Who is chaim kupferberg

But the term he preferred was bohemian, which to him signified a commitment to art as well as a rejection of restrictive bourgeois values, and as a scholar of the counterculture he traced the term back to an early use by students at the University of Paris. Beneath Mr.

Naphtali Kupferberg was born in New York on Sept. He grew up on the Lower East Side and became a jazz fan and leftist activist while still a teenager. He graduated from Brooklyn College in and got a job as a medical librarian. Sanders in an audio interview in Instead he began to write topical poems and humor pieces, contributing to The Village Voice and other publications.

After the Fugs broke up, in , Mr. Clinkenbeard said that he intended to subpoena those records, but Soltys was found hanging in his jail cell the very next day. His cell had been under hour surveillance. What, if any, was the connection here to September 11? Were these copy-cat mass murder episodes just a random occurrence -- or perhaps indicative of a far more murky, complex drama playing out just below the surface?

In the weeks leading up to January 1, , the news media were swamped with speculations of impending catastrophe. We had already experienced the domestic terror wrought by Timothy McVeigh representing the right wing militia set and Ted Kaczynski alias the "Unabomber" representing the lone wacko set. Now we were told to expect an apocalyptic meltdown of our technological infrastructure by way of the Y2K "bug" , or, alternatively, an attack by America's self-declared Number One Enemy -- Osama bin Laden.

The expected catastrophe came 21 months later than expected, with the blow struck in New York City. Ressam, as was later discovered, was on his way to mastermind a massive terror attack on the West Coast -- at Los Angeles International Airport, a facility secured through the services of Burns Security.

Ten days before Ressam was arrested -- on December 4, -- two right wing "militiamen" were arrested on charges of plotting to blow up, on the new year, a Suburban Propane facility at Elk Grove near Sacramento.

It was thought that had they succeeded, hundreds of casualties might have resulted. It is thus on the West Coast, in the lead-up to the millennial new year, that we have the convergence of a pre-existing domestic threat i. As we shall see later in this article, these two threats had actually converged for the first time back in April , with Timothy McVeigh's destruction of the FBI Murrah building in Oklahoma.

Sacramento, though by no means the only West Coast city with an alleged al-Qaida connection, did seem to have a magnetic pull for this type of convergence. Mohamed -- a former Sacramento resident who was also a U.

Army sergeant in Fort Bragg, N. Cole attack in October On the domestic terror front, Sacramento was also the scene of the notorious racist attacks on local synagogues by the Williams brothers. But the crucial question is this: was a West Coast operative clique also to play a role on September 11 -- and if so, then at what point was the West Coast aspect of these operations scotched? It was through Ressam that authorities allegedly got a peek at the upper structures of al-Qaida, with Ressam detailing the operational role of senior al-Qaida man Abu Zubaydah subsequently the first "big fish" caught in the War On Terror in March The Ressam episode also provided a close-up view as to how those all-important connections were made, and, most importantly, by whom.

Humphries, who seemed to be "out of the loop" as regards the complexities of the terror networks, was taken by the hand by Bruguiere, and pointed in the "right" direction -- that is, toward the evidence showing the full depth of Ressam's connections. On the very night that Humphries first met up with Bruguiere in New York City, O'Neill orchestrated a four-alarm, razzle-dazzle show of FBI authority that could not have failed to make an impression on the novice agent Humphries:.

Thereafter, Bruguiere led Humphries to his associates in the Canadian intelligence service, who furnished Humphries with the evidence of Ressam's Montreal "cell. Back stateside, Bruguiere kept on with the Ressam case, furnishing the prosecution -- and the media -- his expert take on Ressam's fit in the overall al-Qaida puzzle.

To the casual observer, there is absolutely nothing nefarious in any of this. It would make sense that a highly esteemed international expert and prosecutor of terror would be so intimately involved in such an important case. In this respect, Humphries would be playing the role of any number of people in his position -- trusting in the expert opinion of a superior authority, and honestly taking his leads where directed. In such a manner do literally thousands of decent law enforcement folk become party to a set-up managed by the few in the upper echelons, reinforcing among one another the perception that the truth is known among a wide swath of their colleagues -- a "herd mentality" that is as prevalent in the realm of law enforcement as it is in government and media.

If Bruguiere had given Humphries the initial impression that Humphries was receiving a fully independent assessment from the Canadian intelligence service, well, that wasn't exactly the case either. Bruguiere led the skeptical Canadians to an apartment he dubbed the " appartement de conspiracie ", among whose occupants was the aforementioned Fateh Kamel and his protege, Ahmed Ressam. At Bruguiere's urging, the Canadians proceeded to monitor the apartment for a period of two years, amassing a "page file on the men who came and went from the apartment.

All the same, Ressam's voice made it on to the "record" in "nearly wire-tapped conversations. The Canadians had apparently lost interest, and subsequently, the denizens of the "appartement de conspiracie" had moved on. Phase Two: almost one year later, in February , Ressam returned to Montreal, now presumably indoctrinated and trained in the al-Qaida brand of covert terror. As chronicled in the Seattle Times investigation, Bruguiere made his next move several weeks later -- requesting that the Canadians question Kamel's former apartment mates in Montreal, among them the newly returned Ressam.

Now, pay special attention to the timing: Ressam, upon his recent return to Montreal, moved into a new apartment on Sherbrooke Avenue. The Canadians, however, showed up at the old " appartement de conspiracie ", now bereft of its alleged conspirators, who had moved on in the past year. Bruguiere continued to harangue the Canadians. A few months later, they finally tracked down the address of Ressam's Sherbrooke Avenue lodgings.

Only problem was, Ressam was no longer officially lodging there. In the interim, he had moved on to another apartment on Rue du Fort what may, in retrospect, be considered as a "safe house" in more ways than one. However, Ressam "occasionally spent the night at his old apartment on Sherbrooke, where his friends still lived.

Here is what happened next, as chronicled by the Seattle Times : "At the sound of the bell, Ressam bolted from the apartment and out a back door into an alley. The door was unguarded. He got away. Nevertheless, the Canadians did find inside the "dingy apartment" some photographs of the aforementioned Fateh Kamel, along with a conveniently placed black address book left in Ressam's presumably abandoned knapsack, which contained the phone number of Abu Zubaydah relatively unknown by then and the address for Evergro Products, an agricultural-supply store in British Columbia later to be tagged as Exhibit A for the prosecution.

As reported in the Seattle Times , it was all pretty much Greek to the Canadian corporal who led the raid, and who subsequently "made a copy of the book and sent it off to Bruguiere in Paris to figure out. And where did Ressam run off to? Back to his Rue du Fort apartment or "safe house" , where he reportedly proceeded that night to plan his explosive attack on the Los Angeles International Airport in the weeks ahead.

Oddly, it did not occur to him that the authorities might also track him down to this apartment as well from the perspective of a man who was apparently alert enough -- and prescient -- to bolt from his overnight lodgings at the first toll of a bell in the wee hours of dawn. But as fate -- or perhaps Bruguiere? On that fateful day, Ressam had almost gone out of his way to draw suspicion on himself, as reported in the Seattle Times :.

Even so, Ressam's car was allowed on to the ferry to Seattle. Stateside, with his car the last in line off the ferry at customs, Ressam put on a sweaty, "jittery" show for the benefit of the discerning customs inspector, who this time got the message and proceeded to do a standard search of Ressam's car. The rest, as they say, is history. By the time agent Humphries was handed the case, the Canadians now had a fully documented dossier on Ressam waiting for him. Was this all a well-timed set-up, orchestrated by Bruguiere, using the unwitting Canadian authorities -- and, subsequently, Agent Humphries - to give the general impression that Ressam's activities were being ferreted out by a virtual army of independent investigators?

In short, through just the prism of the Ressam episode, might we detect the inner workings of a covert legend-in-progress? With the above-stated hypothesis in mind, one should perhaps cast a discerning eye toward those manning the counter-terror posts in Los Angeles today - for an important element in John O'Neill's New York circle has recently relocated to the West Coast.

Miller, some might recall, was one of the very few Americans to conduct a face-to-face interview with bin Laden before September It is, in fact, security firms like Kroll Associates, Burns Security, Teg, Wackenhut, and their ilk that should garner our interest at least as much as the web of conservative think tanks that have welded in place the parameters of "mainstream" debate -- for it is through these very firms that the former stars of law enforcement have gone through the revolving door into the lucrative private sector.

It is a world where former military types mix with various operatives of the CIA, FBI, DEA and any number of alphabet soup agencies charged with the security of our nation. Moreover, the top people in the private security sector have the authority, prestige, and, most importantly, the skill to carry out -- successfully and below the radar -- the kinds of domestic operations that have been pegged as the province of shaggy al-Qaida operatives.

Who, after all, could best ensure that 19 terrorists would be able to make it aboard four separate flights without any real danger of detection? And who, after all, would be best placed to ensure a complete and successful implosion of not just the two Twin Towers, but the neighboring building -- 7 World Trade Center -- which housed a bio-warfare "command and control bunker" under the direction of Jerry Hauer?

A good part of the early work on that legend had been accomplished through the offices of Michael Cherkasky, the managing director of Kroll Associates -- in his capacity as a prosecutor working in the New York office of Robert Morgenthau.

Cherkasky had worked on the case arising out of the first World Trade Center bombing in , which had established Ramzi Yousef as the terrorist mastermind behind the attack. Cherkasky had also worked on the John Gotti and BCCI criminal cases, two cases that would not, at first glance, seem to be related, much less to the events of September Although this dual-purpose netherworld has been with us for over a century -- and roughly parallels the rise of an American industrial "Establishment" of which the Bushes and Rockefellers are most representative -- for our purposes, we will date the true globalization of this "deep political structure" with the creation of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, better known as BCCI.

Before it went under, BCCI served as the cardiovascular system for a global criminal milieu, its laundered arteries servicing the needs of various drug lords, arms dealers, fraudsters, dictators, corrupt politicians, terrorists, and intelligence agencies seeking loose cash for their extra-legal activities. And with cocaine coming stateside by way of Colombia, a little pocket money could be set aside to furnish the Nicaraguan Contras with their own anti-Soviet toys.

Bush's company, Arbusto? Bin Mahfouz, incidentally, had taken over Salim bin Laden's interest in the Houston Gulf Airport after Salim met his demise in an airplane crash over Houston in the same year that Iran-Contra witness, and Israeli counter-terror coordinator, Amiram Nir met his own fortuitous demise by airplane over Mexico, thus denying Congress one witness who could testify to Vice-President Bush's personal involvement in the scandal.

In the decadent 80's, Bush friend and C. Meanwhile, C. As for John Gotti, on June 21, , former C. Bush can be an uncertain proposition. One by one, once these psychopathic proxies had served their purpose, they were "taken out". In the case of Noriega and Gotti, they were silenced through the capable tools of the American justice system.

Mueller III. In the case of BCCI, Mueller had steered the case along the manageable "official" contours, away from the seamier aspects of American foreign policy, ensuring that the domestic aspect of this worldwide fraud would only singe the toes of two well-connected, designated patsies -- Clark Clifford and Robert Altman. BCCI, the brainchild of British intelligence, was the ideal tool by which a supra-national network of compromised politicians and corrupt officials would "play ball", fattened up with a stream of capital furnished through the fruits of drugs, arms, and terrorism.

As Oliver North had pioneered the use of the counter-terrorism office in dealing with narco-terrorists like Monzer al-Kassar connected to the Pan Am explosion over Lockerbie , would it be such a stretch to posit that the counter-terror apparatus -- this time under Richard Clarke and John O'Neill -- was once again being employed to "work" the corrupt networks wrought by BCCI? Could it be that the mutually corrupt global relationships wrought by BCCI persist to this day, with a bevy of compromised political officials standing ready to make their contribution to the New World Order -- and perhaps scam some extra pocket change on the side?

As they say -- follow the money. In vaccines, pharmaceuticals, bio-tech, utilities, security consulting, and surveillance technologies. In other words, they are shifting their money toward those burgeoning industries where they can simply legislate the market need -- the favored modus operandi of the "Establishment" captains of industry who had formerly used their clout in the political sector to secure their all-important interests in the oil and banking sectors.

Was it a coincidence that he was consistently chosen to oversee cases in which the whole bloody mess -- Gotti, BCCI, Noriega et al -- had threatened to spill over the "officially" designated sides? Was it a result of happenstance that Mueller officially had taken up his job as FBI Director only one week before September 11?

Is it Mueller's job to cover the paper trails -- or just cover them up? For good measure, her July 7 piece also mentioned the fact that bin Laden was active in supporting terror groups in Kashmir a cause which bin Laden had, in fact, only formally adopted on October 14, -- that is, a mere five days after the incriminating October 9 Times of India article.

In view of the fact that Omar Saeed now was widely being marketed as an ISI-connected terrorist leader active in Kashmir, he would find an alternative bin Laden link and cover story , courtesy of Maria Ressa and colleagues. And what of that money trail? Was it a dead issue by the time of Saeed's arrest for the Pearl kidnapping? Not exactly. In fact, the mainstream media seemed to adopt -- or was passively used to employ -- an extremely subtle technique to obfuscate the whole issue. Those articles, however, would tellingly omit the "Mustafa Ahmad" alias from the details.

At around this time, articles that briefly touched upon a paymaster by the name of "Mustafa Ahmad" would reveal nothing about the man, except for the fact that he was still "at large.

In fact, by September 11, Moussaoui was already in detention, on suspicion of being connected to al-Qaida. As the story goes, suspicions were aroused when Moussaoui had made inquiries at a flight school. Known to French intelligence as a suspicious character, Moussaoui was promptly investigated by the FBI office out of Minnesota. He was then arrested and detained in August In the same manner through which Brisard had offered up his own "mainstream" criticisms, the Moussaoui Tale was just another example of a red herring news item offered up as an "incriminating" detail, keeping the guilt balanced squarely on the toga-clad shoulders of bin Laden.

Binalshibh was hijacker Mohammed Atta's roommate in Hamburg, and the senior operative directly linking Atta to al-Qaida. According to the Moussaoui indictment, Binalshibh was also a "paymaster," allegedly transferring funds to Moussaoui.

Further, we will see how FBI Director Mueller uses the details in the Moussaoui indictment to explicitly pair up Khalid and Mustafa Ahmed -- a full nine months before these characters end up sharing news space for their own simultaneously choreographed apprehensions. Where "federal", "intelligence", or "law enforcement" officials were variously reported as identifying the paymaster as either Omar Saeed or bin Laden's brother-in-law among others , the Moussaoui indictment way back in December -- though well after the controversial Oct.

And the "settled fact" was: the man providing and receiving back funds under the alias of "Mustafa Ahmad" was actually a flesh and blood year old Saudi named Mustafa Ahmed Alhawsawi or al-Hisawi , depending on the news source. And sure enough, a bit too far below the radar to really attract notice, there existed a thread of articles that referenced the Money Trail Story by means of a paymaster named Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi. As early as three months after the fall of the Twin Towers, it was all known -- the full details, the money trail, the essential players, and their roles - and the eventual arrests of Khalid, Binalshibh, and Mustafa Ahmed would merely serve to cast an official imprimatur on the unsealed word of the Book of Moussaoui.

Perhaps the obvious extended public obfuscation over the paymaster role -- long after it was definitively revealed in the Moussaoui indictment -- was intended until such time as the fates of Omar Saeed, Binalshibh, and Mustafa Ahmed could be settled.

And, indeed, it was a busy week. Only a month earlier, the media was reporting how Rowley had sent FBI Director Mueller a memo questioning his version of the Moussaoui incident. As Rowley had framed it, the Minnesota FBI office had been repeatedly obstructed in its efforts to obtain a warrant for accessing Moussaoui's hard drive, and she cast the blame on the "higher-ups" in the Washington office.

In the lead-up to the hearings, the media was "pre-selling" Rowley's scheduled appearance as a brewing scandal, with intimations that perhaps some damaging revelations would be aired before the probing audience of the nation's esteemed lawmakers.

Prodded by her approving Senatorial inquisitors, Rowley offered her helpful recommendations in making America a more efficient police state -- all in all, an extended advertisement for the Patriot Act and the inevitable Homeland Security apparatus.

John J. Lumpkin of the Associated Press wrote the definitive article here, courtesy of the revelations of an anonymous "top U. Lumpkin's article the June 4 or June 5 version was largely posted verbatim on the CBS and Fox websites, with each of these sites giving the impression that the news was actually ferreted out by their own reporters, acknowledging only that the Associated Press had merely "contributed" to the report. In the case of CBS' June 5 item, they largely cut-and- pasted in Lumpkin's article after a brief paragraph suggesting that this was all being reported by CBS News correspondent Jim Stewart -- in other words, suggesting that the reader was mostly perusing the words of Stewart, not Lumpkin.

Did Lumpkin take offense at this? Or did Lumpkin himself merely affix his own byline to an item that was likely nothing more than an official press release from the National Security Council?

Moreover, it highlights the degree to which the "mainstream" news media is managed, centralized, and strategically compartmentalized to give the misleading impression that a widely circulated fact is "known" among a large body of "independent" journalists -- when, in actual fact, they merely cite the same government press releases. Now, in Lumpkin's June 5, version, Shaikh Saiid had been spliced together with al-Sharif , creating a Shaikh Saiid al-Sharif , the "financial chief" -- tossing out the Sa'd portion of Sharif's name and any suggestion that bin Laden's brother-in-law had anything to do with this.

As it turned out, about the same time that Lumpkin's article was making the rounds, Robert Mueller was making a statement before the Senate-House Committee, narrating the full details of the money trail story as set out in the Moussaoui indictment , but this time adding the role of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who, according to Mueller's statement, shared a credit card with Mustafa Ahmed "Alhawsawi.

And now, thanks to Lumpkin, "Mustafa Ahmad" was not to be thought of as simply a convenient pseudonym, but rather as a real person, bin Laden's bona fide "financial chief. As a textbook example of "muddying the waters", all contingencies -- or threads -- were accounted for. Now all that remained was for Lumpkin to smooth over the apparent contradictions, which he would do -- twice more -- for the record before Mustafa Ahmed's conveniently timed arrest in March Once Lumpkin's June article on Khalid was out, further incriminating details were coming out fast and furious.

Lumpkin's key June article also mentioned Binalshibh as part of Atta's Hamburg "cell. Conveniently timed for release on the very next day -- June 6, -- further news followed that, according to National Security Agency intercepts, Khalid was heard talking on the telephone with hijacker Mohammed Atta.

Moreover, for the very first time, authorities were now reporting that Khalid was actually the uncle of Ramzi Yousef. Perhaps it was this sort of conceptually artistic symmetry that made Khalid so attractive as the designated mastermind. Through Khalid, one had a direct connection to the first World Trade Center attack, providing a smoking gun continuity leading directly to al-Qaida. Prior to Khalid's June public promotion, he was lurking on the official terror lists merely as an indicted conspirator in the Bojinka plot masterminded by Ramzi Yousef.

As it turned out, they chose the guy with the unibrow and the hair shirt. What was the official reason for revealing the role of Khalid at this point in time? Moreover, thanks again to John O'Neill's friend, Jean-Louis Bruguiere, Zubaydah's role in al-Qaida was fully delineated through Bruguiere's interviews with al-Qaida operative Djamel Begal, who purportedly had been part of a plot to bomb the U. Embassy in Paris prior to September But first, we should take note of James Risen's June 5, article for the New York Times , in which Risen reported that the authorities "had begun to suspect soon after the [Sept.

But in the next months, a detailed financial investigation of the money trail from the plot led officials to believe that he had a more prominent role than previously suspected.

Was this a retrospective addition into the record? To construct a viable Legend, it is not always a simple matter of outright fabrication -- for then it would be a logistical nightmare in keeping an army of otherwise honest investigators from ascertaining the true physical facts. Rather -- in terms of covert operations -- a Legend works best when all its elements are actually played out, with real operatives making real transactions, leaving a trail of evidence that can -- with assistance from apparent insiders like Bruguiere -- help those investigators outside "the loop" to come to the desired conclusions.

If Omar Saeed Sheikh had actually played out the role as paymaster, then he would be physically linked to Binalshibh and Atta, who were essential elements in the Legend as it was played out. Moreover, if Khalid was originally part of that Legend, his inclusion in the money trail aspect of that Legend would be problematic so long as Omar Saeed was being linked back to the ISI Chief who in turn links back to Washington, D.

Furthermore, in order to ensure that all "insiders" were equally blackmailable -- that is, no one party could use its inside knowledge to bring down another -- the senior participants would each run their respective operatives in the Legend.

Thus, insider elements within the U. In this respect, we could imagine Binalshibh and Atta as being "handled" by elements in German intelligence with the assistance of federal German prosecutor Kay Nehm, perhaps , while French intelligence in conjunction with Bruguiere, perhaps would "handle" operatives such as Ressam or Zubaydah. As for the U. Less certain, though plausible, is the prospect that Omar Saeed was in fact being "handled" by both British and Indian intelligence.

Was Saeed, then, a double agent, putting himself at the service of the Pakistani ISI Chief, when in fact he was operating on behalf of Indian intelligence all along? With concerted "leaks" pointing suspicions toward the second tier, the members of that tier could either be lulled -- in the case of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, blame could be placed at the feet of "rogue" neo-cons for the leaks -- or, alternatively, their silence could be coerced through the very real threat of "mainstreaming" the evidence already in place to implicate them in the case of Israel.

Certainly, given the scope of mainstream coverage in this respect, this scenario would seem most plausible. Given the obvious murkiness of these complex interactions, it would be impossible at this point to fully posit what exactly went wrong in that first week of October , when the Money Trail Story was picking up steam.

Was the Omar Saeed "leak" a mischievous ploy by India to shore up its geopolitical interests vis-a-vis Pakistan? Was it a set-up to pressure the Americans? It is not within the scope of this article to fully solve that riddle if indeed it can be solved with the available evidence at hand. In short, without the proper analytical foundation, the events surrounding September 11 would remain a disjointed, inscrutable medley of facts -- exactly in keeping with the intentions of its covert architects.

The McVeigh-Iraqi thread, in fact, pre-dates the events of September 11 by a few years. In , Timothy McVeigh's lawyer, Stephen Jones, had broached the existence of a videotaped interview with the co-founder of the Abu Sayyaf terrorist group, a purported al-Qaida front based out of the Philippines. The Abu Sayyaf leader, Edwin Angeles, had turned police informant in February a couple months before the Oklahoma bombing , becoming, in the words of Richard Parry of The Independent , "a deep penetration agent of the Marines and the Philippine National Police.

Nichols, married at the time to a Philippine woman, had made a series of trips to the Philippines -- without his wife -- visiting the very areas where Abu Sayyaf predominated. As Jones argued, it was Nichols who was the operative brains behind the Oklahoma bombing, and his client -- a Gulf War veteran and former Burns security guard -- was taking the fall as a patsy under the influence of Terry Nichols. Moreover, Jones -- through the Ramzi Yousef connection -- was positing an Iraqi link to the Oklahoma bombing.

As reported by Howard Pankratz of the Denver Post on October 12, , Jones had personally learned from Laurie Mylroie mentioned earlier in this article and Vincent Cannistraro also mentioned earlier that Ramzi Yousef was an Iraqi intelligence agent. Yousef, a Kuwaiti, was on scene when the Gulf War broke out. As the legend goes, that conflagration led him -- like bin Laden -- to spearhead a permanent jihad against the United States.

Yousef's first big role was to act as the mastermind behind the bombing of the World Trade Center. As the legend has it, he managed to stay below the radar until January , when a fire broke out in a Manila flat that he shared with his fellow conspirator, Abdul Hakim Murad.

When Philippine authorities entered the premises, they managed to get a hold of documents and the contents of a computer hard drive that pointed to Ramzi Yousef's various activities, among them a plot to take out a dozen U. While Yousef's partner, Murad, was arrested, Yousef managed to evade Philippine authorities, escaping justice until February , when he was finally arrested in a hotel room in Pakistan. Thus, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's connection to the Bojinka plot would serve to illustrate -- compellingly so - the evolution of al-Qaida's operational ambitions.

Of the two, Angeles' resume has all the markings of a classic deep penetration agent. Of mixed Muslim-Catholic parentage, Angeles was formerly trained as a guerilla fighter with the Communist New People's Army before his entry into the Muslim fundamentalist milieu. Angeles had served as Abu Sayyaf's operations chief until he suddenly defected in February around the time that Ramzi Yousef was arrested for the Philippines-based Bojinka plot.

As reported by Keith B. Richburg on May 25, , Angeles may have openly defected from Abu Sayyaf when he came under suspicion by his comrades as being a possible government agent. But even in his new official capacity as a police informant, Angeles had proven to be somewhat erratic.

On January 13, , as reported in the Weekend Australian , Angeles claimed that the Philippine National Police had faked evidence in a massive dragnet of foreigners from Pakistan and the Middle East in order "to paint a scenario that [would] pave the way for the immediate passage of the [Philippine] anti-terrorism bill.

By the Fall of , Angeles was once more in the headlines, this time courtesy of Timothy McVeigh's attorney, who had used Angeles' videotaped testimony before the Philippine police to show that Terry Nichols, McVeigh's alleged accomplice, had met with Angeles and Ramzi Yousef on several occasions. Thus, courtesy of Angeles, there was now a bona fide link between the domestic militia threat exemplified by McVeigh and Nichols and the foreign terror threat exemplified by Yousef and bin Laden.

Soon thereafter, on January 15, , Angeles was gunned down on a city street -- barely one month after his fellow Abu Sayyaf co-founder, Janjalani, had been killed in a shoot-out with the Philippine police. Oddly enough, according to a BusinessWorld article by Conrad M. The military believes Angeles was killed by his rival inside the [Abu Sayyaf Group].

And in this respect, Timothy McVeigh and Ramzi Yousef are most emblematic of that convergence -- for their respective paths to infamy had arisen out of the Gulf War conflagration known as Desert Storm. In all these events, the message was singular: we were entering a new age of insecurity, with new and sophisticated dangers bearing down on us from within and from without.

If the Ramzi Yousef episode had not quite made a sufficient impact on our collective consciousness, if Timothy McVeigh had failed to stir us from our complacent slumber, then we were ripe for the plucking by September 11, -- ready to serve up our civil rights, our right to privacy, our constitutional checks and balances -- and prepared to place our trust in a government empowered by our collective ignorance of the facts.

Yet this link would be resurrected as late as April 22, , when Kenneth Timmerman of Insight had broached the existence of an audiotaped interview with Philippine authorities, given by the dying year old widow of Edwin Angeles.

Angeles' widow, Elmina, had repeated Angeles' contention that he had met with Nichols and Yousef, but more revealingly, she was now contending -- in the words of her deceased mate -- that Yousef was acting on behalf of Saddam Hussein. In other words, Yousef -- by this time definitively tagged as an al-Qaida operative -- was doing double duty as an Iraqi agent. Elmina died within days of her interview, felled by liver disease. Once again, here was an example of a counter-legend masking the plausible reality.

This counter-legend, though, served to mask an opposing reality -- that it was the federal government , in fact or the powerful elites behind it that were managing this convergence so as to consolidate the power of the federal authorities. The counter-legend of this convergence thus remained in the background, ready to be "mainstreamed" if needed, but most importantly, serving to muddy the waters in ferreting out the true, opposing reality. In order to make the connection more clear, the article helpfully went on to point out that "the Oklahoma City bomb was identical to the World Trade Center bomb.

Following up on this thread was an article in the Indianapolis Star on September 7, Director James Woolsey has given new credibility to suspicions of Iraqi involvement in the Oklahoma City bombing and the World Trade Center bombing of -- enough to merit congressional hearings. The article further revealed that Woolsey had credited Laurie Mylroie, "who independently unearthed evidence of a Baghdad connection to domestic terrorism prior to Sept. On December 1, -- only a few months before Edwin Angeles' defection and Ramzi Yousef's arrest, and just five months before the Oklahoma bombing -- bin Laden brother-in-law and Abu Sayyaf financier, Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, entered the United Sates where, within weeks, he was arrested in San Francisco and held over pending deportation hearings.

Only two days before the Oklahoma bombing, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Khalifa was linked by Philippine authorities to Ramzi Yousef, with the article further mentioning Khalifa's relationship to bin Laden. Now we have the internet, so these brave info-warriors can write away to their heart's content, and always find someone who'll "publish". At least that's how he seems to me, and I'm the greatest living authority on how things are perceived by me, so we'll have to take my word on it.

CE, did you finish the Hopsicker tome? On to other proofs of the ever inter-connecting global conspiracy, I see. Foolmewunz has just been added to the list of people who aren't complete idiots. Hokulele It's not that liberals have become less tolerant. It's that conservatives have become more intolerable.

Originally Posted by Foolmewunz. Responding to this mod box in thread will be off topic Posted By:chillzero. All times are GMT The time now is PM. Powered by vBulletin. However, the forum now exists as an independent entity with no affiliation with or endorsement by the JREF, including the section in reference to "JREF" topics.

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You are currently viewing the forum as a guest, which means you are missing out on discussing matters that are of interest to you. Please consider registering so you can gain full use of the forum features and interact with other Members. Registration is simple, fast and free! Click here to register today. Chaim Kupferberg. Thread Tools. Find More Posts by Childlike Empress. Chiam Kupferberg is the son of Mr. Find More Posts by Gravy. It appears he is a real nut case with no actual facts, are you being sarcastic?

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