databases; he was captured in 2005 and kept in various secret prisons, until transferred to Guantanamo where he is detained now.

Careful reading of the file shows that al-Libi was connected with al Iraqi since October 2002. In 2003, OBL stated al Libi would be the official messenger between OBL and others in Pakistan. In mid-2003, al Libi moved his family to Abbottabad, Pakistan and worked between Abbottabad and Peshawar. He maintained contact with al Iraqi.

And we know that OBL was found and killed in Abbottabad – just as this publication hit the pages of the newspapers. So the trail to Abbottabad was known to the American services at least since 2005, when al-Libi, another Abbottabad dweller, was captured.

What we do not know is the nature of the contacts between the US authorities and  OBL.

What we do know is that David Leigh and Bill Keller tried to hid it from their readers. Their redacting of the Guantanamo files, like their redacting of the Cablegate, had nothing to do with “saving informers”.

David Leigh claimed that Assange  “double-crossed” the paper by distributing the Gitmo files to various “right-wing” news organisations, meaning the conservative Daily Telegraph. This is rich. “Left” and “right” has very little meaning nowadays, after Blair and Clinton. What is important is the position on wars and overseas interventions, susceptibility to  Secret Service meddling, subservience to the priorities of the state.

In France, right-wing Marine Le Pen stands against foreign interventions in Libya and Côte d’Ivoire , against payments to bankers, against the president, while left-wing Bernard Henri Levy supports wars and interventions, loves bankers, is a friend of the right-wing president Sarkozy.

In England, the Guardian is the leading newspaper for calls to war. Libya, Syria – the Guardian wants them bombed. Afghanistan, Serbia, Iraq, – the Guardian wanted them to be invaded. It is just the package is different: instead of right-wing jingoism, the Guardian served the neo-colonialist adventurism under delicate sauce of humanitarian intervention. The Guardian leads on hypocrisy. The Guardian is not the newspaper of the left; it is the problem of the left. The case of Guantanamo files proves that the Guardian redacted the most vital information as told by the CIA.

And Osama? What about Osama bin Laden? Now we know that the US knew of his whereabouts; they knew of the trail, they asked Leigh and Keller to remove relevant references. Why didn’t they capture him or kill him earlier?

OBL’s organisation did what the US authorities wanted to be done. They fought the Russians and ruined Afghanistan. They conspired and fought against Hezbollah, slaughtered Shias in Iraq, undermined Qaddafi, hated Hamas and Iran. They supported ethnic cleansing of ‘infidels’ in Chechnya and in the Balkans. They never ever attacked Israel: they preserved their vigor for Sayyed Nasrallah. Like a dreadful beast nurtured in the CIA secret labs, only once they reportedly rebelled against their merciless creator – on 9/11. Osama was greater than, but similar to such American friends as Jonas Savimbi of Angola or Shamil Basayev of Chechnya, and hopefully after his death his organization will vanish like Unita and Basayev did.

The Guantanamo files reveal utter wretchedness of Osama’s unlucky followers. With exception of a few dozen close associates, the rest of the prisoners made a wrong choice ever listening to him. They (especially foreigners) were idealists, who wanted to establish the Kingdom of God upon the earth; they were encouraged by the US to flock to Afghanistan to fight the Commies.  The majority of them never even had a chance to hold the gun. They, the foreigners in Afghanistan and Pakistan were sold for bounty to the Americans as fast as possible. They paid for this by years of torture. And now they are about to learn that their supreme chief was safeguarded by the same Americans who tortured them!

But in the mind of the Muslim masses OBL will be remembered (justly or not) as the architect of the only successful response of the oppressed to the Empire on its own soil. And that ensured him greatness of his own and a place in history.

The post US Knew Where Osama Was Since 2005 appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

Ex-U.S. Sen. Mike Gravel is likewise agitating to place initiatives on the 2012 ballot in California and other states mandating a thorough investigation of the 9/11 disaster, including alleged manipulation of the country’s air security system just prior to the disaster
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Here in San Diego, the so-called San Diego 9/11 Truth Group – one of the most hardcore of the 9/11 conspiracy organizations – claims its monthly meetings in the San Diego area community of Hillcrest routinely attract up to 200 seekers, reflecting a steady increase in attendance in the last several years.

The 9/11 conspiracy push has been dismissed by both liberals and conservatives as a preposterous set of scenarios conjured on a mythic scale.

Some leftists have compared the campaign to the workings of the Christic Institute, which in the 1980s charged that the U.S. government had for decades sponsored a secret team of operatives involved in everything from the murders of journalists to the bombings of dissidents in such countries as Nicaragua. Never mind that a 1985 lawsuit inititated by the institute under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act was dismissed by a judge prior to trial, with the organization ordered to pay defendants about $1 million in damages.

However, such considerations have hardly fazed the determination of a core group of 9/11 true believers dedicated to proving that traitors within the federal government colluded to bring on the momentous disaster with the intention of fostering heightened world tensions and empowering various elite economic groups, such as the vast U.S. military-industrial complex.

“Our message is gaining traction,” said Dwain Deets, a retired flight research engineer at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration who now edits the 9/11 Investigator newspaper.

Deets, a member of the San Diego 9/11 Truth Group as well as the liberal Progressive Democrats For America, will be among the guests on Ventura’s “Conspiracy Theory” 9/11 segment next month.

He stood last Thursday in front of a sprawling 9/11 exhibit on a walkway near North Harbor Drive during a Veterans Day celebration.

The impromptu setting included a dozen or so booths manned by members of Veterans for Peace and kindred groups and entrepreneurs.

A block away, a parade honoring U.S. servicemen featured military marching bands and politicians like liberal Rep. BoB Filner (D-Calif.).

Deets pointed to oversized photographs mounted on easels depicting Building 7’s demise on 9/11 in second-by-second sequence – a train of events he said indicates that the skyscraper was bombed from the inside.

The National Institute of Science and Technology “had recordings of explosions in the vicinity (of the structure), but withheld this evidence until well after issuing their final report,” Deets claims, adding that the account did not even mention the possibility of explosions.

Sceptics of the 9/11 conspiracy line have been especially critical of accusations that longtime Republican officials like Cheney could have been a part of such widespread intrigue involving hundreds of connivers.

Indeed, news of such subterfuge would likely destroy the conservative movement for good, as well as bring down a long list of military contractors and associated firms and interests.

Deets nevertheless noted that the World Trade Center housed such tenants as the Department of Defense, the Securities and Exchange Commission and various other federal agencies. “The SEC was investigating Enron,” he suggested, emphasizing that the company would have benefitted from the World Trade Center carnage.

Deets stressed that the 9/11 coverup is being facilitated not only by Republicans, but by their Democratic counterparts.

Democrats “are stonewalling any investigation” in 9/11, he said. People attending the Veterans Day festivities who walked by the 9/11 showcase displayed a mix of emotions, from bafflement to mild agreement, as they viewed the hazy, black and white photographs of the deadly onslaught.

“Maybe there’s something to it … Nothing would surprise me these days,” said Marita Bardoni, whose brother recently returned from a two-year military stint in Iraq. “It is odd that everything has changed for the worse since it (the 9/11 attack) happened.”

But World War II veteran William Hemmings was having none of it.

“If any of this were true, Cheney would be lynched from the Washington Monument in a minute,” Hemmings said. “A conspiracy supposedly this big could never be kept secret. Somebody would have stepped forward by now.”

Frank Green is a veteran journalist and lives in the San Diego area. He can be reached at fjkbgreen@cox.net

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The phone call from my sister, telling me that Chase was killed in Iraq, is among the brutal.

My nephew, Chase Comley, died a little over five years ago. He enlisted in the military because he believed our freedoms were in jeopardy, a message George Bush gaveled into the American psyche after 19 hijackers used planes as weapons to attack US symbols of power on 9/11.

This week, we mark the ninth anniversary of that turning point, the day that invokes images of death and destruction, and the date that heralded our post-9/11 world with its increased militarism/imperialism resulting in more death and destruction, mainstream media failure, the Patriot Act, a surveillance state, torture, indefinite detention, military tribunals, corporatism, economic collapse, and Islamophobia.

I have just watched 9/11 Press for Truth at the urging of Jon Gold, a friend and fellow member of Peace of the Action. Gold has worked diligently to bring justice for 9/11 families.

Less than two minutes into the film, George Bush says: “Today our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom, came under attack.”

Members of the Bush Administration tell us there were no warnings. Condi Rice states: “No one could have imagined them taking a plane, slamming it into the Pentagon … into the World Trade Center, using planes as a missile.”

We learn, however, that 14 nations alerted our intelligence agencies to the threats, and that on the eve of the event, Bush stayed at a resort whose roof was mounted with ground-to-air missiles, a safeguard never before taken.

The film navigates tragedy, fear, courage, hope, perseverance, strength, anticipation, disappointment, anger, disbelief, and futility. Its heroes are those who scratch and claw for honesty. They are the “Jersey Girls,” Lorie Van Auken, Patty Casazza, Mindy Kleinberg, and Kristen Breitweiser, four women whose husbands perished in the towers. There are other heroes, of course, but the Jersey widows, bound by heartbreak, researched, questioned, attempted to connect dots, and walked the halls of Congress. Eventually, they held a rally in DC to unite 9/11 families, form a larger group, and push for a formal investigation. Frustrated by the Bush Administration’s position and a lack of support from the public, they made the decision to open their private anguish to the press. Their efforts, finally, forced George Bush to authorize an independent commission to investigate 9/11.

Patty Casazza uses the word adversaries when she talks about the Bush Administration. It is not an antonym for hero. Villain is, but I’ll stick with Casazza’s noun. George Bush and Dick Cheney resisted the investigation of 9/11 and, thus, became adversaries of honesty and justice. Recall that they insisted on a not-under-oath tandem testimony.

Many readers have written and asked me to address 9/11 as an “inside job.” That’s not my intention. I have no knowledge to support grand conspiracy ideologies. My comprehension resides with family grief and an acknowledgement that the 9/11 Commission was a contrivance that failed to provide a thorough, transparent, and factual assessment.

Evidence can be manipulated or ignored. An investigator can look at what he or she wants and shift an examination in any direction. Even down a road leading nowhere.

A week after my nephew was killed, I poured my feelings into an essay. I was naïve, then, and believed my article might prevent other families from hearing the words my brother received: “We regret to inform you.”

The families who were unwilling to accept the government’s account of September 11, needed assurance that tragedies like theirs would never be repeated. They expected to find answers that would make the world safer for their children.

Their questions led to more questions:

Why did it take two hours for standard air defense operating procedures to be put in place when there was an obvious attack on the United States?

Why, when George Bush had been briefed (August 6, 2001) that Osama bin Laden was determined to strike within the United States, did he do nothing to prevent an attack?

Why, when the north tower was hit, were people told to remain in the building and why weren’t those in the south tower immediately evacuated?

Why was then Attorney General John Ashcroft told to avoid commercial air travel in the days before 9/11?

Why was Henry Kissinger selected to chair the 9/11 Commission when he had an obvious conflict of interest—one exposed by Lorie Van Auken when she asked if his consulting firm had any Saudi clients named bin Laden?

Why did the mainstream media fail to accomplish what Paul Thompson achieved when he compiled an online timeline of reports and articles that became the basis for his book, The Terror Timeline, whose content is the foundation for the film?

Why did the United States invade Afghanistan?

Why did the US allow Osama bin Laden to escape from Tora Bora?

Why were al-Qa’ida and Taliban members flown from Afghanistan to Pakistan?

What role did Pakistan play in 9/11, and why did the US ally with this country?

Why did the chief of Pakistani intelligence (ISI) order Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, a man who was both a member of al-Qa’ida and the ISI, to wire $100,000 to Mohammad Atta?

Why did members of the Bush Administration meet with that same chief of Pakistani intelligence in the weeks and months prior to 9/11?

Why, given all that was exposed by Paul Thompson, did the 9/11 Commission find that the events of September 11, 2001 were the result of a “failure of imagination”?

Americans need to know what happened that day. Why? Not just because we owe it to those who died and to their families but, also, because every single day, our country commits acts of unspeakable horror in the name of 9/11.

Journalist Ron Suskind wrote an article, “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” for the October 17, 2004 New York Times Magazine, in which he said:

In the summer of 2002 … I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

This is astonishing thought and language. It underscores the hubris of a power-mad administration. And it’s a glimpse into a mindset that, perhaps, allowed terrorists, “determined to strike within the United States,” an opportunity. The Bush Administration was, at the least, negligent. In a very deliberate way. The warnings were there and they were not obscure.

As George Bush concluded his address on 9/11, he said, “This is a day when all Americans from every walk of life unite in our resolve for justice and peace.”

Justice has not been served. Peace seems far from our grasp. The 9/11 Commission was a farce, conducted by “history’s actors,” those aligned with the distortion that: “… when we act, we create our own reality.”

This created “reality” promotes the fear necessary to prevent critical thinking at a time when a premium must be placed on “the judicious study of discernable reality.” Let us not be told what to think, what to believe. We need a REAL, independent criminal investigation of 9/11, justice for the families, justice for families whose troops were sent to avenge a disaster that possibly could have been averted, and justice for those who have died, their lands destroyed, in the countries we invaded in a revenge frenzy.

Please watch the movie, 9/11 Press for Truth, read Paul Thompson’s comprehensive book, The Terror Timeline, and never forget the words often attributed to Martin Luther King, Jr., an admirer of Theodore Parker, the 19th century abolitionist and Unitarian minister, who originally spoke them: “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one … But from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice.”

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