JohnO'Neill was FBI agent Bush kept from Bin Laden investigations

http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/06.03A.oneill.nyer.htm

The Counter-Terrorist
by Lawrence Wright
The New Yorker Magazine

John O'Neill was an F.B.I. agent with an obsession: the growing threat of Al Qaeda.

June 1, 2002

The legend of John P. O'Neill, who lost his life at the World Trade Center on September 11th, begins with a story by Richard A. Clarke, the national coordinator for counter-terrorism in the White House from the first Bush Administration until last year. On a Sunday morning in February, 1995, Clarke went to his office to review intelligence cables that had come in over the weekend. One of the cables reported that Ramzi Yousef, the suspected mastermind behind the first World Trade Center bombing, two years earlier, had been spotted in Pakistan. Clarke immediately called the F.B.I. A man whose voice was unfamiliar to him answered the phone. "O'Neill," he growled.

"Who are you?" Clarke said.

"I'm John O'Neill," the man replied. "Who the hell are you?"

O'Neill had just been appointed chief of the F.B.I.'s counter-terrorism section, in Washington. He was forty-two years old, and had been transferred from the bureau's Chicago office. After driving all night, he had gone directly to headquarters that Sunday morning without dropping off his bags. When he heard Clarke's report about Yousef, O'Neill entered the F.B.I.'s Strategic Information Operations Center (SIOC) and telephoned Thomas Pickard, the head of the bureau's National Security Division in New York. Pickard then called Mary Jo White, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, who had indicted Yousef in the bombing case.

One of O'Neill's new responsibilities was to put together a team to bring the suspect home. It was composed of agents who were working on the case, a State Department representative, a medical doctor, a hostage-rescue team, and a fingerprint expert whose job was to make sure that the suspect was, in fact, Ramzi Yousef. Under ordinary circumstances, the host country would be asked to detain the suspect until extradition paperwork had been signed and the F.B.I. could place the man in custody. There was no time for that. Yousef was reportedly preparing to board a bus for Peshawar. Unless he was apprehended, he would soon cross the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan, where he would be out of reach. There was only one F.B.I. agent in Pakistan at the time, along with several agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration and the State Department's diplomatic-security bureau. "Our Ambassador had to get in his car and go ripping across town to get the head of the local military intelligence," Clarke recalled. "The chief gave him his own personal aides, and this ragtag bunch of American law-enforcement officials and a couple of Pakistani soldiers set off to catch Yousef before he got on the bus." O'Neill, working around the clock for the next three days, coordinated the entire effort. At 10 A.M. Pakistan time, on Tuesday, February 7th, SIOC was informed that the World Trade Center bomber was in custody.

During the next six years, O'Neill became the bureau's most committed tracker of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network of terrorists as they struck against American interests around the world. Brash, ambitious, often full of himself, O'Neill had a confrontational personality that brought him powerful enemies. Even so, he was too valuable to ignore. He was the point man in the investigation of the terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia, East Africa, and Yemen. At a time when the Clinton Administration was struggling to decide how to respond to the terrorist threat, O'Neill, along with others in the F.B.I. and the C.I.A., realized that Al Qaeda was relentless and resourceful and that its ultimate target was America itself. In the last days of his life, after he had taken a new job as the chief of security for the World Trade Center, he was warning friends, "We're due."

MORE......much much MORE................

Hey, did you hear the one about Robert Hansen being a Russian spy?

the material? There are lots of newcomers to DU who may have missed these discussions.

You almost sound like you don't want to hear it.....hmmmmmmm.

The Bush-Saudi Connection

By Michelle Mairesse

EXCERPT...

Jihad

The Wahhabi Taliban in Afghanistan had the blessings of the Saudi royal family and of The Big Three--the bin Laden family, the al Ahmoudi family, and the Mahfouz family--the richest clans in that medieval kingdom. (A C.I.A. official testified to Congress that Khalid bin Mahfouz is bin Laden’s brother-in-law). The desert oligarchs profited from world-wide investments as well as sleazy banking schemes such as the infamous Bank of Credit and Commerce International.

Salem bin Laden, Osama’s brother, has conducted all his American affairs through James Bath, a Houston crony of the Bush family. Bath’s former business partner Bill White testified in court that Bath had been a liaison for the C.I.A. In 1979 Bath invested $50,000 in Arbusto, George W. Bush’s first business venture. Rumor had it that Bath was acting as Salem bin Laden’s representative. "In conflicting statements, Bush at first denied ever knowing Bath, then acknowledged his stake in Arbusto and that he was aware Bath represented Saudi interests." (4)

In addition to doing aviation business with Saudi sheiks, Bath was part owner of a Houston bank whose chief stockholder was Ghaith Pharaon, who represented the Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI), a criminal global bank with branches in 73 countries. BCCI proceeded to defraud depositors of $10 billion during the ‘80s, while providing a money laundry conduit for the Medellin drug cartel, Asia’s major heroin cartel, Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and Islamist terrorist organizations worldwide. (5)

Big Three wheeler-dealer Khalid bin Mahfouz, one of the largest stockholders in the criminal bank, was indicted when the massive BCCI banking scandal blew apart in the early 1990s. The Saudi royal family placed him under house arrest after discovering that Mahfouz had used the royal bank to channel millions of dollars through fake charities into bin Laden’s organizations, but Mahfouz was not so much punished as inconvenienced. (6)

CONTINUED...

http://www.hermes-press.com/BushSaud.htm

Wahhabis in the Old Dominion
What the federal raids in Northern Virginia uncovered.
Weekly Standard
by Stephen Schwartz
04/08/2002, Volume 007, Issue 29
<snip>

......Reaction to the raids suggests the Feds inflicted serious injury on the Wahhabi lobby, the Saudi-backed extremist network that largely controls Islam in America. Officials of the targeted groups as well as their non-Muslim apologists--notably GOP operative Grover Norquist, the chief enabler of Islamic extremists seeking access to the White House--have condemned the raids as civil rights violations......


The keystone of the Saudi-sponsored Northern Virginia network is the Saar Foundation, created by Suleiman Abdul Al-Aziz al-Rajhi, a scion of one of the richest Saudi families. The Saar Foundation is connected to Al-Taqwa, a shell company formerly based in Switzerland, where its leading figures included a notorious neo-Nazi and Islamist, Ahmed Huber. Subsequently moved to the United States, Al-Taqwa was shut down after September 11 and its assets frozen by U.S. presidential order. But operations continued, as the Wahhabi lobby shifted to its backup institutions here.
Saar has also been linked to Khalid bin Mahfouz, former lead financial adviser to the Saudi royal family and ex-head of the National Commercial Bank of Saudi Arabia. Mahfouz has been named by French intelligence as a backer of Osama bin Laden; Mahfouz endowed the Muwafaq Foundation, which U.S. authorities confirm was an arm of bin Laden's terror organization. Muwafaq's former chief, Yassin al-Qadi, oversaw the financial penetration of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Albania by Wahhabi terrorists in the late 1990s.

more: <http://terrorism.reallybites.com/article16.htm>

Head of SAAR donated $1000 to Bush in 2000. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28721-2002Mar27?language=printer
The request created a thorny question for the Bush administration -- whether the president should take campaign cash from a leader of a Northern Virginia group that his own Treasury Department is raiding as part of a terrorist financing investigation.

Is this why Treasury head Tom O'Neil was let go?

Grover Norquist is the same conservative who said his dream was to "shrink government down to size" so he could drag it to the bathtroom and "drown it in the bathtub." Sounds like his mind works in a "different" way from the sane. Below is a photo from 1983, demonstrating what some of Norquist's business partners did to the US Marine barracks in Beirut.



Norquist's group took seed money from an avowed supporter of Hezbollah, the terrorist group that killed 241 US Marines in a 1983 Beirut bombing.

Islamist 'enabler' threatens 'grave harm to Bush presidency,' Gaffney warns

A prominent conservative leader who allegedly has used undeclared foreign money and top political connections to promote terrorist sympathizers is an 'enabler' who threatens 'to do grave harm to the Bush presidency.'

SNIP...

'People who afford terrorist-supporters or -apologists and their organizations entree into the White House deserve to be both challenged and criticized,' Gaffney wrote in response. Norquist, an anti-tax activist and Washington networker who often purports to speak in the name of President Bush, told Gaffney in a widely distributed letter that the Center for Security Policy leader was guilty of 'racial prejudice, religous bigotry or ethnic hatred' because the criticized official is a Muslim.

In response, Gaffney and American Conservative Union leader David Keene slammed Norquist for 'employing "Stalinist tactics" against those who disagree with Mr. Norquist's role in brokering access to the Bush White House,' the Washington Times reported on February 7.

Norquist has been criticized for promoting what is called the Wahhabi lobby, a Saudi-funded network designed to dominate and radicalize Islam in America, at the expense of other Muslim groups whose stand against terrorism is unequivocal.


CONTINUED...

http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/index.jsp?section=today&headline_id=149

also for United Airlines and Dulles Airport on 911...google "Securacom/Bush"...the company that hired O'Neil after leaving the FBI...and 9/11 was his first day on the new job :(

Marvin Bush
... Nonetheless, public records reveal that the firm, formerly named Securacom,
listed Bush on its board of directors and as a significant shareholder. ...
www.anderson.ath.cx:8000/911/hj05.html

Bush-Linked Company Handled Security for the WTC, Dulles and ...
... Marvin Bush joined Securacom when it was capitalized by the Kuwait-American Corporation,
a private investment firm in DC that was the security company's major ...
www.commondreams.org/views03/0204-06.htm

Security, Secrecy and A Bush Brother
... Public records indicate that the firm, formerly named Securacom, had Bush on
its board of directors. He was also listed as a significant shareholder. ...
www.dissidentvoice.org/Articles5/Burns_Stratesec.htm

the "cause of death" on the coroner's report.

They really did a good job of showing who O'Neil was. He harped on the link between Al Qaeda and the Saudis, and was ignored by CIA head Louis Freeh.

The particulars of how he got the job at the WTC is what I want know.

of taking office...it was bush not freeh

piece. O'Neil was investigating the USS Cole bombing and linked the perps to Saudi Arabia. During the flight back from Yemen he confronted the CIA head. O'Neil was seriously agitated that the Saudis were off limits in the investigation.

I think this was during the early Bush Admin. I'll check on it.

http://insiders7.ezboard.com/fcpndhardcorefrm9.showMessage?topicID=355.topic

"In October of 2000, after entering the Port of Aden off the coast of Yemen, the USS Cole was hit by suicide bomber. The blast killed 17 and injured 35 Americans. O'Neill was sent over to investigate, as head of the FBI team. Accompanying O'Neill to Yemen were over 100 FBI agents, laboratory experts and forensics specialists, as well as FBI Director Louis J. Freeh. From the earliest moments of the investigation, O'Neill was sure Bin Laden was responsible. However, from the start, his efforts to work the case were sabotaged by US ambassador to Yemen, Barbara Bodine. Bodine refused to cooperate in the investigation or to encourage Yemenis to cooperate. Despite repeated death threats against agents, she refused to allow them to carry the type of weapons O'Neill considered adequate. O'Neill reportedly called Louis Freeh in the middle of the night once expressing anxiety about the safety of his men. The clash between O'Neill and Bodine went steadily from bad to worse, peaking when Bodine publicly called O'Neill a liar. Incredibly, Bodine claimed that through her actions, she was merely trying to keep diplomatic relations running smoothly.
But a look at Ms. Bodine's history suggests a very different motivation. Throughout her career, Barbara Bodine has served primarily under rightwing old boys and in areas where the oil interests of said old boys are being furthered. Under Reagan, she served as Deputy Principle Officer in Baghdad, Iraq. Under Bush, Sr., she served as Deputy Chief of Mission in Kuwait and was there during the Gulf War. She has also worked for Bob Dole, and far more ominously, for Henry Kissinger. So, in 2000 we find her in Yemen, and though a Clinton appointee, impeding the Clinton administration's efforts to conduct an investigation of a crime of terrorism in which the chief suspect is the son of a Bush family business associate.
What makes Bodine's actions toward O'Neill particularly indefensible is that there is credible evidence that she herself was to blame, at least in part, for the Cole disaster. Kie Fallis, a Defense Intelligence Agency counterterrorism analyst, had issued a report before the disaster, warning of the danger of just such an attack in Yemen. As it turned out, the report was suppressed by senior DIA officials, and by Bodine and Gen. Anthony Zinn, who decided to allow the Cole to enter the Port under the lowest grade of security permitted in the Middle East — though they were both aware of the warning. Fallis quit in protest the day after the bombing.

"...The article further makes reference to Vernon Loeb, Al Quds al-Arabi (Atwan), Judith Miller, Al Jazeera, and Brian Jenkins (formerly of Kroll Associates - the security firm that obtained the WTC position for John O'Neill by way of Jerry Hauer)."?


- snip -

As regards New York, there is another element involved in germ warfare operations. Actually, a multi-million dollar bunker - serving as a command and control center in the event of a biological attack - was set up at 7 World Trade Center at the direction of Rudolph Giuliani, who also oversaw the mass spraying of malathion over the boroughs of New York City when the West Nile Virus hit town a few summers previously. The man Giuliani placed in charge of that operation, Jerry Hauer, also happened to be the man who found John O'Neill the position at the World Trade Center, as well as being the one who - by his own admission - identified O'Neill's body.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/KUP206A.html

John O'Neill, the former head of the FBI's antiterrorism division -- who perished in the World Trade Center on September 11-- told Jean-Charles Brisard in July 2001,

"All of the answers, all of the clues allowing us to dismantle Osama bin Laden's organization, can be found in Saudi Arabia."


-- excerpt from French book by Jean-Charles Brisard
http://www.forbiddentruth.net/book.html

I have seen one report that says that O'Neill made it to the ground floor of the World Trade Tower, made a cell phone call to someone (wife? can't remember) saying he was okay, then apparently went back upstairs and perished.

Sorry, I don't seem to have saved the reference. I remember being surprised, because that creates a possibility for not just bad circumstance, but foul play directed at O'Neill. (I said POSSIBILITY.)

O'Neill quit the FBI only two weeks before 9-11.