Black 9/11

A review

The best way to discover the truth about the monumentally corrupt, near monolithic power that rules over the United States and much of the free world is to dig as deeply as you can into one important issue. Pulling on one loose string, you will find, soon causes an unraveling of the nice, neat ball as it is presented to us by the press and by much of the academic community. The truth, you will find, is quite different from what absolutely every single person in the mainstream media and government is telling you that it is.

Different Eye Openers

The big awakening for me, after I had already developed a rather hefty skepticism over the Kennedy and King assassinations, was the Vince Foster case. Here is how I summed up my epiphany over the death of Bill Clinton’s deputy White House counsel:

For those willing to open their eyes only a little bit, no episode reveals so simply and clearly the complete corruption of America’s major institutions as we head into the 21^st century.  How easily did a supine Congress, led by the putative opposition, go along with the obvious cover-up of Foster’s murder by not one, but two “independent” counsels (and now, actually, three with the replacement of Kenneth Starr by Robert Ray)!  How willingly did a number of “experts” in the medical and psychology professions cash in their credibility by lending their assistance to the murder cover-up!  How complete was the silence about it from America’s intellectual leaders, if such creatures even exist.  Are you listening, Noam Chomsky?  And most important of all, what an expensive, Herculean effort its massive propaganda apparatus, otherwise known as America’s news and entertainment media and its publishing industry, have had to put forth to nail down the impression in our minds that, contrary to the evidence that is as plain as the nose on your face, the experienced courtroom litigator, poor Vincent Foster, was such a weakling at heart that he was moved to suicide by a smattering of public criticism that was only remotely and tangentially directed his way!

That article was published on November 26, 2000. I concluded the article this way:

And if they would lie to us about this, isn't it a safe bet that they would also lie to us about such things as the Oklahoma City bombing, Waco, TWA 800, Egypt Air Flight 999, Pan Am 103, and any number of political assassinations? That is the real lesson of Vince Foster's death.

As it turned out we were only a little more than nine months away from another major outrage that would make major demands upon the big lying machine, the “attacks” of September 11, 2001. Not long after, researcher Mark H. Gaffney began pulling on this new loose string and made many of the same discoveries that I have about our corrupt rulers—and many more. One of the most important ones is encapsulated in one paragraph of his prologue of his 2012 work, Black 9/11: Money, Motive and Technology:

America is probably the most propagandized country on earth, with the possible exception of totalitarian backwater places like North Korea or Burma. Our countrymen have been systematically dumbed down, distracted and demoralized by our own government and its willing minions in the media and throughout much of academia. Here in the US, the dark arts of thought control have been elevated to a level of sophistication almost undreamed of by the Nazis and Soviets.

As we write this, that essential truth is being brought home to a large new audience among the many followers of the insurgent presidential candidate, Donald Trump, many of whom might never even have heard of Vince Foster. Up until very recently they might even have believed all that they were told by our thoroughgoing propaganda apparatus about 9/11 and all the other outrages I list in “Vince Foster’s Valuable Murder.” Now a lot of people are almost being forced to know things that they are a lot more comfortable not knowing.

Mark Gaffney does not write for people who prefer the comfort of their ignorance. In his earlier book, the main dangling 9/11 strings that he pulled at were the sighting of what appeared to be a command and control military plane over Washington, DC, at the time of the attack on the Pentagon, and the impossibility of WTC Building 7 having collapsed as a result of a small office fire in a corner of the building. His latest book directs our attention more broadly to the powerful financial interests who benefitted from the attacks and the many ways in which they were directly involved in them. He also examines the numerous anomalies associated with the flights of the four airplanes known to have been involved in the operation, concluding persuasively that remote takeover of the flights makes abundantly more sense than the official story that totally incompetent novice pilots were able to pull off the spectacular feats of airmanship we are asked to believe that they did.

Follow the Money

The first point is hard to summarize, but we can make some progress in doing so by looking at one of his primary sources available online, the story of the Black Eagle Trust Fund. I commend the whole article, and the longer one that it summarizes, to readers attention, but the heart of that article can be found in two paragraphs:

With an understanding of the economic war being waged on the Soviet Union, the focus needs to turn to reports that on September 11, 1991, President George Bush was responsible for issuing $240 billion dollars in secretive bonds as a part of this attack on the Russian ruble. There are six lines of evidence from eight sources that suggest this was indeed the case. Many of these instances are corroborated with documents available on the Internet, presented by those making the claims.

The bonds sat for ten years, like a ticking time bomb. They had to be settled – or cashed in by September 12, 2001. The two firms in the U.S. most likely to be handling them would be Cantor Fitzgerald and Eurobrokers – the two largest government securities firms in the U.S. The federal agency mostly involved in investigating those transactions was the Office of Naval Intelligence. On 9/11, those same three organizations: the two largest government securities brokers and the Office of Naval Intelligence in the US took direct hits. (Emphasis added)

That article makes reference to a couple of things we have written about. The economic war against the Soviet Union conducted by the Reagan administration is still little known by the American public, and even Gaffney seems not to be aware of its sabotage element. Had he known of it, it might have directed him to connect the apparent assassination of one of its principal architects in late 2003, Gus W. Weiss. It never occurred to me at the time I wrote about it that there might have been a 9/11 connection to Weiss’s curious untimely demise, called a suicide with virtually no supporting evidence, but it certainly does now.

I have only briefly alluded to the second important item. Gaffney devotes a chapter to it. It is the vast amount of Japanese stolen gold that has underwritten a great deal of the dirtiest dealing by the Deep State, and which very few people know about. This is from the Black Eagle Trust Fund article:

Numerous sources have documented that at the end of WWII, the treasury of the Japanese Empire was discovered in the Philippines by a staff member of General Charles Willoughby, [Edward Lansdale], who was General MacArthur’s chief of Intelligence. Then known as the Golden Lily Treasure, this mass of wealth had been accumulated by the Japanese through over fifty years of pillaging by its army in Southeast Asia and China. It was deposited in the Philippines due to the U.S. submarine blockade of Japan. Reports vary, but documents in the public domain suggest the recovered treasure was in excess of 280,000 metric tonnes of gold, not including jewels and diamonds. After the War [Lansdale] tortured Major Kojima Kashii – General Yamashita Tomoyuki’s driver – until he revealed and created a map of the gold sites.

The one best source on this subject, which Gaffney makes great use of, is Gold Warriors: America’s Secret Recovery of Yamashita’s Gold by Sterling and Peggy Seagraves. So sensitive is the whole topic, apparently, that the book was erased from my Kindle for the three weeks that I traveled in South Korea in the fall of 2013. I write about it in my article, “My Brush with French (and World) ‘Press Freedom’.”

That huge stash of dirty money also has connections to the Ron Rewald case in Hawaii, which I mention briefly in my review of The Money and the Power, by Sally Denton and Roger Morris. A neighbor of mine who was a producer for the BBC was stopped by law enforcement at Dulles Airport upon his return from covering the Rewald trial and told that he was suspected of smuggling drugs. A search of his luggage turned up nothing, but knowing how easily drugs could have been planted, but he was duly shaken, having clearly received the message of how dangerous it was to dig deeply into the Rewald case.

The big overlap between the Denton and Morris book and the Gaffney book concerns not illicit confiscated gold, though, but illicit drugs and money laundering. We learn from The Money and the Power that a lot of the mob money that built Las Vegas came from the illegal drug trade and that its casinos continue as major money laundering operations. Denton and Morris also write about the extensive connections between organized crime and the CIA. So important does Gaffney consider the matter to be that it is the central topic of his first chapter.

Time and again, the same historic pattern has played out: US military intervention, whether in Southeast Asia, Central America or, since 2001, Afghanistan and Iraq, has been accompanied by a sharp increase in narcotrafficking, with all the attendant evils.

Quite simply, a US power elite has followed in the footsteps of the British and French, who in their day also exploited the immensely profitable opium and heroin trade.

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After the onset of the war in Afghanistan, the CIAs support for Afghan drug lords moved out of the closet. By 2009, even the major US papers were reporting on it.

They weren’t reporting on it nearly enough, though. Most of what they have reported on the unprecedented epidemic of drug overdose deaths in the country is designed the give the impression that it comes from the abuse of prescription drugs. That is simply not true.

The concealing-of-financial-hanky-panky aspect of 9/11 was brought home vividly to the young software salesman, Richard A. Grove, who had just lost his job at a company called Silverstream. He had discovered that his employer was overbilling the huge insurance underwriter, Marsh and McLellan, to the tune of $7 million or more and when he called attention to that fact to the key executives at both his employer and the customer, neither seemed to be concerned about it. He was on his way to meet with several sympathetic contacts at Marsh and McLellan in WTC-1 on September 11, 2001, but was delayed by Manhattan traffic. By the time he got in sight of the Twin Towers, WTC-2, the South Tower, collapsed in front of him. All of his key contacts at Marsh and McLellan had already perished in the collapse of WTC-1. You can hear Grove talk about his experience and his education on YouTube. He is one of Gaffney’s major sources.

Gaffney also writes extensively about the money that was made on insider trading of the stock of some of the companies that would experience some of the biggest losses on 9/11. One of his main sources is Kyle Hence of Global Research:

In 2002, investigator Kyle Hence wrote about the stocks involved in the SEC’s target list.  Those that had the highest examples of trade volume over the average were UAL [285 times over average], Marsh & McLennan (Marsh) [93 times over average], American Airlines (AMR) [60 times over average], and Citigroup [45 times over average]. Other stocks flagged included financial firms, defense-related companies, and the reinsurance firms Munich Re, Swiss Re and the AXA Group.  Put options for these reinsurance firms, or bets that the stock would drop, were placed at double the normal levels in the few days before the attacks.  Regulators were concerned about “large block trades” on these stocks because the three firms were liable for billions in insurance payouts due to the damage inflicted on 9/11.

The four highest-volume suspect stocks — UAL, Marsh, AMR and Citigroup — were closely linked to the attacks of 9/11.  The two airline companies each had two planes hijacked and destroyed.  Marsh was located in the exact 8 floors out of 110 in the north tower of the WTC where Flight 11 impacted and the fires occurred.  Citigroup was the parent of Travelers Insurance, which was expected to see $500 million in claims, and also Salomon Smith Barney, which occupied all but ten floors in World Trade Center (WTC) building 7.  Oddly enough, Salomon Smith Barney had both Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney on its advisory board until January 2001.

The quote is not from Gaffney, but from another Global Research article by Kevin Ryan that covers much of the same ground, “Evidence of Insider Trading on the Attacks of September 11.” Another non-Gaffney quote takes us further into the ground Gaffney covers in his third chapter, entitled “Insider’s Trade.”

To the embarrassment of investigators, it has also emerged that the firm used to buy many of the “put” options [related to 9-11] – where a trader, in effect, bets on a share price fall – on United Airlines stock was headed until 1998 by “Buzzy” Krongard, now executive director of the CIA. Until 1997, Mr Krongard was chairman of Alex Brown Inc, America’s oldest investment banking firm. Alex Brown was acquired by Bankers Trust, which in turn was bought by Deutsche Bank. His last post before resigning to take his senior role in the CIA was to head Bankers Trust – Alex Brown’s private client business, dealing with the accounts and investments of wealthy customers around the world.

This quote is from The Independent (UK) from an October 13, 2001, article by Chris Blackhurst. The quote is used to very good effect at the beginning of Christopher Bollyn’s online article that goes somewhat beyond Gaffney in pointing the finger at the prime suspects for 9/11, “9-11 and Alvin Krongard – Israel’s Agent at the CIA.”

As Usual, the CIA at the Center

To say that Bollyn goes beyond Gaffney is not to suggest, though, that Gaffney gives short shrift to the CIA’s likely role in the 9/11 outrage or to Israel’s. We learn from him in his sixth chapter, “Rise of the National Security State,” that the CIA from its inception has been perhaps more an arm of Wall Street than of the executive branch of the federal government:

According to former CIA director Richard Helms, when Allen Dulles was tasked in 1946 to “draft proposals for the shape and organization of what was to become the Central Intelligence Agency,” he recruited an advisory group of six men made up almost exclusively of Wall Street investment bankers and lawyers. Dulles himself was an attorney at the prominent Wall Street law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell. Two years later, Dulles became the chairman of a three-man committee which reviewed the young agency’s performance. The other two members of the committee were also New York lawyers. For nearly a year, the committee met in the offices of J.H. Whitney, a Wall Street investment firm.

According to Peter Dale Scott, over the next twenty years, all seven deputy directors of the agency were drawn from the Wall Street financial aristocracy; and six were listed in the New York social register. So we see that from the beginning the CIA was an exclusive Wall Street club. Allen Dulles himself became the first civilian Director of Central Intelligence in early 1953.

President Harry Truman, under whose watch the CIA was created by the National Security Act of 1947, later expressed regrets about it:

But while most Americans have at least heard of Ike’s famous warning [about the military industrial complex], delivered in his final address to the nation, by contrast, Truman’s remarkable letter has been forgotten.  No doubt, Truman ruffled some powerful feathers, because later that day, his letter was mysteriously yanked from subsequent editions of the Post.

And Israel, Too

As for the likely Israeli involvement in 9/11, Gaffney might not go as far in his book as Bollyn does, but an article he published online just before his book came out, “9/11: The FBI Report and the Dancing Israelis Standing Truth on its Ear” should allay any fears that he might be a false critic deflecting suspicion away from Israel.

The Mossad team based in Weehawken not only had, by its own admission, foreknowledge of the “attacks,” the testimony in the FBI’s own report, as I have attempted to show, suggests that the Israelis also knew, that very morning, that the World Trade Center was being demolished with explosives.

Much of what he writes about concerning the apparently celebrating Israelis on the day of the attacks is already widely known—though no thanks to our news media—but as he lays out the case that 19 hijackers could not possibly have flown the planes that day, he reveals an Israel connection that came as news to me, and I’m sure it will to most of his readers. Officially, a completely inept pilot, even in single-engine propeller-driven aircraft, by the name of Hani Hanjour was the pilot of the airplane that made the extraordinary spiraling dive into the Pentagon.

On August 16 and 17 Hanjour attempted to rent a single-engine Cessna 172 at Freeway Airport in Bowie, Maryland, near Washington, DC. The airport manager insisted that he first go up with instructors so his piloting skills could be evaluated. After three such flights over two days, based upon the recommendations of two instructors, he was denied his rental request because his skills were so inadequate. This evaluation, Gaffney points out in great detail, was completely consistent whit the impression that Hanjour had left on all previous flight instructors. Yet, three days later he went through the same procedure before renting another Cessna 172 not far away at Montgomery County Airpark and he passed with flying colors. The 9//11 Commission Report ignores the Freeway Airport incident, but, as Gaffney reports, had the following little item on page 531, note 170:

Hanjour successfully conducted a challenging certification flight supervised by an instructor at Congressional Air Charter of Gaithersburg, Maryland, landing at a small airport with a difficult approach. The instructor thought Hanjour may have had training from a military pilot because he used a terrain recognition system for system for navigation. Eddie Shalev interview. (Apr. 9, 2004)

So who was this Eddie Shalev who discovered flying skill in Hanjour that no one before him had been able to come close to detecting? Supporting documents to The 9/11 Commission Report released by the National Archives in 2009 reveal that Shalev is an Israeli military veteran who moved to the Gaithersburg area in April 2001. He was a jumpmaster on a Boeing C-130 for the Israeli Defense Forces in a paratroop regiment. Since that revelation, various 9/11 researchers have tried to track him down, but without success. No one by that name can be found in the United States. An “Eddy Shalev” has been located in Israel, but he seems not to be the same person.

A Realistic Guidebook

As with Gaffney’s previous book on the subject, The 9/11 Mystery Plane and the Vanishing of America, there is far more material of great importance in Black 9/11 than a review can possibly do justice to. If you feel that you can’t take the time to read what he has written, you should at least acquaint yourself with some of the sources to which I have directed you in this review. Gaffney well summarizes what is at stake with this passage in his concluding chapter:

One thing is clear: We will not succeed in our efforts to demobilize the US war machine and restore the US Constitution unless we open our eyes, full wide. Because our only chance to exert a positive influence on events will be through right action, and that means we must understand our world as it actually is, not as we would like it to be, and or as some would have us believe. (Emphasis in original)

Stated metaphorically, it is very unwise to follow a map that has roads and terrain features that are where you wish they were rather than where they are or one that was prepared by people whose only interest is directing you where they want you to go. To read Black 9/11 is to take at least one realistic step toward navigating our perilous future.

David Martin

October 26, 2016

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