The Discerning Texan
All that is necessary for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing.
-- Edmund Burke
-- Edmund Burke
Thursday, January 19, 2006
Eye Opening Evidence in Timmerman's "Countdown to Crisis"
I have been reading Kenneth Timmerman's excellent book 'Countdown to Crisis: The Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran', and it is absolutely riveting. In particular, I locked in on a section in his chapter "Thunder" on 'The RAAD Plan', which basically makes a tremendous case that the Iranian leadership, notably Khamenei, planned and executed the explosion of TWA Flight 800, off of Long Island, on July 17, 1996, after a previous stopover in Athens, Greece. Remember that one, the plane that "just blew"?? The Clintons, in an election year, orchestrated a public release of information alleging that it was just a little problem with "gas in the fuel tank". Wrong. It appears not that this was a planned attack, by Iran against the United States.
Furthermore, Timmerman's book makes a compelling case that several intelligence agencies (among them the DIA and the CIA), were warned by an Iranian source in country who had access to Iranian intelligene agents--and passed on information to the Clinton administration that the mullahs has planned an impending attack on an American airliner. A few excerpts from this chapter (buy the book here: it will both alarm you (it completely shocked me...) and will simultaneoudly make you mad as hell at Bill Clinton. This to me is worse than anything having to do with Monica and Paula Jones. This is a possible cover-up at the highest levels, keeping the fact that this was indeed a terrorist strike, orchestrated by the government of Iran, against the US. And why? Because it was an election year! From the intel brought by one Homayoun Moghadam, an agent runner inside Iran:
..."One [internal Iranian] memo called for a campaign of 'strike' operations against the United States, 'to create maximum chaos and instability among the US leadership during the four months before the US presidential elections...'
[...] On June 10, 1996 -- two weeks before Dhahran--Homayoun [the inside source] told me that he had received information from a source called "Elvis" within the Revolutionary Guards Protection and Intelligence Department. Iran was planning to hijact a US civilian airliner.
[...] Homayoun's source said the attack would be carried out by Lebanese surrogates--not directly by Iranians-- and had been approved by Rafshanjani in person as a "warning" to the US government. Elvis believed the operation would originate in Greece or somewhere else in the Mediterranean. [which it did...]
The FBI interviewed Homayoun on June 20, 1996. [...]
On June 24, I communicated the same information to the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency's Middle East and terrorism policy support team at the Pentagon. He did not follow up on the information. Two days later came the bombing at the Khobar Towers. Within days, US officials I interviewed were already talking about communications intercepts that clearly indicated Iran's responsibility for that attack.
On July 11, Homayoun phoned me, all excited. He had just received an urgent communication from Elvis, saying that the attack on a US civilian airliner was "imminent". [...] He reiterated that the attack on the airliner would involve a plane that originated in a Mediterranean capital, probably Athens.
I phoned my contact at the State Department, and he asked me to fax the report to him immediately. I never heard from him again.
Six days later, in the early evening of July 17, TWA Flight 800 exploded twenty minutes after taking off from JFK airport and crashed off the coast of Long Island, killing all 230 people on board. The plane had just arrived in New York from Athens and was heading back to Paris.
A great deal of information--much of it false--has been written about the crash of TWA 800. There was a major, highly classified presence of US Warships in the immediate vicinity of the crash site out at sea. The NTSB acknowledges that the surface radar picked up an unidentified ship fleeing the vicinity of the crash at 40 knots. Despite more than 200 eyewitnesses who reported seeing the vapor trail of a missile arcing up from the sea towards the aircraft from the precise location of the unidentified ship, the CIA went to great expense after that July 19 meeting [convened by Richard Clarke of Clinton's National Security Council] at the White House, which it released to the media, arguing that what the eyewitnesses had seen an 'optical illusion' [...] If Hollywood had produced it, the CIA video would have been dismissed as pure fantasy.
I cannot affirm here with certainty that agents of the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran attacked TWA 800. However the existence of multiple warnings against a US civilian airliner--including a CIA source that specifically named flight 800 as the target--has never been aired in any of the public reports.
In the wake of 9/11, it is no longer tolerable that the US government cover up knowledge of threats to America. I believe that Congress should demand that the intelligence community reopen its books on TWA 800 to a blue ribbon panel, and let the chips--and the responsibilities--fall where they may.
No shit...
Heard enough? Me neither. Fortunately, it turns out that Ed Morissey had started reading this incredible book too. The Captain focuses on the Intel that came in that Iran provided operational support for Al Qaeda for 9/11! Read on...
I really cannot say enough about Timmerman's work and this incredible book. The research and sources in this book are like nothing I have ever seen in a long while with something this explosive; this is reminiscent at least nothing since the Swift Vets setting history straight about the military record of John Kerry--and I think this is a MUCH bigger story that where chicken little was during 'Christmas in Cambodia'. Anyway, here are excerpts from the Captain's post:
Evidence has begun to emerge that the violent and secretive regime in the Islamic Republic of Iran not only applauded the 9/11 attacks, not only gave safe haven to terrorists, but actively collaborated with al-Qaeda on the attacks themselves.
Granted, none of this implicates Mr. Ahmadinejad; but his new boss, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is involved right up to his turbin.
Some of this evidence is detailed in the new book by Kenneth Timmerman, Countdown to Crisis: the Coming Nuclear Showdown With Iran, which I have just begun reading.
Fair warning: If you are one of those -- and I know you're out there -- who reject anything written by Timmerman or any other "right wing" author, then gird yourself; I'm going to be discussing several things from this book in future posts as well. Forwarned is four-armed!
Timmerman begins the bombshells in the very first chapter, in which he discusses the testimony from an Iranian defector, Hamid Reza Zakeri, who says he gave (or tried to give) critical information to the CIA, back in July of 2001, of an impending terrorist attack on the United States in September... an attack in which Iran had been closely involved with al-Qaeda in the planning phase. Timmerman says that the CIA refused to listen and did not pass the intel up the chain.
Now of course, much of this is he-said, she-said; you are either with Timmerman, or you are with the CIA. But given the track record of the latter, as thoroughly deconstructed by the 9/11 Commission Report on the intelligence failures that led up to 9/11, I know where I'm placing my flutter.
Bear one important note in mind: this entire chapter derives from several interviews that Timmerman conducted with Zakeri. Wherever possible, when Zakeri gave specific information -- such as the descriptions of various top-secret facilities in Iran, the presence of certain personnel in Iran at specific times, and specific documents that Zakeri claimed to have smuggled out of Iran -- Timmerman tested the claims against all publicly available and classified information he was able to obtain, including with American and foreign intelligence agents, with other Iranian defectors, with document examiners, and with prosecutors in Germany who evaluated Zakeri for a terrorism case in which they called him as witness. In each case that Timmerman checked up on Zakeri's specific claims, they were borne out; not a single claim made to Timmerman by Zakeri was contradicted by any specific counter-evidence.
The central claim of this chapter is, in Timmerman's words:
The 9/11 hijackers and al-Qaeda planners had been in constant contact with senior Iranian officials and intelligence officers before September 11. It was not a casual relationship or a chance encounter here and there, but a steady stream of contacts.
These "contacts" began in January 2001, when Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, who is the founder of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Osama bin Laden's personal physician, and widely regarded as the number-two man in al-Qaeda, journeyed from Afghanistan to Iran with several other al-Qaeda capos. Zakeri's connection was that he was in charge of the security detail protecting the visitors; he picked them up at the airport and conveyed them to the meeting at a "mountain guesthouse near the town of Varamin, just sough of Tehran", which normally was used by senior officials of Iran.
According to what an Iranian official present at the meeting told his friend Zakeri, Zawahiri was in Iran to seek equipment, forged travel documents, and help in laundering money. I am presuming this meant money collected by various Islamic charities, then laundered to al-Qaeda, a practice we have established, through many successful prosecutions, was the normal way that AQ was funded.
One of Zawahiri's men present was Saif al-Adel, who had worked in the past with Lebanese-born Imad Fayez Mugniyeh. Mugniyeh was a high-ranking official with the Revolutionary Guard's Qods Force, which controlled foreign terrorist operations... and a man well-known personally to Zakeri. Al-Adel and eleven other AQ members stayed on after the meeting to continue working with the Iranians.
The Iranians present were not low-level flunkies, either. The Iranian delegation to this conference included Hojjat-ol eslam Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri, the chief inspector of the Ministry of Information and Security (MOIS), a clandestine intelligence organization that reports directly to the Supreme Leader of Iran, who was at the time (and still is) Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the successor of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Also present, Ali Akbar Parvaresh, one of the top officers in Section 43 of MOIS; Section 43 is in charge of terrorist operations outside the Middle East and also runs the Varamin safe house. Parvaresh was wanted by the Argentinian government for a bombing in 1994 that killed eighty-six people. Mugniyeh was also in attendance, which is how Zakeri found out what was discussed.
A few months later, in May 2001, another delegation arrived from al-Qaeda... this one led by none other than Osama bin Laden's eldest son, Saad. Saad bin Laden met with all of the members of the Iranian leadership, including Supreme Leader Khamenei, Hashemi Rafsanjani (head of the Expediency Council), Mohammed Yazdi (head of the Guardians Council), Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi (chief of Judiciary), and Ali Meshkini (head of the Assembly of Experts).
Zakeri believes it was at this meeting, on May 4, 2001, that Iran's leaders learned the specifics of bon Laden's plans for the September 11 attack and decided to provide operational assistance. "Everything changed after this," he told me.
Nateq-Nouri subsequently sent a memo to Mustafa Pourghanad, the director of Section 43, conveying Khamenei's orders for "joint operations" with al-Qaeda; this is one of the memos that Zakeri carried with him from Iran when he defected.
Timmerman closes the chapter with the CIA's reaction to all this information from Zakeri:
A female intelligence officer returned my call with a shaking voice. "This man is a serial fabricator," she said, more nervous than indignant. "I have to warn you off of this story."
A few hours later, I received another call, this one from a higher-ranking official. When I asked him to comment on the veracity of Zakeri's warning, he replied angrily, "We have no record that he made any such claim. And he is a fabricator of monumental proportions." But when I asked him whether Zaker was lying about meeting with U.S. officials in Baku on July 26, 2001, this senior official pointedly refused to answer.
Now of course, I can certainly understand the CIA refusing to comment upon the specifics of CIA meetings with defectors from hostile powers. But on the other hand, they repeatedly characterized Zakeri as a "fabricator," yet never once pointed Timmerman to any sources, even public sources, that would tend to discredit Zakeri. So take it for what you will.
But at the very least, the Iranian connection to al-Qaeda and the 9/11 attack -- and whether the CIA dropped this particular ball in 2001 -- deserves at least as much exploration as that other well-known ball they dropped: the extent of Saddam Hussein's own interaction with al-Qaeda, which the CIA refused to admit for literally years, but which is now thoroughly documented in the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's report on the intelligence failures in Iraq, as well as by recent revelations from Jordan about another high-level Zawahiri meeting, this one in Baghdad.
Iran has been attacking the United States with repeated atrocities and terror attacks since the current Prez took the US Embassy personnel hostage in 1979. When are people going to wake up to the fact that, while we may not have been fighting them, Iran has been in a state of War with us for a long long time. How long are we going to have leaders who hide their heads in the sand about this.
Furthermore, Timmerman's book makes a compelling case that several intelligence agencies (among them the DIA and the CIA), were warned by an Iranian source in country who had access to Iranian intelligene agents--and passed on information to the Clinton administration that the mullahs has planned an impending attack on an American airliner. A few excerpts from this chapter (buy the book here: it will both alarm you (it completely shocked me...) and will simultaneoudly make you mad as hell at Bill Clinton. This to me is worse than anything having to do with Monica and Paula Jones. This is a possible cover-up at the highest levels, keeping the fact that this was indeed a terrorist strike, orchestrated by the government of Iran, against the US. And why? Because it was an election year! From the intel brought by one Homayoun Moghadam, an agent runner inside Iran:
..."One [internal Iranian] memo called for a campaign of 'strike' operations against the United States, 'to create maximum chaos and instability among the US leadership during the four months before the US presidential elections...'
[...] On June 10, 1996 -- two weeks before Dhahran--Homayoun [the inside source] told me that he had received information from a source called "Elvis" within the Revolutionary Guards Protection and Intelligence Department. Iran was planning to hijact a US civilian airliner.
[...] Homayoun's source said the attack would be carried out by Lebanese surrogates--not directly by Iranians-- and had been approved by Rafshanjani in person as a "warning" to the US government. Elvis believed the operation would originate in Greece or somewhere else in the Mediterranean. [which it did...]
The FBI interviewed Homayoun on June 20, 1996. [...]
On June 24, I communicated the same information to the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency's Middle East and terrorism policy support team at the Pentagon. He did not follow up on the information. Two days later came the bombing at the Khobar Towers. Within days, US officials I interviewed were already talking about communications intercepts that clearly indicated Iran's responsibility for that attack.
On July 11, Homayoun phoned me, all excited. He had just received an urgent communication from Elvis, saying that the attack on a US civilian airliner was "imminent". [...] He reiterated that the attack on the airliner would involve a plane that originated in a Mediterranean capital, probably Athens.
I phoned my contact at the State Department, and he asked me to fax the report to him immediately. I never heard from him again.
Six days later, in the early evening of July 17, TWA Flight 800 exploded twenty minutes after taking off from JFK airport and crashed off the coast of Long Island, killing all 230 people on board. The plane had just arrived in New York from Athens and was heading back to Paris.
A great deal of information--much of it false--has been written about the crash of TWA 800. There was a major, highly classified presence of US Warships in the immediate vicinity of the crash site out at sea. The NTSB acknowledges that the surface radar picked up an unidentified ship fleeing the vicinity of the crash at 40 knots. Despite more than 200 eyewitnesses who reported seeing the vapor trail of a missile arcing up from the sea towards the aircraft from the precise location of the unidentified ship, the CIA went to great expense after that July 19 meeting [convened by Richard Clarke of Clinton's National Security Council] at the White House, which it released to the media, arguing that what the eyewitnesses had seen an 'optical illusion' [...] If Hollywood had produced it, the CIA video would have been dismissed as pure fantasy.
I cannot affirm here with certainty that agents of the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran attacked TWA 800. However the existence of multiple warnings against a US civilian airliner--including a CIA source that specifically named flight 800 as the target--has never been aired in any of the public reports.
In the wake of 9/11, it is no longer tolerable that the US government cover up knowledge of threats to America. I believe that Congress should demand that the intelligence community reopen its books on TWA 800 to a blue ribbon panel, and let the chips--and the responsibilities--fall where they may.
No shit...
Heard enough? Me neither. Fortunately, it turns out that Ed Morissey had started reading this incredible book too. The Captain focuses on the Intel that came in that Iran provided operational support for Al Qaeda for 9/11! Read on...
I really cannot say enough about Timmerman's work and this incredible book. The research and sources in this book are like nothing I have ever seen in a long while with something this explosive; this is reminiscent at least nothing since the Swift Vets setting history straight about the military record of John Kerry--and I think this is a MUCH bigger story that where chicken little was during 'Christmas in Cambodia'. Anyway, here are excerpts from the Captain's post:
Evidence has begun to emerge that the violent and secretive regime in the Islamic Republic of Iran not only applauded the 9/11 attacks, not only gave safe haven to terrorists, but actively collaborated with al-Qaeda on the attacks themselves.
Granted, none of this implicates Mr. Ahmadinejad; but his new boss, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is involved right up to his turbin.
Some of this evidence is detailed in the new book by Kenneth Timmerman, Countdown to Crisis: the Coming Nuclear Showdown With Iran, which I have just begun reading.
Fair warning: If you are one of those -- and I know you're out there -- who reject anything written by Timmerman or any other "right wing" author, then gird yourself; I'm going to be discussing several things from this book in future posts as well. Forwarned is four-armed!
Timmerman begins the bombshells in the very first chapter, in which he discusses the testimony from an Iranian defector, Hamid Reza Zakeri, who says he gave (or tried to give) critical information to the CIA, back in July of 2001, of an impending terrorist attack on the United States in September... an attack in which Iran had been closely involved with al-Qaeda in the planning phase. Timmerman says that the CIA refused to listen and did not pass the intel up the chain.
Now of course, much of this is he-said, she-said; you are either with Timmerman, or you are with the CIA. But given the track record of the latter, as thoroughly deconstructed by the 9/11 Commission Report on the intelligence failures that led up to 9/11, I know where I'm placing my flutter.
Bear one important note in mind: this entire chapter derives from several interviews that Timmerman conducted with Zakeri. Wherever possible, when Zakeri gave specific information -- such as the descriptions of various top-secret facilities in Iran, the presence of certain personnel in Iran at specific times, and specific documents that Zakeri claimed to have smuggled out of Iran -- Timmerman tested the claims against all publicly available and classified information he was able to obtain, including with American and foreign intelligence agents, with other Iranian defectors, with document examiners, and with prosecutors in Germany who evaluated Zakeri for a terrorism case in which they called him as witness. In each case that Timmerman checked up on Zakeri's specific claims, they were borne out; not a single claim made to Timmerman by Zakeri was contradicted by any specific counter-evidence.
The central claim of this chapter is, in Timmerman's words:
The 9/11 hijackers and al-Qaeda planners had been in constant contact with senior Iranian officials and intelligence officers before September 11. It was not a casual relationship or a chance encounter here and there, but a steady stream of contacts.
These "contacts" began in January 2001, when Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, who is the founder of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Osama bin Laden's personal physician, and widely regarded as the number-two man in al-Qaeda, journeyed from Afghanistan to Iran with several other al-Qaeda capos. Zakeri's connection was that he was in charge of the security detail protecting the visitors; he picked them up at the airport and conveyed them to the meeting at a "mountain guesthouse near the town of Varamin, just sough of Tehran", which normally was used by senior officials of Iran.
According to what an Iranian official present at the meeting told his friend Zakeri, Zawahiri was in Iran to seek equipment, forged travel documents, and help in laundering money. I am presuming this meant money collected by various Islamic charities, then laundered to al-Qaeda, a practice we have established, through many successful prosecutions, was the normal way that AQ was funded.
One of Zawahiri's men present was Saif al-Adel, who had worked in the past with Lebanese-born Imad Fayez Mugniyeh. Mugniyeh was a high-ranking official with the Revolutionary Guard's Qods Force, which controlled foreign terrorist operations... and a man well-known personally to Zakeri. Al-Adel and eleven other AQ members stayed on after the meeting to continue working with the Iranians.
The Iranians present were not low-level flunkies, either. The Iranian delegation to this conference included Hojjat-ol eslam Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri, the chief inspector of the Ministry of Information and Security (MOIS), a clandestine intelligence organization that reports directly to the Supreme Leader of Iran, who was at the time (and still is) Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the successor of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Also present, Ali Akbar Parvaresh, one of the top officers in Section 43 of MOIS; Section 43 is in charge of terrorist operations outside the Middle East and also runs the Varamin safe house. Parvaresh was wanted by the Argentinian government for a bombing in 1994 that killed eighty-six people. Mugniyeh was also in attendance, which is how Zakeri found out what was discussed.
A few months later, in May 2001, another delegation arrived from al-Qaeda... this one led by none other than Osama bin Laden's eldest son, Saad. Saad bin Laden met with all of the members of the Iranian leadership, including Supreme Leader Khamenei, Hashemi Rafsanjani (head of the Expediency Council), Mohammed Yazdi (head of the Guardians Council), Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi (chief of Judiciary), and Ali Meshkini (head of the Assembly of Experts).
Zakeri believes it was at this meeting, on May 4, 2001, that Iran's leaders learned the specifics of bon Laden's plans for the September 11 attack and decided to provide operational assistance. "Everything changed after this," he told me.
Nateq-Nouri subsequently sent a memo to Mustafa Pourghanad, the director of Section 43, conveying Khamenei's orders for "joint operations" with al-Qaeda; this is one of the memos that Zakeri carried with him from Iran when he defected.
Timmerman closes the chapter with the CIA's reaction to all this information from Zakeri:
A female intelligence officer returned my call with a shaking voice. "This man is a serial fabricator," she said, more nervous than indignant. "I have to warn you off of this story."
A few hours later, I received another call, this one from a higher-ranking official. When I asked him to comment on the veracity of Zakeri's warning, he replied angrily, "We have no record that he made any such claim. And he is a fabricator of monumental proportions." But when I asked him whether Zaker was lying about meeting with U.S. officials in Baku on July 26, 2001, this senior official pointedly refused to answer.
Now of course, I can certainly understand the CIA refusing to comment upon the specifics of CIA meetings with defectors from hostile powers. But on the other hand, they repeatedly characterized Zakeri as a "fabricator," yet never once pointed Timmerman to any sources, even public sources, that would tend to discredit Zakeri. So take it for what you will.
But at the very least, the Iranian connection to al-Qaeda and the 9/11 attack -- and whether the CIA dropped this particular ball in 2001 -- deserves at least as much exploration as that other well-known ball they dropped: the extent of Saddam Hussein's own interaction with al-Qaeda, which the CIA refused to admit for literally years, but which is now thoroughly documented in the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's report on the intelligence failures in Iraq, as well as by recent revelations from Jordan about another high-level Zawahiri meeting, this one in Baghdad.
Iran has been attacking the United States with repeated atrocities and terror attacks since the current Prez took the US Embassy personnel hostage in 1979. When are people going to wake up to the fact that, while we may not have been fighting them, Iran has been in a state of War with us for a long long time. How long are we going to have leaders who hide their heads in the sand about this.
