“Black 9/11: A Walk on the Dark Side”

“Black 9/11: A Walk on the Dark Side”
 – by Mark H. Gaffney

“In his important 2006 book “Nemesis, the Last Days of the American
Republic,” the third and concluding part of a trilogy, the late Chalmers
Johnson, who was an expert on Japan and US foreign policy, writes that
as much as 40% of the Pentagon budget is “black,” meaning hidden from
public scrutiny.  If the figure is even approximately correct, and I
believe it is, the number is alarming because it suggests that
democratic oversight of US military research and development has broken
down. In which case our democratic values and way of life are presently
at risk; not from without, as there is no foreign enemy that can
destroy the US Constitution, but from within.

I would argue that Chalmers Johnson’s estimate was corroborated on
September 10, 2001, on the eve of the worst terrorist attack in US
history, when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld acknowledged during a
press conference that the Department of Defense (DoD) could not
account for $2.3 trillion of the massive Pentagon budge, a number so
large as to be incomprehensible.  Any remaining hope that the US
military might still get its budgetary house in order were dashed at
9:38 AM the next morning when the west wing of the Pentagon exploded in
flames and smoke, the target of a terrorist strike. Incredibly, the
exact point of impact was the DoD’s accounting offices on the first
floor. The surgical destruction of its records and staff, nearly all of
whom died in the attack, raises important questions about who
benefited from 9/11. Given the Pentagon’s vast size, the statistical
odds against this being a coincidence prompted skeptics of the official
story to read a dark design into the attack. As Deep Throat said:
“Follow the money.”

Was the Pentagon accounting office destroyed because diabolical
individuals had planned it that way? No question, the west wing
presented a much more challenging target than the east wing. Targeting
the west wing required a difficult approach over the Arlington skyline.
The final approach was especially dicey and amounted to a downhill
obstacle course, skirting apartments and also a large building complex
known as the Naval Annex, which was smack in the way. The Annex is
located about a quarter-mile from the Pentagon and sits atop a hill
that rises from the flat ground along the Potomac River. When I
interviewed Army Brigadier General Clyde Vaughn over the telephone, in
April 2008, he explained that he was on his way to work at the
Pentagon, on the morning of 9/11, via Shirley Highway (I-395) when the
strike occurred. In my opinion, Vaughn is an especially credible
witness because some of his remarks to CNN, that morning, did not
conform with the official narrative about what happened. The general
told me that the hijacked aircraft (presumably AA 77) just missed the
Naval Annex and would have hit the US Air Force memorial that presently
occupies the site, had the 270 feet-tall monument existed on 9/11. The
new memorial was constructed in 2006 and dedicated the same year.

Why did the terrorists not take the easy approach up the Potomac River?
The river approach would have afforded a reasonably good chance to
crash the offices of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, which which were located on the opposite side of the
building, in the middle of the outer “E” ring. The location of their
offices was no secret. Surely terrorists would have been more
interested in decapitating the command structure of the US war machine
than going after a bunch of accounting clerks.

That morning, there were other striking anomalies. The crash of AA 11
into the North Tower at 8:46 AM should also have raised red flags
because the point of impact at the the 95th and 96th floors was too
remarkable to be happenstance. Both floors were occupied by Marsh &
McLennan, one of the world’s largest insurance brokerages, with family
ties to the private intelligence firm, Kroll Associates, which held
the security contract at the World Trade Center. Indeed, the network of
corporate ties is so entangled, that were I to trace all of the links
they would easily fill a book. Here, I will sketch out only the most
salient connections.

The CEO of Marsh & McLennnan on 9/11 was Jeffry Greenberg, son of
Maurice “Hank” Greenberg, owner of AIG, the world’s largest insurance
conglomerate (or second largest, depending on the source). Greenberg’s
other son, Evan, was CEO of Ace Limited, another large insurance
company. Maurice Greenberg had been a director of the New York Federal
Reserve Bank for many years, and in 1994-95 served as its chairman.
Greenberg was also vice-chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations
(CFR), which in 1996 published his report, “Making Intelligence Smarter:
The future of U.S. Intelligence”; as a result of which Senator Arlen
Specter floated Greenberg’s name as a candidate for the directorship of
the CIA. Although George Tenet eventually got the job, the mere fact
that Greenberg was in the running shows the extent of his influence. In
1993, Greenberg’s huge insurance conglomerate AIG reportedly bankrolled
the Wall Street spy firm, Kroll Associates, saving it from bankruptcy.
Thereafter, Kroll became an AIG subsidiary. After the 1993 World Trade
Center bombing, Kroll acquired the contract from the Port Authority of
New York to upgrade security at the World Trade Center, in the process
beating out two other firms. Kroll continued with the WTC security
contract through the period leading up to the September 11 attacks. One
of Kroll’s directors, Jerome Hauer, also managed New York mayor Rudolph
Giuliani’s Office of Emergency Management, which was located on the
23rd floor of WTC-7.

Notice, this means Kroll had unfettered access to all three of the
buildings destroyed on 9/11. This startling coincidence should have
been reason enough for the 9/11 Commission to investigate Kroll’s shady
background as well as its relations with AIG, Ace, and Marsh &
McClennan. The commission was armed with subpoena authority and might
have probed deeply enough to learn the truth. Unfortunately, the
official investigators were not interested in connecting the dots.
Although Kroll was based in New York City, it served (and still serves)
an international clientele through 60 offices in some 27 countries.
Over the years, the firm has repeatedly been accused of, and/or
formally charged with, conspiracy. In 1995 the French government
expelled several Americans from the country, including a Kroll employee
named William Lee, for allegedly spying on French industry. Lee’s
involvement with Kroll made French authorities suspicious that his
Paris operation might be a CIA front. The French were surely aware of
Kroll’s longstanding practice of hiring former CIA, FBI, and British
Intelligence agents. Kroll/AIG made no effort to conceal the fact that
between 1997-2003 the AIG board of directors included Frank G. Wisner,
Jr., son of one of the founders of the CIA. Wisner Jr. is also a member
of the Council on Foreign Relations. Wisner Jr. also served as US
ambassador to several nations, including Egypt, and is a member of the
Council on Foreign Relations. Wisner’s name surfaced in the news when
President Obama dispatched Wisner as his personal envoy to confer with
the embattled Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak. Even as popular pressure
continued to build for Mubarak to step down, Wisner embarrassed Obama
by publicly encouraging Mubarak to ride out the crisis and hang onto
power. No doubt, his action reflects the view from Langley, which would
much prefer to have seen Mubarak remain in power. The CIA had long
supported the Mubarak regime and in return was allowed to use Egypt as a
haven for renditions and torture. Wisner’s thumbing his nose at his
own president, no doubt, was also an accurate measure of the US
national security state’s low opinion of Obama. It certainly exposed
Obama’s weakness as president.

Did the French government over-react in 1995 when it expelled a Kroll
employee for suspected industrial espionage? Possibly, but the French
had good reason to be wary of CIA meddling in their country. It is a
safe bet the French have not forgotten Operation Gladio, the rogue
intelligence network secretly organized in Europe by the CIA, NATO and
British MI-6, after World War II.  “Gladio” means “sword” in Italian
and is the root of the word “gladiator.” Known as the “stay behind
armies,” they were in every NATO country, and totalled thousands of
paramilitary soldiers. Their ranks included known underworld criminals
and drug traffickers; and crucially, the CIA kept the whole operation
secret for nearly forty years.

Although the stay-behind-armies were supposed to form the nucleus of an
armed resistance movement in the event of a Soviet invasion of western
Europe, the invasion never materialized and the CIA-trained forces
were sometimes used for other less savory purposes. These included
smear and disinformation campaigns, mass bombings, kidnappings,
assassinations and attempted coup d’etats; all of which was blamed on
the communists. Before it was over, the CIA-staged terror campaign
added up to hundreds of incidents in Italy, France, Greece, Belgium,
and other European nations.

The news about Gladio first broke in the Italian press, in August 1990,
at the time of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait; and immediately
touched off a political earthquake on the continent. As they say, bad
news travels fast. Shock turned to outrage as Europeans learned that
for decades the CIA and NATO had been sponsoring terrorist attacks in
the democratic nations of Europe. All of which, as noted, was blamed on
the communists. The purpose of Gladio had been to strike fear into the
population of Europe, and thus, to weaken the left-wing parties.

If this sounds like fantasy to the reader, it is only because the US
media, to this day, has never informed the American people about the
CIA’s long and ugly history of staging international terrorism. Here in
the US, it is euphemistically known as “counter-terrorism.” Although
the average American is ignorant of the fact, most Frenchmen probably
also know that under Gladio the CIA lent support to an attempted putsch
against French President Charles de Gaulle in 1958 by reactionary
elements of the French army. The renegade French forces were opposed to
de Gaulle’s controversial decision to end to the French military
occupation of Algeria. Most of the people of France probably also know
about the CIA’s involvement in at least one other conspiracy to
assassinate de Gaulle in the mid-1960s; but which fortunately failed.
De Gaulle survived some thirty assassination attempts. At the time, the
CIA’s involvement caused a near rupture in US-French relations. De
Gaulle reacted angrily by pulling France out of NATO, and ordered US
military forces out of France. The US was compelled to move NATO
headquarters from Paris to Mons, in Belguim. Nor did the American
people hear the truth about what really happened. In fact, they still
do not know, because the US press has never informed them.

Given this brief background, one must ask: Were the French trying to
send a wake-up signal to the American people when they leaked the
following shocker about 9/11 to the world press? In October 2001 the
prestigious French paper Le Figaro reported that in July 2001, just two
months before 9/11, Osama bin Laden received dialysis treatments and
other medical care for a serious kidney ailment at the American
Hospital in Dubai, one of the Arab emirates in the Persian Gulf.[xiv]
At the time, bin Laden was a wanted man, and had been indicted by the
US Department of Justice for the 1998 bombing of US embassies in
Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. Yet, according to the detailed report in Le
Figaro, the Americans treated bin Laden as a VIP guest. The Al Qaeda
leader arrived with a retinue that included his personal physician, a
nurse, four bodyguards, and at least one of his lieutenants. Bin Laden
reportedly held court in his hospital suite, welcoming members of his
large family, Saudi officials, and even the local CIA station chief,
who evidently was a well known figure in the tiny country. The CIA
official was evidently seen entering bin Laden’s room. Immediately
after leaving, he caught a flight back to the US. The article in Le
Figaro was closely followed by a story in The Guardian (UK), which
added more details. It noted that bin Laden’s Saudi guests had included
Prince Turki al Faisal, then head of Saudi intelligence. The story
also named French intelligence as the source of the story in Le Figaro,
and added that the information was leaked because the French were
“keen to reveal the ambiguous role of the CIA and to restrain
Washington from extending the war to Iraq and elsewhere.”  If the story
is accurate, it means Osama bin Laden was a US intelligence asset
right up until the morning of 9/11. There is no other possible
interpretation. In which case, the American people have been seriously
misled, indeed, have been fed a pack of lies, about the events of that
horrible day. I would add: there were no retractions. Le Figaro stood
by its story. Meanwhile, the US media played dumb and never even
reported it.

But I digress. Back to AIG/Kroll. In 2005 the government of Brazil
formally indicted Kroll’s chief Brazilian executive Eduardo Sampaio and
five other Kroll employees on criminal charges, including bribery and
various breaches of Brazil’s data privacy laws. Sampaio reportedly
escaped arrest by fleeing the country.

In 2006 another Kroll affiliate made the news for “unacceptable billing
practices” while representing the failed energy giant Enron in court.
The Enron Corporation had collapsed in late 2001 amidst allegations of
fraudulent accounting; then, in January 2002, hired Kroll Zolfo Cooper
to handle its chapter 11 proceedings. The US Trustee Program, which
administers bankruptcy cases, uncovered the billing irregularities
after Kroll sought an additional fee of $25 million for its services.
The firm had already received a cool $100 million for scavenging the
Enron corpse but wanted more, even as stockholders received nothing.
Evidently, the folks at Kroll thought no one would notice a mere $25
million, which is chump change compared with the $30 billion in
inflated energy costs that Enron gouged from the state of California,
in 2000-2001. All of which must be good: because Enron got away with
it. According to economist Paul Krugman, emails confirmed that Enron
had rigged the markets. The heavily Democratic golden state has yet to
recover from what must be viewed as a partisan attack.

Also in 2006: a whistleblower named Richard A. Grove went public with
stunning testimony about his involvement with the Greenberg empire, an
up-close-and-personal experience, Grove says, that nearly cost him his
life. During the period leading up to 9/11, Grove worked as a salesman
for Silverstream Software, an enterprise company which marketed
designer solutions to a number of Wall Street firms, including Merrill
Lynch, Deutsche Bank, Banker’s Trust, Alex Brown, and Morgan Stanley.
According to Grove, Silverstream “built internet transactional and
trading platforms,” designed “to web-enable the critical business
functions of Fortune 500 companies, basically integrating and making
available on the web the disparate legacy applications and mainframes
while simultaneously streamlining workflow and traditional paper
processes.” The “end result [was] a lower cost of operation and more
efficient transactions because inefficiencies such as people were being
taken out of the loop.”

Grove was so successful as a salesman that (he claims) he became a
millionaire before the age of thirty. He only realized, later, that the
software he sold might have enabled fraudulent trading in the hours
before and possibly during the 9/11 attacks. The most advanced software
of all went to Marsh & McClennan, which, he says, placed an order
in 2000 for a technological solution “beyond what we had done for any
of the above-named companies; insofar as it would be used to
electronically connect Marsh to its major business partners via
internet portals, for the purpose of creating ‘paperless transactions’
and expediting revenue and renewal cycles.” Grove inked the software
deal with Marsh & McClennan in October 2000. After which, his
employer Silverstream stationed a team of 30-40 technicians in the
client’s offices in WTC-1, led by several software developers who
proceeded to design and build the software package “from the ground
up.” During this period, Grove served as liaison between
Silverstream/Marsh to insure that the software would perform as
specified. The team worked around-the-clock, seven days a week, to meet
Marsh’s pre-September 11, 2001 deadline. The end result was “a specific
type of connectivity that was used to link AIG and Marsh &
McLennan, the first two commercial companies on the planet to employ
this type of transaction.”

Grove says he first noticed fiscal irregularities in October 2000 when
he and a colleague helped “identify about $10,000,000 in suspicious
purchase orders.” Marsh’s chief information officer, Gary Lasko, later
confirmed that “certain vendors were deceiving Marsh….selling….large
quantities of hardware that were [sic] not necessary” for the project.
But Grove did not worry too much about this at the time, nor did he run
into personal trouble until the spring of 2001, when he learned, while
negotiating a license renewal contract with Lasko, that his own
employer Silverstream was over-billing Marsh “to the tune of $7
million, or more.” Grove brought the matter to the attention of
Silverstream executives but was told to keep quiet and mind his own
business. A Marsh executive advised him to do the same. By this point, a
number of Marsh employees had earned Grove’s trust and when he shared
his concerns with them, they agreed that “something untoward was going
on.” Grove names these honest employees in his testimonial: Kathryn
Lee, Ken Rice, Richard Breuhardt, John Ueltzhoeffer, in addition to
Gary Lasko, all of whom perished on 9/11. Incidentally, a simple check
confirmed that these names do indeed appear on the fatality list of
World Trade Center victims.

The proverbial schtick hit the fan on June 5th, 2001, the day after
Grove sent an email to his sales team informing them that “Silverstream
was billing Marsh millions above and beyond the numbers we were being
paid commissions on…” There were only two possibilities: either the
members of his team were being cheated out of their rightful
commissions, or Silverstream was defrauding Marsh & McClennan.
Later that day, Grove received word from Gary Lasko that Marsh had
decided to retain Silverstream for the the next phase of the project.
The extension was good news and he immediately informed his boss. Grove
was personally delighted because his rightful commission “would have
been a payday worth well over a million dollars.” He never collected
it, however; because the next morning, Grove was summoned to his boss’s
office and abruptly terminated.

This is not the end of the story. Several weeks later, Grove suffered a
medical emergency that required surgery and weeks of hospitalization.
In August 2001, while still bedridden, a Silverstream company official
visited him at the hospital and offered him $9,999 in cash plus an
extension of his medical benefits if he would agree never to talk about
the work he did for Silverstream. Grove needed the continuing medical
coverage and agreed to the terms. However, after his convalescence he
became suspicious about the secrecy agreement, and decided that, at
very least, he should maintain contact with the honest employees at
Marsh, several of whom were now close friends. Shortly thereafter, one
of them arranged for Grove to attend a meeting at the offices of Marsh
& McClennan, at which the honest employees planned to “openly
question the suspiciously unconcerned executive who seemed to be at the
center of the controversial secrecy.” The executive had agreed to
participate via a video conference link from his apartment in uptown
Manhattan. This was the same individual who, months before, had warned
Grove to look the other way. Grove was in possession of documents
proving illicit activity, and he planned to produce them at the
meeting. However, on the day of the showdown he ran late, having been
delayed by heavy Manhattan traffic. Grove says he was within 2-3 blocks
of the World Trade Center when UAL175 hit the South Tower. By then,
all or most of his friends in the North Tower were already dead, or
trapped on the upper floors. All told, some 300 or more Marsh employees
perished, that morning. None of whom had any idea what was in store
for them.”

- http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/?p=19712

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Mark
H. Gaffney is the author of “The 9/11 Mystery Plane and the Vanishing
of America” (2008). His next book, “Black 9/11,” will be released later
this year. 9/11 whistleblowers are encouraged to contact Mark at
[email protected]

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Hat tips to Alex Noble and Reality Zone for this material.

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Footnotes: http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/?p=19712