The Clean Energy Blockade

The oil and battery industries have spent over $73 Billion on disinformation and lobby campaigns to keep it from happening.
Kleiner Perkins, Elon Musk and a cartel of Silicon Valley VC’s that control the battery market, will stop at nothing to sabotage it.
The most powerful thing in the galaxy, our Sun, is powered by it.
You can get it from any organic material, or body of water, anywhere, in any country, any place on Earth.
If the word is even mentioned once in any blog, anywhere on the internet, it triggers alerts in hundreds of hired “Meat Puppet” farms where assigned blog trolls rush to the blog to cut-and-paste their assigned disinformation text in order to create doubt and concerns about it.
Unlike the competing solutions, It leaves no toxic waste, can’t cause cancer and turns into something that can saves lives after you use it.
The new Feature Film: “MERCHANTS OF DOUBT”, reveals the names and tactics behind the disinformation campaign against it.
Secretary of Energy: Steven Chu held financial interests in the competing technologies and actively sabotaged every effort for it under his regime. 15 U.S. Senators worked with him, on delaying it, because they also held stock in the competing effort.
Almost every taxpayer cash award winner that Steven Chu’s Dept. of Energy gave money to had an investment in the War in Afghanistan and the lithium, indium and other minerals from Afghanistan, which they planned to use in their “Cleantech” companies to obsolete this competing solution. Some say that was an “organized crime”-level corruption effort to claim to do a “feel-good” thing in order to get free taxpayer cash without a big ruckus.
People have been killed over it.
It affects hundreds of trillions of dollars of global markets.
If the West loses control of the Middle East: IT WILL BECOME THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT THING ON EARTH!
What is it?
HYDROGEN!

By spending billions of dollars trying to kill hydrogen, and the people around it, they are killing families, children, economies and the future of the world

HYDROGEN POLITICS: Here is how it works:
While all of the falsified points against hydrogen have been countered in numerous papers, such as: http://www.rmi.org/images/other/Energy/E03-05_20HydrogenMyths.pdf and at: http://www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid171.php#LibFuelCellsHydro
It is important to consider the following:
The oil and auto industry consider the battery industry to be a failed technology that can never be made or delivered in the form factor, price point, range or efficiency that they care about. So they got together and used "layered anti-evangelism" to manipulate the battery industry.

"Layered anti-evangelism" is an intelligence agency third world manipulation device that works like this:
1. Select the target: In this case it is hydrogen fuel cells, which have been demonstrated to beat batteries on every business front.
2. Select your internal agents. In this case lobbyists and "writers" that are paid by the oil and auto industry.
3. Have the agents contact and talk to the "sheep". In this case the sheep are the writers for battery industry trades and heads of battery lobby or support organizations.
4. Have the agents convince the sheep via skewed data provision. In this case selected reports were written and then shown to the sheep to convince the sheep that hydrogen fuels cells would steal their funding, put them out of business and that the only source of hydrogen was from the "evil oil companies".
So you have battery evangelists who are anti-hydrogen sheep such as Ulf Bossel of the European Fuel Cell Forum, Alec Brooks, EV World Sam Thurber and a few ex-CIA directors, like James Woolsey . All of whom get paid to nay-say it by their investment conduits.
Yet for every manipulated argument they come up with, they are shot down by hundreds of sites with facts, ie: http://www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid985.php
WHY? Because you can make hydrogen at home and the ability to do it fast, cheap and clean is coming 40 times faster than they thought.
This happened, using the same process, to:
1.) Electric light rail in America (US Vs. National City Lines, 334 US 573)
2.) The EV1 (Movie: Who killed the electric car) Etc.
The interventions of these 'doubters' fall into a number of clear categories which I'll summarise as:
1 "You can't succeed because no-one has ever succeeded at this (sports car making / battery-power / taking on the majors, etc etc) before". - May I commend to everyone Dava Sobel's wonderful (and short!) book, "Longitude", which offers a perfect map of the tendency of government and the scientific establishment collude to reject true innovation. This effect can only be overcome when a tipping-point of perceived popular utility is reached, at which point the establishment suddenly has a bout of collective amnesia about their earlier denials. (Same story many times over, historically, of course - from Gallileo onwards.)
2 "It's inefficient to carry around". Rather as it's inefficient to carry around a full tank of gas, perhaps? Or to carry around a SUV chassis which itself weighs a ton or more? (Come on, Detroit, you can find a better argument than that, surely?)
3 "This technology is not a solution and never will be." This very much reminds me of the IBM's famously short-sighted take on the prospect of home computing, back in the 70s. The language of these contributions, let alone their content, points to a thought-process rooted in volume-producers' vested interests. Consider the successes of some other new-tech challengers of vested interests: Dyson taking on Hoover with a bagless vacuum-cleaner; Bayliss bringing clockwork (i.e. battery-less) radios and laptops to the third world; thin-film solar panels (sorry, can't remember who, but you know who I mean). On this point, it was deeply depressing, at a high-level environmental science conference of the UK Government last year, for me to witness a "leading and respected" Professor of Transport rejecting electric traction out-of-hand with the words "it will never be more than just power storage on a trolley". Given that this "expert" was advising ministers of state setting future national policy on alternative transport, my immediate thought was "Who pays this man's research grant?"
So let's be vigilant for any who claim, in a smooth way, that invention can't possibly have the answers. From a position of some expertise in this field, may I remind readers that the "you-don't-understand-how-our-industry-works" argument has been the policy instrument of choice for numerous corporate fraudsters and protectionists down the ages (Enron, anyone?). New York's energetic DA, Mr Spitzer, has made a fine career out of challenging such thinking in the finance sector (with the simple rejoinder: "WHY does your industry work like that? Against customer choice?"). And then of course there's the entire consumer movement (remember Flaming Fords? remember "Unsafe at Any Speed"?). We can and should ask the same questions of the conventional auto industry.
The good news is that genuine innovation will out - as long as ordinary consumers are able to find it and buy it. One of the early lessons of the twenty first century, thank goodness, is that the old-school, browbeating style of corporate communication - terrorising one's customers into rejecting alternatives - increasingly fails as people wise up to making decisions based on their own independently-gathered information about benefits and risks. (Interestingly, a popular reaction against "selling by fear" is also now happening in the political field. Now why might that be?) As a consumer, one doesn't have to agree with the in-ya-face techniques of anti-corporate critics like Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock to still subscribe to the view that we can buy what we want to buy. We no longer want to be told by old-tech that new-tech is inherently suspect. Isn't it old-tech that brought us dependency on oil, climate change, wars over energy sources?
So c'mon people, how about a reward system for "spot the spoiler"? I'm all for free debate on the issues, but some of these blogs smell rather like the work of paid old-tech corporatists trying to sabotage your success.
Challenge such interventions with the greatest possible vigour, and let consumers decide for themselves!
1.) Battery companies are spending millions of dollars to knock H2 because it works longer, better, faster and cheaper than batteries! Most of the people writing these screaming anti-H2 articles are battery company shills or have investments there. H2 does beat batteries on every front so they should be SCARED!
2.) The steel unions hate H2 because H2 cars don't use steel. Steel is too hard to afford any more so nobody will use it in any case.
3.) Activists hate H2 because they think it can only be made by the oil companies and they hate the oil companies. This is a falsehood created by the battery and steel guys.
4.) Oil companies hate H2 because it is so much better than oil but they only get to hate it unto 2030 when the affordable oil runs out. Then they know they must love it because H2 energy will be all that is left. The Oil industry is dismayed that H2 is coming on so fast and they are trying to slow it down even more.
5.) Other alternative energy interests hate it because it is getting all of the funding because the polita-nomics are better with H2 than ANYTHING ELSE ON EARTH.
You can make hydrogen at home with free energy. If the gasoline in your car blows up it will do a VAST AMOUNT more death and damage than H2 ever will PLUS Gasoline is the number one cause of cancer and birth defects. You are driving a MOLOTOV COCKTAIL. In 2030 oil is GONE and there is NO OTHER OPTION that can be delivered world-wide in time but H2!
WIKILEAKS recently exposed the following secret documents:
https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1977STATE000430_c.html
Date:
1977 January 3, 00:00 (Monday) Canonical ID:
1977STATE000430_c
Original Classification:
UNCLASSIFIED Current Classification:
UNCLASSIFIED
Handling Restrictions
-- N/A or Blank --

Character Count:
8833
Executive Order:
-- N/A or Blank -- Locator:
TEXT ON MICROFILM,TEXT ONLINE
TAGS:
ENRG - Economic Affairs--Energy and Power | OECD - Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development | TECH - Technology and Science--Technology | UK - United Kingdom | US - United States
Concepts:
AGREEMENTS | HYDROGEN | PRODUCTION | PUBLIC CORRESPONDENCE | SCIENTIFIC COOPERATION | TECHNOLOGICAL EXCHANGES

Enclosure:
-- N/A or Blank -- Type:
TE
Office Origin:
ORIGIN ERDA - ENERGY RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT ADMINISTRATION

Office Action:
-- N/A OR BLANK -- Archive Status:
Electronic Telegrams
From:
DEPARTMENT OF STATE
Markings:
Margaret P. Grafeld Declassified/Released US Department of State EO Systematic Review 22 May 2009
To:
ORGANISATION FOR ECONOMIC CO-OPERATION AND DEVELOPMENT (PARIS)


This set of documents, and related documents, demonstrate that National governments considered the production of hydrogen from water as the “Single most valuable and history changing technology modern society has ever encountered…”

ADDRESS OF MICHAEL C. RUPPERT- FOR THE COMMONWEALTH CLUB – SAN FRANCISCO
Thank you for that gracious introduction. Let me begin by thanking Pat Lamken for inviting me to be here today and for her efforts to arrange – what is certainly for me – a historic landmark in my 26 years of work to bring to light information – vitally important, life and death, information – which has been virtually ignored by the mainstream media. This information has also remained completely unaddressed or even publicly acknowledged by those elites in both America and the world that determine and shape public policy and direct the course of human events.
I say this with the full and complete awareness that I am tonight standing partially in the midst of those elites and that those elites are listening. I have long been aware of the stature and prestige of the Commonwealth club, for its ability to attract some of the World’s most influential speakers; also for its reputation for bi-partisanship; and perhaps most importantly for its willingness to present conflicting or opposing viewpoints.
My appearance here tonight no doubt marks a departure for the club even from that inspiring record. With today’s remarks I intend to establish a whole new definition of “conflicting viewpoint.” I applaud the club’s record and am mindful that, had it not been for the dangerous and epochal historical events taking place around us, I would never have been afforded such an opportunity as this. Because clearly, my writing and public speaking have demonstrated that where we are today is exactly where I said we would be if something fundamental was not changed about how we both view the world, and how we interact with it.
Before preparing this speech, of course, I did some research to see who had spoken here before. I was happy to see that I follow on the heels of such notables as former CIA Director James Woolsey and two members of the Kean commission on 9/11: Slade Gorton and Richard Ben-Veniste. These are not people who I would call
“kindred spirits.” I also saw the name of homeland security secretary Tom Ridge and former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. These are also leaders of whom I have been sharply critical in the past and will be sharply critical of in the future. I also saw names like John Kerry, John Edwards, Dennis Kucinich, Joe Liberman and Madeleine Albright.
My record as a journalist and lecturer shows that I have not embraced, and have indeed been fiercely critical of, most of these opinion makers. While I am more inclined to find Kinship with Dennis Kucinich, I also state categorically that no political leader who does not address the real causes of the problems facing us will ever be considered by me as a true kindred soul – or as a political champion for the future.
Such praise and endorsement I offer only to the likes of my good friend, the Honorable Cynthia McKinney of Georgia, and to former Assistant Secretary of Housing Catherine Austin Fitts. I heartily recommend them to the club as potential speakers for future events.
I also saw the names of spiritual leaders and independent or International voices like Al Franken, Jane Goodall, Arianna Huffington, the Rabbi Michael Lerner, Norman Mailer, Ted Turner, Hans Blix and King Abudullah II.
In looking at this long list of prestigious speakers I was very aware that the life’s work of Michael Ruppert did not place me in any category that fit with these people. For the most part – I have long considered them to be part of a serious problem rather than pathfinders to its solution.
That realization brought to mind what was perhaps the single most memorable line from the 1992 vice-presidential debates in which Ross Perot’s running mate, retired navy Admiral James Stockdale – a medal of honour winner and Vietnam POW – asked, “who am I?” And “why am I here?”
I am not prone to over-analyzing such opportunities. I have always said that, if given the chance, I would walk into the Lion’s den or the devil’s bedroom to make my case and that is what I intend to do today. This is as close as I have come thus far to either. For here, I can see tonight parts of the elite whose consciousness and attitudes must be changed if humanity is to even partially meet the challenges that are “in our faces.”
For any of you who might be either lions or devils I hope that you have had a good meal recently and also that you have checked your pitchforks at the door. I also implore that your ears be open and your minds accessible.
For those of you who realize that a global crisis is casting Its shadow across the entire planet, and who wish better to understand its dynamics, I am here to offer some of my experience and learning as a “mapmaker” who has no allegiance to partisan politics or any desire except to tell you the truth, no matter how disquieting it may be, or how divergent it may be from whatever cherished beliefs you may Hold; from whatever cosmological principles you may believe in; or from whatever economic or other personal interests you may have. A spiritual teacher once told me that my problem was not that I thought highly of myself; not that I thought lowly of myself; but that I thought constantly of myself. In that vein, Let us all tonight try to think of issues larger than ourselves, our personal interests, our wants, or our fears.
Viewed from almost any perspective; be it geopolitics, economics, climate, spreading warfare that threatens to unleash a global orgy of blood letting, rising energy prices, documented energy shortages, fresh water shortages, biological warfare, the repression of civil liberties at home and abroad, or any of a dozen other issues; planet earth and all of its inhabitants are in great danger. This is not a time to think of national security. It is a time to think of planetary security – indeed, of planetary survival.
And I must recognize also that I would never have been afforded this incredible opportunity to speak to you today, had it not been for the consistent support and generosity; the research and activism; the courage and disenfranchisement, and above all the loyalty of all those people who have helped my newsletter, “From he
Wilderness”, grow in just six years from 68 to more than 15,000 monthly readers worldwide. Today our web site at http://www.fromthewilderness.com averages more than 12,000 visitors a day. These include members of congress, business and economic
Leaders, professors at more than 30 universities, respected Journalists, and political leaders in many countries. If anything had an impact on my thinking as I prepared these remarks it was my awareness that these loyal supporters are the people on whose behalf I presume to speak. It is their voice and their commitment which has given rise to my voice. I could not and would not be here were it not for them.
But I also, if I may be that bold, presume to speak for all mankind, regardless of religion, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual preference, bank account or any other artificial distinction.
This is no time to be shy. This is not a time when men and women of good conscience can afford to be politically correct or be guided by anything except a willingness to discard every “cherished” belief or opinion which stands in the way of an accurate and fearless appraisal of the world around us.
As I have said so many times in the last three years while delivering more than 40 lectures on the truth and lies of 9/11 and peak oil, in eight countries: the events in the five years following the attacks of September 11th will determine the course of human history for the next 500 years or more.
I can only assume that the record of my lectures and writings, wherein I have come to be known as a man who backs up everything he says and presents it to his audiences for verification, had something to do with how the board of governors reached its decision to extend this invitation. For many years now not a single fact, citation or piece of evidence, presented in my lectures, or in my best-selling video, “the truth and lies of 9/11” has been proved inaccurate.
I am known as a man who does not expect people to take his word on faith but who asks and even expects people to challenge his research, evaluate it, and reach their own conclusions.
Operating under the assumption that the past credibility of my research has produced a record which got me in the door at the commonwealth club, I am today, in the interest of time and for maximum impact, going to dispense with my customary slide presentation. I fully expect that anyone who challenges or disagrees with my assertions will go out and do some checking for him or her self.
Almost everything I present to you today will be fully documented – by means of approximately 1,000 endnotes – in my soon to be released book, “crossing the Rubicon: the decline of the American empire at the end of the age of oil.”
The book, published by new society publishers, should be available for sale from the FTW web site within 2-3 weeks and It will go on sale nationally, through all major outlets, by mid-October.

September 11th

Both here in the united states and around the world I am not alone in believing that the attacks of September 11th were facilitated, orchestrated and executed by the United States Government. However, there is a great deal of misunderstanding and conclusion jumping about these assessments that is not supported by the evidence. I was trained as a police officer and detective, and for many years now I have been an effective investigative journalist because I have adhered to strict evidentiary and investigative standards.
The 9/11 attacks were the result of deliberate planning and orchestrated efforts by identifiable leaders within the US Government, and the energy and financial sectors, to see a Pearl Harbour-like attack which would provide the American Empire with a pretext for war, invasion and the sequential confiscation of oil and natural gas reserves, or the key transportation routes through which they pass. 9-11 was a premeditated murder and in my book, and here tonight, I will name some of the suspects who committed the crime. In my book I will show you overwhelming evidence of their guilt which I would be proud and confident to place either before a district attorney or a jury.
Historically, the assertion that the United States Government would orchestrate an attack upon American interests has ample precedent. Former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski described the need for such an event in several places in his 1997 book “the grand chessboard.” It was I who first brought this book to worldattention in late 2001. The project for a new American Century made reference to the need for such an attack in its 2000 report “rebuilding America’s Defences.” declassified top Secret documents disclosed by author James Bamford in his
book, “body of secrets” tell us that in 1962 the joint chiefs had approved a plan called “Operation Northwoods” which was a covert operation that would shoot down American aircraft and stage attacks on American military facilities with the intent of blaming those attacks on Fidel Castro and prompting the subsequent us invasion and occupation of Cuba.
The declassified Northwoods documents can be seen and downloaded from the FTW web site. But once viewed, they cannot be ignored.
Therefore it cannot be said that such a thing has never been conceived of or carried out by American political leaders. From the sinking of the battleship Maine, to the Gulf of Tonkin, and indeed, even to Pearl Harbour itself, history today provides us with abundant documentation of US government complicity in varying degrees in similar attacks. The book “day of deceit” and other records from the national archives
have shown us that the Roosevelt administration had broken the Japanese codes well before December 7th, and that a conscious decision was made to allow the attack on Pearl Harbour to take place. This was intended to provide the necessary impetus for us entry into the second world war at a time when great Britain was buckling under the military Blitzkrieg, aerial bombing and u-boat warfare of the Third Reich.
Crossing the Rubicon is a detective story that gets to the innermost core of the 9/11 attacks. It places 9/11 at the centre of a desperate new America, created by specific, named individuals in preparation for peak oil: an economic crisis like nothing the world has ever seen.
Simply defined, peak oil is that moment in time when global oil – and natural gas – production begins an irreversible and permanent decline which will not yield or give way regardless of how much money and effort is spent trying to change it.
With demand still accelerating rapidly in both the us and the Industrialised and developing world, the arrival of peak oil literally describes a point of overshoot in which economic and ecological stasis – let alone growth – becomes unsustainable. Over the course of the last three years,“from the wilderness” has pioneered the investigation and documentation of this crisis. With the invaluable research and writing of FTW’s energy editor Dale Allen Pfeiffer, a geologist, and through my own travels and research in the US, France and Germany, we have drawn upon the expertise of those with decades of experience in the oil industry (many of whom have left it), independent scientists and academics having no connection to the energy industry, business and financial leaders, international bodies such as the international energy agency, and actual world events to draw attention to what is the single most serious threat facing mankind in its entire history.
It is my belief, as I speak to you tonight that planet earth is – plus or minus one year – at the all time peak of hydrocarbon energy production. Simply put, we have used half of all the oil god placed on this planet, and every drop, every barrel extracted from the ground from now on will become progressively more expensive, of lesser quality, and much harder to obtain. We have picked the low hanging fruit. As all experts agree, peak is something we will only know of a certainty as we view it in our rear view mirrors.
The attacks of September 11th, 2001 were the pretext for the American, and to a lesser extent, the British and Israeli empires to begin seizing, by force, those energy supplies needed to sustain their power, hegemony (whether regional or global) and their teetering economies. The attacks of 9/11 were accomplished through an amazing orchestration of logistics and personnel. Former National Security Aide and Counter-terror Adviser Richard Clarke has postulated that such a conspiracy could never be kept a secret. Too many people would have been involved, he said.
On this point I disagree with Clarke completely and point to the fact that the Manhattan project, which developed the atom bomb and the stealth fighter project were both successfully kept secret. The numbers of people involved in both of those projects far exceeded the numbers of people within the United States government required to execute 9/11.
However, I must express a deep debt of gratitude to Clarke. For in his book “against all enemies” he left a compelling trail of bread crumbs, contradictions to the sworn testimony of our highest leaders, and hard evidence which provided me with much of the information needed to say that not only can I name some of the us government officials who perpetrated those attacks, I can also identify the prime suspect – or mr. Big – who played the command role in executing them. Mr. Clarke is not a stupid man and I can only conclude that he left those crumbs for others to find.
All of this of course stands in stark contrast to the report of the so-called independent commission which investigated those attacks. Before I start naming names, let me first take a look at why absolutely nothing presented by the Kean commission can, or should, be accepted without challenge. The Kean commission a recent story in the Minneapolis star tribune reported on how one US Senator, Mark Dayton of Minnesota, found some egregious inconsistencies in the final report of the Kean commission. The story said that during a recent hearing evaluating the Kean report:
“Dayton told leaders of the sept. 11 commission that, based on the commission's report, a Norad chronology made public a week after the attacks was grossly misleading. The chronology said the FAA notified the military's emergency air command of three of the hijackings while those jetliners were still airborne. Dayton cited commission findings that The FAA failed to inform Norad about three of the planes until after they had crashed. “and, he said, a squadron of Norad fighter planes that was scrambled was sent east over the Atlantic Ocean and was 150 miles from Washington, DC., when the third plane struck the Pentagon – ‘farther than they were before they took off.’ “Dayton said Norad officials ‘lied to the American people, they lied to congress and they lied to your 9/11 commission to create a false impression of competence, communication and protection of the American people.’ he told Kean and Hamilton that if the commission's report is correct, President Bush ‘should fire whoever at FAA, at Norad ... Betrayed their public trust by not telling us the truth.’”
What Senator Dayton did not fully focus on was that, just a few short weeks before releasing its final report, the Kean Commission unilaterally changed the times of certain key events, negating and overruling testimony and evidence presented under oath, without having received a single new piece of evidence – either formally or informally – that contradicted or changed the evidence already received.
I’m sure that there are some attorneys in the room tonight. I wonder how many of you would acquiesce to the judge in a criminal trial submitting and ruling on evidence that neither the defence nor prosecution had presented during trial, but which the judge had somehow produced, without explanation, from his or her chambers. How would you react if the judge then ruled on the basis of that evidence, making no attempt to reconcile the evidence presented by either side?
What would you say to the jury?
While Senator Dayton was astute enough to note some glaring inconsistencies and contradictions in a highly manipulated and frequently altered evidentiary record, he missed, or chose to ignore other elephants sitting comfortably in the living room of one of the most shameless pieces of dishonest public accounting in American history.
These include the fact that the commission inexplicably introduced, at the last minute, a completely new timeline of events surrounding the responses of the FAA, Norad and the pentagon on 9/11 in direct contradiction to previously sworn testimony and exhibits from these commands. In most cases this evidence was presented by the same men who actually made key decisions that day.
Why?
In its mere constitution, the Kean commission’s members would never have been allowed to even approach the bar of judicial impartiality in an American courtroom to decide such an important case. They – every one of them, including your two recent speakers – would and should have been immediately disqualified from providing, as was mandated by law, “a full accounting” of the events of September 11th.
In describing to you some of these conflicts of interest, I would like to express my thanks to independent journalist Jim Rarey who did a magnificent job of cataloguing the histories of the wolves and the foxes who managed the hen house of September 11th’s historical record.
The following is only a partial description of some of the more obvious conflicts within the Kean commission.

Thomas Kean (chairman)
Thomas Kean is a director (and shareholder) of Amerada Hess Corporation, which is involved in the Hess-delta joint venture with delta oil of Saudi Arabia, owned by the [Khalid] Bin Mahfouz and Al-Amoudi clans. This company was involved in the initial planning for a trans-afghan oil pipeline just prior to September 11th. Khalid Bin Mahfouz, once a senior executive with the legendary organized crime bank BCCI, is Saudi Arabia’s largest banker and his clients include both the Saudi royal family and the Saudi Binladin group of companies.
Coincidentally, the former governor of new jersey is also a member of the council on foreign relations, together with another prominent member of the board of directors of Amerada Hess, former Secretary of the Treasury Nicholas Brady.
It is also worth mentioning that Thomas Kean also sits as Co-chairman of the Homeland Security project (hsp) under the auspices of the Century Foundation. In this capacity, Kean has played a key role in the draft recommendations of the Century Foundation, which partially laid the groundwork of the department of homeland security legislation. Journalist Wayne Madsen has shown with ample documentation that George W. Bush also had business relations with Khalid Bin Mahfouz, when he was in the Texas oil business. Both George W. Bush and Khalid Bin-Mahfouz were also implicated in the BCCI scandal closely tied to the Iran-contra and savings and loan scandals.
Other links between Bush and Mahfouz can be found through investments in the Carlyle group, an American investment firm managed by a board on which former president George H.W. Bush himself once sat. The younger Bush personally held shares in one of Carlyle’s owned companies, Caterair between 1990-94.
Lee Hamilton (Vice Chair)
In 1987, house speaker Jim Wright (who later resigned in disgrace) appointed Hamilton to chair a committee investigating the Iran/Contra affair.
When a question was raised about CIA/Contra drug smuggling, the response was release by Hamilton of a cursory review that concluded there was no truth to the charges. The CIA released a report in October of 1998 (volume II of the CIA inspector general’s report on IranContra drug trafficking), that received almost no publicity yet admitted the drug connection and direct CIA involvement in the trans shipment of thousands of kilos of cocaine.
Hamilton played a key role in the so-called October surprise of 1980-81 in which it was charged that the Reagan-Bush campaign team was reported to have secretly negotiated with Iran’s revolutionary government to delay release of the American hostages held at the us embassy in Tehran. The deal was that the hostages would be released after the presidential election so that Jimmy Carter could not benefit from their emancipation during the campaign. In this progenitor of the Iran-Contra scandal military weapons were promised to the Iranian government in exchange for its cooperation. The evidence was serious enough to warrant congressional hearings which were ultimately chaired by then congressman Hamilton.
As most of us who are old enough recall, the hostages were not released until the very day of Ronald Reagan’s first inauguration in January of 1981. This was one of history’s great coincidences.
For more than four decades, veteran Washington journalist Sarah McLendon was the grand dame of the white house press corps. Until her January 2003 death (at 92) she was a revered and active journalist known for her feisty confrontations with presidents and the powerful dating to the Truman administration. In her later years she had a great habit of appearing to be asleep in her wheelchair until the moment when she would wake up and pounce on her prey with incisive questions that revealed she hadn’t missed a word of what had been said. Once, on national television and in the middle of a live white house press conference, she even dared to question president Bill Clinton about the abundantly documented record of CIA and Arkansas state government involvement in drug smuggling operations at Arkansas’ Mena regional intermountain airport during the 1980s.
In 1994 and 1995, while living in Washington, I was a regular attendee at Mclendon’s weekly study group at the national press club and later at her residence on Connecticut avenue. After she passed, the national press club renamed one of its conference rooms as “the Mclendon room.” In 1992 Mclendon offered her observations on Hamilton’s behavior as the chief “fact-finder” and chair of the October surprise and Iran-contra committees.
“I declined to withdraw the report I made that congressman Hyde elicited and obtained a promise from Chairman Lee Hamilton, d., ind. Of the house task force on October surprise, that the group would clear president George Bush of going to Paris to cinch a deal of weapons for Iran in exchange for retaining American hostages to be delivered to President Ronald Reagan and not to outgoing President Jimmy Carter. Hyde says he made no such a deal and I must remember that Hamilton is a Democrat. That makes no difference. Hamilton held a Press conference to clear bush before the Investigation into the deal between the Reagan-Bush candidates for presidential office and the Iranians had even started. Hamilton then admitted he had not interrogated witnesses or talked with his special attorney hired to investigate the matter.” Iran-contra, in all its horrific corruption, was effectively “managed” by lee Hamilton in the house and John Kerry (among others) in the senate throughout the late 1980s to conceal the greatest crimes of the era; crimes committed by a litany
of well-known government operatives. At the time, Hamilton was the chairman of the house permanent select committee on intelligence.
While many activists regard 2004 democratic presidential candidate Kerry as something of a hero for bringing many details of Iran-contra drug activities to light (and into the public record), others, more deeply versed in the evidentiary record, suspect that he also did a masterful job of keeping some of the most damaging Iran-contra secrets — especially records of CIA proprietary company operations — hidden. I am among the latter group.
Many figures who came under criminal and investigative scrutiny in Iran-contra, like John Poindexter, Elliot Abrams, Richard Armitage, Dick Cheney, Otto Reich, Colin Powell and John Negroponte, returned (with little or no congressional opposition) to serve in the current bush administration after the 2000 (so-called) election.
Veteran AP journalist Bob Parry, who broke the first major story linking drug smuggling to contra support activities, only to later lose his job, offered some additional observations on Lee Hamilton in his independent web newsletter consortium news. “one of the key congressional republicans fighting this rear-guard action was rep. Dick Cheney of Wyoming, who became the ranking house republican
On the Iran-contra investigation. Cheney already enjoyed a favorable reputation in Washington as a steady conservative hand. ”Cheney smartly exploited his relationship with rep. Lee Hamilton, D-ind., who was chairman of the Irancontra Panel. Hamilton cared deeply about his reputation for bipartisanship and the republicans quickly exploited this fact.” Not only did Hamilton fail to find any wrongdoing by top officials in either investigation, he was even “satisfied” with the performance of marine lieutenant colonel Oliver North In the Iran-contra hearings. As one commentator connected to the national security archives observed:
“North appears before the house select committee on intelligence to answer questions about his role in a contra resupply operation. He lies convincingly: he has "not in any way, at any time violate[d] the principles or legal requirements of the Boland Amendment," which bans federal support for the Nicaraguan counterrevolutionaries. Committee Chairman Lee Hamilton, D-ind., pronounces himself satisfied with North's "good faith." when North's Superior, John Poindexter, is told of his successful deception of congress, Poindexter e-mails Ollie: ‘well done.’”

Philip Zelikow (executive director)
Perhaps no more glaring conflict of interest attracted opposition from victim families and 9/11 activists than that of the commission’s executive director Philip Zelikow. Concerns were raised when it was disclosed that only two commission members and Zelikow might be allowed to see certain classified presidential records, including the much ballyhooed and publicly debated presidential daily briefing (pdb) of August 6, 2001.
Personally, I viewed the August 6th PDB as a red herring and a hubristic pretext over which the commission could make a show of “battling” the White House for information. The PDB, Titled, “Bin Laden determined to strike in US” was eventually released in a one and a half page version that was presented to the world as “complete.”
Nothing could have been further from the truth. The respected German paper Die Zeit published a story in October of 2002, well before the PDB became an issue, stating that the PDB was actually eleven and one half pages long. Since I had documented so many other clear, direct and credible and apparently more detailed warnings of the 9/11 attacks, the Aug 6 pdb was a non-issue for me. In “Crossing the Rubicon” I will document more than a dozen specific warnings which foretold hijacked airliners being crashed into the World Trade Centre during the week of September 9th. Other warnings, such as massive insider trading on financial markets from Hong Kong to Tokyo, to Chicago, to New York, to London and Berlin told those who were watching that the airlines involved would be united and American.
The insider trading, acknowledged and documented by the likes of CBS news, Bloomberg, and respected financial commentators was given the complete brush off by the Kean Commission in its final report. All it said was that Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda did not make the trades. In my book I will give you an idea of who did.
The controversy arising from the public debate over Zelikow forced even the New York Times to comment on some of his more obvious conflicts of interest.
“advocates for the families said they were alarmed by the commission’s disclosure on Thursday that only one of the 10 commissioners would have access to a wide range of the briefings, and that the only person from the commission with similar access Would be its staff director, Philip Zelikow, who has close ties to Condoleezza Rice and other senior officials in the Bush administration. “the commission has previously rejected a request from victims’ families to limit Mr. Zelikow’s responsibilities sharply in light of potential conflict of interests involving the White House. “the families’ advocates said the decision to have Mr. Zelikow be one of only two commission officials with wide access to the highly classified documents — the other is Jamie s. Gorelick, a democratic commission member who was deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration — raised new questions about the investigation’s impartiality…
“Mr. Zelikow, who wrote a book with Ms. Rice in 1995, was on the Bush administration’s transition team for the national security council and has acknowledged having contacts earlier this year with Karl Rove, President Bush’s chief political adviser, about Mr. Zelikow’s scholarly work at the university of Virginia.
What’s more, Zelikow had been serving as a member of President Bush’s foreign intelligence advisory board (pfiab) since 2001 and he also made a September 2002 public statement saying that US military action against Iraq would be based upon a desire to protect Israeli interests rather than any real threat from Iraq.
Perhaps the worst conflict of interest was the fact that Zelikow had advised the incoming Bush administration on Terror-related intelligence matters and had several discussions about bin laden and Al Qaeda in 2000-2001 with Richard Clarke. By rights, he should have been a witness testifying under oath before the commission instead of its executive director. When many of the victim families learned of this they were justifiably outraged at an arrangement that would have never been permitted in a court of law. In spite of all the controversy, and calls from many for his Resignation, Zelikow remains securely in place at the Kean commission to this day.


Jamie Gorelick
Freelance journalist Jim Rarey writes: “considered one of the fifty most powerful women in the country, CFR member Jamie Gorelick is currently Vice-chair of the giant mortgage lender and insurer Fannie Mae. From march 1994 until she joined Fannie Mae in may 1997 she was deputy attorney general, the number two spot in Janet Reno’s department of Justice.
“In May 1995, the intelligence community law enforcement policy board was established to meet quarterly and discuss mutual concerns of the attorney general and director of central intelligence. The board was co-chaired by Gorelick and DCI George Tenet. Other members included all of the law enforcement agencies, the assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research and the Defence Department general counsel. “this is the same time frame (spring of 1995) in which the Philippine government apprised the FBI, CIA and state department of “project Bojinka” an Islamic terrorist plot which included hijacking commercial airliners and flying them into the pentagon, World Trade Center Towers and, several other buildings. “the BCCI scandal involved a number of powerful individuals. Clark Clifford and Robert Altman were the top two officers in first American, the new name given financial general bankshares when it was taken over by BCCI (known as the bank of crooks and criminals international in the corridors of Washington) with the help of the Jackson Stephens/Lippo Worthen bank and the rose law firm. “First American is said to have been using the Notorious Promis software.
I will have a great deal to say about this legendary “spyware” in “crossing the rubicon.” Back to Jim Rarey: “when BCCI and First American were exposed, the Legal defence team for Clark Clifford and Robert Altman attracted a bevy of well-known names including Robert Fiske (later the first “independent counsel” investigating whitewater and Vince Foster’s “suicide”), Robert Bennett (later attorney for Bill Clinton), and Jamie Gorelick…“In 1998, while at Fannie Mae, Gorelick served on Clinton’s central intelligence national security advisory panel as well as the president’s review of intelligence.”
At one point in the Kean commission hearings, a brief stir was caused when republican partisans charged that Gorelick bore some personal blame for the attacks by virtue of having created an “intelligence wall” between the FBI and the CIA.
There was no wall. A 2001 rand corporation study, which I quote in my book, offered great praise for the working relationships between the FBI and the CIA. It documents a number of instances where successful cooperation and information sharing between the bureau and the CIA actually prevented a number of Al Qaeda and other terrorist attacks against US interests.
There is also no wall between the Kean commission and the government it has been charged with investigating. Gorelick also has oil connections. Mrs Gorelick site on the Board of the world’s premier oil drilling firm, Schlumberger.
Gorelick was one of four commission members allowed to review presidential intelligence records and make notes before reporting to the commission. It appears that the white house had very little to worry about. Let’s take a look at your recent guests who came here promoting the final 9/11 report. Jim Rarey tells us:
Richard Ben Veniste
Ben-Veniste is a high-visibility Washington Attorney and democratic power broker. He was Democrat counsel to the senate whitewater investigation where he blocked inquiries about Webster Hubbell’s hiring by the Lippo group and others administered by Truman Arnold. According to investigative journalist Daniel Hopsicker, Ben-Veniste then turned around and defended Arnold (the man he was supposed to be investigating) before Ken Starr’s whitewater grand jury, for which he was roundly criticized. Hopsicker also reveals that Arnold had furnished a $2 million Airplane to his friend Wally Hilliard for $1. Hilliard, Hopsicker says, owned the flight school in Venice, Florida where (according to official accounts) four of the Islamic terrorist pilots were trained that flew the suicide missions on 9/11.
Another of Ben-Veniste’s clients was Barry Seal, the drug running CIA asset of Iran/contra and Mena, Arkansas notoriety. In fact, Hopsicker relates Benveniste told the Wall Street Journal, “I did my part by launching him (seal) into the arms of Vice President Bush who embraced him as an undercover operative.”
Slade Gorton
Slade Gorton is a former senator from the state of Washington. After he lost his Reelection bid in 2000, he joined the Seattle law firm of Preston, Gates & Ellis, which specializes in environmental issues. If jury selection rules were being used, Gorton would probably be dismissed from consideration for the commission for cause [a technical term for conflict of interest]. Two days after the 9/11 attacks he told a public-television audience there was nothing government intelligence officials could have done to thwart the attack, according to the Seattle times. The times quotes Gorton as saying, “I doubt we can expect to get too much inside information no matter what we do.” Gorton served two years on the senate intelligence committee. He says that experience and his personal friendship with Trent Lott were responsible for his appointment by Lott.
Every commission member has deep conflicts of interest with respect to 9/11 and its investigation of the government agencies charged with protecting the American people that day. I will discuss all of them in my book. One, apparently, who did not, is former Georgia senator Max Cleland, who at one point called the commission a sham. Cleland resigned from the commission before its investigation was complete.
What happened on 9/11?
While these attacks were arguably one of the most serious homicides ever committed, the investigation and "prosecution" of that case by means other than Dick Cheney's "war that will not end in our lifetimes" has never even approached the legal and logical standards governing all such investigations. No real case has ever been made that would pass first muster of even a junior assistant district attorney.
Without such a court process, we are forced to employ analogies and metaphors. But there remains to us the most successful, fundamental strategy for the prosecution of criminal behavior: demonstrating that a suspect (or suspects) did, or did not, possess the means, motive, and opportunity to commit the crime.
To date, the case that 9/11 was perpetrated solely by Osama Bin laden and Al Qaeda has never been proved, even to the most rudimentary standards. In fact, some 35 months after the attacks there has not been a single successful 9/11 prosecution anywhere in the world. The only conviction that had been secured, a German prosecution against Mounir El Motassadeq, charged with aiding the so called Hamburg cell of Mohammed Atta, was overturned in 2004 because the US government refused to produce key witnesses such as Khalid Shaikh Muhammad or Ramzi (Bin Al-Shibh and other evidence relevant to the charges. Every defendant in a Western criminal case has the right to examine the evidence used against him and to cross-examine witnesses. To the general public as well as to the 9/11 research community, the mysterious and inexplicable failure of the Nation’s air defences that day remains the most glaring and gaping hole in the Kean commission’s account and in the government’s version of events. Scrambling fighter aircraft was a routine occurrence for years before 9/11. The associated press has told us that fighter aircraft were scrambled and flying beside errant commercial and private air traffic within minutes of the slightest deviation some times in the calendar year preceding June 1 2001. This is one of many areas where the Kean commission not only failed to look but actually altered evidence in the preparation of its final report. (ED: See Missing 28 Pages of report for criminal level conflicts revelation re: certain commissioners)
For me, the pivotal evidence absolutely demonstrating direct government complicity in, and management of, the attacks was found in a number of undisputed, yet virtually unaddressed wargames that I will show were being conducted, coordinated and/or controlled by vice president Dick Cheney or his immediate staff on the morning of September 11th. The names of those wargames are known to include: Vigilant Guardian, Vigilant Warrior, Northern Guardian, Northern Vigilance, and Tripod II. All have been reported on by major press organizations relying on undisputed quotes from participating military personnel.
They have also been confirmed by Norad press releases. All, except for northern vigilance and tripod II had to do with hijacked airliners inside the continental united states, specifically within the northeast air defence sector where all four 9/11 hijackings occurred. According to a clear record some of these exercises involved commercial airline hijackings. In some cases false blips were deliberately inserted onto FAA and military radar screens and they were present during (at least) the first attacks. This effectively paralyzed fighter response because, with only eight fighters available in the region, there were as many as 22 possible hijackings taking place.
Other exercises, specifically northern vigilance had pulled significant fighter resources away from the Northeast US. – just before 9/11 – into northern Canada and Alaska. In addition, a close reading of key news stories published in the spring of 2004 revealed for the first time that some of these drills were “live-fly” exercises where actual aircraft, likely flown by remote control – were simulating the behavior of Hijacked airliners in real life. All of this as the real attacks began. The fact that these exercises had never been systematically and thoroughly explored in the mainstream