Sandy BergerI asked him to write a little more - here tis:
NSA '97-'01. ATC board of directors. Civitas. Stonebridge International.
Hides classified documents under construction trailers?
The blogs are all over the partisan angle. I would venture to say this goes beyond the age old Dems vs. Repubs dispute.
Noise added:
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This page on Paul Thompson's timeline is all events surrounding the Malaysian summit (1)
What is shows is that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was at the meeting. He was wanted by US intelligence for involvement in the Bojinka plot with Ramzi Yousef. Also at the meeting were Fahad Al-Quso and Tawfiq bin Attash...both later involved in the Cole attack (October 2000).
Three men implicated in terror attacks yet US intelligence fails to track the other two men (al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar) at the very same meeting? Yes, these are the same two men who lived in San Diego with an FBI informant AND reserved and purchased tickets on Flight 77 using their real names. Not only that but nobody in US intel bothered to give their names to the FAA.
Inexcusable? Yes.
Can anyone else add anything? I'm at a loss.
update:
starroute in the comments adds:
Sandy Berger and Stonebridge sure do have some funny connections. In 2003, Stonebridge and Charlie Black's BKSH & Associates formed Civitas Group LLC as a joint venture to cash in on the homeland security consulting market. Civitas, in turn, entered into strategic partnerships with Richard A. Clarke's Good Harbor Consulting and with the Paladan Capital Group, headed by Kenneth A. Minihan (former NSA and DIA director) and James Woolsey, and both Clarke and Minihan sat on the Civitas Board of Advisors.
Also on the Civitas board were a couple of long-time Bush family cronies, Jim B. Francis of the Texas Public Safety Commission and Joe Allbaugh, former head of FEMA and by 2003 founder of New Bridge Strategies (which had connections both with Neil Bush and with Diligence LLC, the firm that Peter Dale Scott links to Far West Ltd. as part of the whole Boris Berezovsky complex.)
Berger no longer seems to be involved with Civitas -- outnumbered by the Bush cronies, perhaps -- and it's possible that all these various security consulting firms were motivated by nothing deeper than greed and the hope of profiting from insider knowledge. But there are also hints of something kinkier going on -- at the very least, suggestions that these people have worked hard to invent the very problems they then turn to profit.
There's this, for example, in Chaim Kupferberg's "There's Something About Omar: Truth, Lies, and The Legend of 9/11" (http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/KUP310A.html):
Heading up that clique was Richard A. Clarke, who joined the National Security Council under the first President Bush, and stayed there under Clinton. As reported by Lawrence Wright in The New Yorker, "In the web of federal agencies concerned with terror, Clarke was the spider." Tim Weiner of the New York Times wrote of Clarke on February 1, 1999: "He has placed proteges in key diplomatic and intelligence positions, creating a network of loyalty and solidifying his power."
It was Clarke who, together with John O'Neill, "discovered" bin Laden as a global terrorist mastermind. Here, as reported by Lawrence Wright in The New Yorker, was Clarke's version of his discovery:
"We'd [O'Neill and I] see CIA reports that referred to 'financier Osama bin Laden' and we'd ask ourselves, 'Who the hell is he?' The more we drilled down, the more we realized he was not just a financier - he was the leader. John said, 'We've got to get this guy. He's building a network. Everything leads back to him.' Gradually the CIA came along with us."
The Kupferberg article is mainly a long, detailed account of the entirely artificial concoction of the official narrative of 9/11 (including the central role of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed) during the months following the attack -- but the clear implication is that the Osama story itself may have been invented in the same way during the late 90's. And certainly it's true that the favored scapegoats for various anonymous terrorist attacks have swung around wildly and even randomly -- with Libya being at center stage for a long time, and Iran often favored by the more pro-Israel factions -- and that Osama only became the star of the show fairly late and (in view of his non-presence since 2001) amazingly briefly.
One problem is that none of these people are reliable witnesses -- including Trento, who has struck me as leaving out as much as he puts in. But it's possible that focusing not on the supposed terrorists and what they were allegedly up to, but on people like Clarke and Berger and what their interests were and the process by which they introduced certain assumptions into public awareness and got them accepted as gospel truth might shed more light on the situation.
Stonebridge International sure sounds a lot like the Cohen Group.
I've read lots of speculation about Berger's actions. Two of the more incredible assertions are that he simply wanted the material to prepare for his testimony. Right. The other was the concern that his actions might prevent the 9/11 Commission from "getting to bottom of things." Uh huh.
He apparently swiped some COPIES of documents, returning some and cutting some into pieces. Several news stories suggest that no original documents were lost. Is this true? Who knows.
So WTF was he doing? If he took some documents related to the Millenium Plot after action report, what was so important about that information? Again, who knows. One thing of note is that Berger as NSA would be in position to possibly know more than CIA Director George Tenet since the NSA is supposedly not subject to turf battles. A key meeting was the Al Qaeda terrorist summit in Malaysia January 5-8, 2000. Two of the supposed hijackers attended that meeting...Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar. In Joe and Susan Trento's latest book Unsafe At Any Altititude they suggest that these two men may have been GID agents. What I realized recently is that Paul Thompson (in his timeline) had linked a Trento article from 2003 with this information. Trento's source is an unidentified former CIA official who also claims that Bin Laden once worked for Saudi intelligence.
Here is the paragragh from Trento's '03 article:
(Written 8/6/03) There was another problem: Two of the hijackers—part of the team that flew a plane into the Pentagon—had very visible connections to Saudi intelligence and the CIA. Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar were well known to the CIA and FBI. The claim that an FBI informant in San Diego who knew the men and assisted them but never mentioned any of this to his FBI handlers has another, darker explanation. A former CIA officer who worked in Saudi Arabia described what he says happened: "We had been unable to penetrate al-Qaeda. The Saudi's claimed that they had done it successfully. Both al-Hazimi and al-Mihdhar were Saudi agents. We thought they had been screened. It turned out the man responsible for recruiting them had been loyal to Osama bin Laden. The truth is bin Laden himself was a Saudi agent at one time. He successfully penetrated Saudi intelligence and created his own operation inside. The CIA relied on the Saudis vetting their own agents. It was a huge mistake. The reason the FBI was not given any information about either man is because they were Saudi assets operating with CIA knowledge in the United States." (1)
Or perhaps they were Al Qaeda operatives. After 9/11 the failure of US intel to explain how these two men were not apprehended was a big problem. I would guess Sandy Berger was worried about this as well.