Information Dominance, Part 13: The Warrior Princess

We review the following seven-year-old article in its entirety: The Chinese Army Spy and Condoleezza Rice, by Charles R. Smith, Wednesday, Jan. 24, 2001.

Condoleezza Rice, national security adviser to President Bush, has recently granted an interview to virtually every reporter but me. Perhaps it is because I keep asking her questions about the Chinese spy in her past.

Rice has impeccable credentials. She worked for the elder George Bush in the White House, handling Russian issues. She is a distinguished fellow at the Hoover Institution and former provost of Stanford University. Rice is very close to former Clinton Secretary of Defense William Perry. Rice worked with Perry and the Clinton administration during her term at Stanford. The Clinton White House once mentioned her as being on the short list for secretary of state.

Yet it is her years at Stanford working with Perry that have rendered Rice silent. While working at Stanford, she became involved in the most successful Chinese army penetration of the Clinton Defense Department. She will not answer questions about her relationship with Chinese spy Hua Di.

Hua Di was born into a family of prominent Communist officials. He studied missiles in Russia and worked for the Chinese army missile program for 24 years. In 1984, he went to work for the China International Trust and Investment Co. (CITIC), a firm then part-owned by the Chinese army.

Hua defected to the United States in 1989 after the Tiananmen Square crackdown on student democracy demonstrators. He went to work as a researcher at Stanford's Center for International Security and Arms Control. There he met Rice and the Stanford Center co-directors, former Secretary of Defense William Perry and political science professor John Lewis.

There are two things that I find exceptionally interesting about this particular scandal. One is the role of this Professor Lewis.

In 1994, Hua used his contacts at Stanford, in Beijing and inside the Clinton Defense Department with then-Secretary Perry to obtain a secure fiber-optic communication system for the Chinese army. In 1994, Hua contacted an old friend in the Chinese army then working for Gen. Ding Henggao, a close friend of Perry.

In fact, Perry and Ding's relationship spans three administrations. Perry reportedly met Gen. Ding in the late 1970s during the Carter administration. By 1994, Perry ran the U.S. Defense Department, and Ding had risen to command the Chinese army military research bureau COSTIND, or the Commission on Science Technology and Industry for National Defense. COSTIND, according to the General Accounting Office, "oversees development of China's weapon systems and is responsible for identifying and acquiring telecommunications technology applicable for military use."

Hua Di teamed in 1994 with Stanford Dr. John Lewis, Secretary of Defense Perry, and Gen. Ding of the Chinese Army to buy an advanced AT&T fiber-optic communications system for "civilian" use inside China. The communications system slipped past U.S. exports laws as a joint U.S.-Chinese commercial venture called Hua Mei. The Chinese part of the venture was run by a newly formed firm named Galaxy New Technology.

There is a government report on this scandal that makes interesting reading regarding what the Communist Chinese got through this operation: GAO report GAO/NSIAD-97-5.

Of course, this was one of many related scandals which happened during the Clinton Administration. Clinton was systematically loosening controls on the export to China of sensitive technology with military applications, and China was systematically feeding money into Democratic campaign coffers -- but, that's another story.

Hua Di described himself as the "matchmaker" between the Chinese Army and Lewis during an interview for the Far Eastern Economic Review. Hua arranged for Gen. Ding's wife, Madam Nie Li, to head the joint project as the Chinese co-chairman.

Stanford's Lewis, himself a board member of the project, located Adlai Stevenson III, the former Democrat senator from Illinois, to lead the American side. According to the Far Eastern Economic Review, Lewis had Defense Secretary Perry write a personal letter on his behalf to U.S. government officials, favoring the export to China.

In Information Dominance, Part 11, I quoted the following background on Professor Lewis:

John Lewis is the William Haas Professor of Chinese Politics, emeritus, and an FSI senior fellow by courtesy. He is an expert on Chinese politics, U.S.-China relations, China's nuclear weapons program, and U.S. policy toward Korea. He founded and directed the Center for East Asian Studies, in 1969-1970; the Center for International Security and Arms Control (now the Center for International Security and Cooperation, or CISAC) from 1983 to 1991; and the Northeast Asia-United States Forum on International Policy (now APARC), from 1983 to 1990. He currently directs CISAC's Project on Peace and Cooperation in the Asian-Pacific Region.

As we return to our article, it is important to keep in mind that Dr. Lewis had impeccable credentials regarding not just China, but Chinese politics and the Chinese nuclear weapons program -- so much so that he was an advisor on the Clinton Administration's payroll when it came to China.

With Perry's blessing, Hua Di and Lewis contracted AT&T to ship the secure communication systems directly to a Chinese Army unit using Galaxy New Technology as a front. AT&T officials who sold most of the equipment and software were adamant that there was no need to check the Chinese firm since the "civilian" Madam Nie Lie led it.

Yet, the so-called "civilian" firm was actually packed with Chinese army officers and experts. Madam Nie Lie was not only the wife of Gen. Ding Henggao; she was actually Lt. Gen. Nie Lie of the Chinese Army.

Another member of New Galaxy Technology, according to a Defense Department document, was Director and President "Mr. Deng Changru." Deng is also known as Lt. Col. Deng Changru of the People's Liberation Army, head of the PLA communications corps. Still another Chinese army officer on the Galaxy New Technology staff was Co-General Manager "Mr. Xie Zhichao," better known in military circles as Lt. Col. Xie Zhichao, director of the Chinese Army Electronics Design Bureau.

In fact, the evidence shows that Lewis worked not only for Stanford and the Chinese army during this time period. Documents obtained from the Department of Defense using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) show that he also worked for the U.S. Defense Department.

In August 1994, Lewis and Secretary of Defense Perry traveled to Beijing to meet with Gen. Ding Henggao. According to the official list of attendees, Lewis accompanied Perry as his "personal" consultant. Lewis, then a paid consultant of the U.S. Defense Department, met in Beijing with Ding, who was also then Lewis's partner inside a joint U.S. Chinese "commercial venture" for military communications systems.

It is unimaginable that Professor Lewis, this professor emeritus of Chinese politics and advisor to the Clinton Administration's Defense Department on China, did not now how the People's Liberation Army was using this operation to steal secrets for military use.

Therefore, he must have been collaborating as a willing co-conspirator.

Professor Lewis made significant money in this business deal.

In 1997, Stanford professor Lewis was charged with using university funding and equipment to set up the deal with Galaxy New Technology. Stanford Provost Condoleeza Rice announced that Lewis faced an investigation because he had used iniversity stationery and his office to run the joint U.S-Chinese business. In the 1997 investigation, Rice issued a statement to the university press.

"We'll follow what is a normal process under these circumstances," said Rice in the 1997 interview. "Similar issues arise quite frequently. It's not all that unusual that issues arise concerning conflict of interest."

The other thing I find exceptionally interesting about this scandal is the role of Condoleezza Rice.

According to Forbes, Rice has an interesting nickname:

With her steely nerve and delicate manners (she has been called the "Warrior Princess"), Rice lately has reinvigorated her position with diplomatic activism, whether it's promoting Israel's withdrawal from the Gaza Strip to ease the Palestinian conflict...

Let's see how the Warrior Princess's investigation went:

Yet, no formal charges were filed, and Rice quietly dropped the investigation against Lewis and Hua Di. To this day, Ms. Rice will not answer why she stopped the investigation.

It was quietly dropped.

The steely-nerved Provost of Stanford University must have decided that this was an occasion for delicate manners.

The General Accounting Office also documented the New Galaxy Technology scandal (GAO report GAO/NSIAD-97-5). According to the GAO, the scandal involved the "transfer of broadband telecommunications equipment to Hua Mei, a joint venture between SCM Brooks Telecommunications, a U.S. limited partnership, and Galaxy New Technology, a Chinese company primarily owned by an agency of the Chinese military."

In 1997, Rep. Henry Hyde pressed Attorney General Janet Reno to investigate the Galaxy New Technology scandal in a letter outlining his concerns. According to Hyde, "in 1994, sophisticated telecommunications technology was transferred to a U.S.-Chinese joint venture called HUA MEI, in which the Chinese partner is an entity controlled by the Chinese military. This particular transfer included fiber-optic communications equipment, which is used for high-speed, secure communications over long distances. Also included in the package was advanced encryption software."

By the end of 1997 the scandal was drawing too much heat for Hua Di to remain in the United States. In an article curiously released in October 1998, the New York Times announced that Hua Di had returned to China in December 1997.

According to the New York Times, Hua met with Chinese security officials in late 1997 and was assured that he would not be prosecuted. On Dec. 31, 1997, he returned to China. On Jan. 6, 1998, he was arrested and charged with passing state secrets to U.S. officials. In 1999, according to the official Chinese news service, Chinese defector and missile scientist Hua Di was sentenced in a people's court to 15 years for passing state secrets to the United States.

The end of this story is not very pretty. Stanford officials, including Rice and Lewis, have openly appealed to the Chinese government for Hua's release. Rice also continues to defend Hua.

Rice stated in a New York Times interview that Lewis "provided evidence to the fact that the source materials for publications written by him and Mr. Hua were provided by approved Chinese authorities or already were available through the Stanford University library."

Yet, Rice will not talk about Hua Di and the Galaxy New Technology deal. There was more than profit for Hua and the Chinese Army company packed with electronics experts. The secure fiber optic communication system delivered by Hua to his People's Liberation Army general buddies was modified in 1998 and now serves as a secure air-defense system exported to Iraq.

The current Iraqi air defense network, NATO code-named "Tiger Song," is made of U.S. and French fiber optic parts modified and re-exported by the People's Liberation Army. Tiger Song is based on the original secure AT&T system obtained by Hua Di in 1994. Iraqi missiles guided by Tiger Song have repeatedly attacked U.S. fighter jets.

Chinese proliferation in general goes far beyond some radar.

As I document in Enter the Dragon and The Islamic Bomb, Part 4: "The PRC has stolen classified information on every currently deployed thermonuclear warhead in the U.S. ICBM arsenal."

China has passed a tremendous amount of information on to Pakistan, helping Pakistan develop its own nuclear arsenal. Pakistan's A. Q. Khan network has, in turn, helped provide nuclear expertise and components to anyone with money and an interest -- including to Al Qaeda.

As we first found out in Information Dominance, Part 4, and again saw in Part 9, when an Army computer was datamining open-source information about Al Qaeda, it came up with the name of Condoleezza Rice -- connected to Chinese proliferation!

It was a surprise then -- but is it a surprise now?

We conclude with the article:

According to an August 2000 Washington Times interview, Rice asserted, "China is not a threat."

Tiger Song is considered a lethal threat to American and allied armed forces. Such sweet irony that we now face our own weapons and they are not a threat.

Still, all seems to be well between Beijing and Bush. Condoleeza Rice is national security adviser to the president, and the Chinese Army again has a "matchmaker" inside the White House. Just don't ask her about Chinese army spy Hua Di.

The Army program that connected Rice to Chinese proliferations was called Able Danger, and it was run from the Army's Information Dominance Center. It was shut down at the end of the Clinton Administration, even though it was digging up mountains of useful data (2.5 terabytes!) about Al Qaeda. It even made connections that would have allowed us to prevent 9/11.

As asked during Congressional hearings (see Information Dominance, Part 4):

Senator Biden. Is there anything to the sort of, when you get into this, the sort of buzz that it was shut down because Able Danger exceeded its authority and was dealing with targeting Americans that the Defense Department and others were concerned would cause a real brouhaha? There were even some press accounts that the now-Secretary of State came up on a list as being a suspect somehow, or something ridiculous. What part did that play in it?

It wasn't so ridiculous, was it? In fact, the apolitical computer, without prejudices or hang-ups, was right on the money!

John Lewis, Stanford University's William Haas Professor of Chinese Politics, emeritus, and the Honorable Condoleezza Rice, United States Secretary of State, need to be investigated for their roles in this scandal, and for their connections to Communist China's People's Liberation Army.

A conscientious investigation will result in indictments of John Lewis and Condoleezza Rice; the charges will include, but will not be limited to, espionage and treason.

Then, of course, the role of our 42nd President in Chinese proliferation has never been adequately, legally addressed, has it?

Information Dominance, Part 12

We review an article from August 30, 2000: Condoleezza Rice and the Stanford spy ring is reproduced in its entirety, with my enlightening observations interspersed.

On the surface, Condoleezza Rice is the perfect pick for George W. Bush. Rice worked for George Bush Sr. in the White House, handling Russian issues. She is a distinguished fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Bush insiders have mentioned Rice as being on the short list for Secretary of State.

Rice reportedly is also close with former Clinton Secretary of Defense Dr. William Perry. Rice worked with Perry and the Clinton administration during her term at Stanford. Clinton insiders have also mentioned her as being on the short list for Secretary of State.

On Aug. 1, Condoleezza Rice stated during her speech at the Republican National Convention that George W. Bush is up to speed on communist China.

"I know that he understands the complexities of our relationship with China," stated the former Stanford provost of the Texas governor.

"He believes that conflict between our nations is not inevitable. Yet he recognizes the challenge that the Chinese government poses to our interests and values and the irresistible demand for liberty that can be unleashed by freer trade with its people."

"'I know that he understands the complexities of our relationship with China,' stated the former Stanford provost of the Texas governor."

That's quite an endorsement.

Rice has some experience concerning past free trade issues with China. In 1996, Rice was involved in the largest Chinese army penetration of the Clinton administration. To this day, Condoleezza Rice will not answer questions about her service at Stanford with Chinese Army spy Hua Di.

Hua Di came from a family of prominent Communist officials. Hua Di studied missiles in Russia, and worked in the Chinese ballistic missile program for 24 years. In 1984, Hua Di went to work for the China International Trust and Investment Company (CITIC) a firm part owned by the Chinese army.

In 1989, Hua Di fled China for America during the Tiananmen Square crackdown and joined Stanford University. While at Stanford, Hua Di worked with Condoleezza Rice, Dr. William Perry and Dr. John Lewis. Hua Di spent most of his time documenting Chinese missile systems for the University and the Clinton administration.

This Dr. John Lewis has an impressive background. It is worth recalling from Information Dominance, Part 11 his credentials as a professor emeritus of Chinese politics:

John Lewis is the William Haas Professor of Chinese Politics, emeritus, and an FSI senior fellow by courtesy. He is an expert on Chinese politics, U.S.-China relations, China's nuclear weapons program, and U.S. policy toward Korea. He founded and directed the Center for East Asian Studies, in 1969-1970; the Center for International Security and Arms Control (now the Center for International Security and Cooperation, or CISAC) from 1983 to 1991; and the Northeast Asia-United States Forum on International Policy (now APARC), from 1983 to 1990. He currently directs CISAC's Project on Peace and Cooperation in the Asian-Pacific Region.

With that kind of background, keep in mind this question: How likely is it that Dr. Lewis did not know what was really going on in his dealings with China?

Continuing now with Condoleezza Rice and the Stanford spy ring:

Hua Di also started a little home-based company at Stanford. By 1994, Dr. Lewis of Stanford and Hua Di were in business with the Chinese army. In 1994, Hua Di and Dr. Lewis joined with Chinese Gen. Nie Li -- wife of Chinese warlord Gen. Ding Henggao -- and entered into a joint venture called Galaxy New Technology.

As a result of that joint venture, a secure fiber-optic communication system was exported directly to the Chinese army.

The project, named "Hua Mei," also drew a General Accounting Office report that was sharply critical of the direct transfer to the Chinese army.

The key to the whole transaction was Chinese defector Hua Di. In an interview published by the Far Eastern Economic Review, Hua Di described himself as a "matchmaker." Hua Di also noted that he was a good friend of Gen. Huai Guomo, the Chinese army officer then working for Gen. Ding.

Hua Di was a spy for Communist China. Reading the GAO report, it is amazing how astutely these guys circumvented export safeguards.

Hua's business partner, Dr. Lewis, was also a busy man with two extra jobs. In 1994, Dr. Lewis was officially listed on the U.S. Defense Department payroll as Defense Secretary William Perry's personal "consultant" at the same time he worked on the Hua Mei project. According to documents obtained using the Freedom of Information Act, Lewis was pulling three paychecks: one from Stanford, one from the U.S. Defense Department, and one from the Chinese army.

So this professor emeritus of Chinese politics, on the U.S. government payroll as a consultant to the Secretary of Defense, was also involved in establishing a front company for China, through which the People's Liberation Army acquired sensitive technology.

How likely was it that Dr. Lewis did not know that this project was an espionage effort for the Chinese Army?

In 1994, Dr. Lewis traveled to Beijing with Secretary Perry. Lewis went to China in order to meet with Gen. Ding and his subordinate, Gen. Huai, as a paid consultant to the secretary of defense. At the same time, the Hua Mei deal was completed with the same Chinese generals. The sudden upgrade of Chinese military technology enriched Ding and Lewis.

Gen. Ding's incredible espionage success inside the Clinton administration brought a literal flood of advanced military equipment for the People's Liberation Army. The long list of advanced military equipment obtained by Gen. Ding does not stop with the Hua Mei secure fiber-optic communications system. Ding, reported to be a close and old friend of Dr. Perry, also obtained super computers for nuclear weapons research, missile nose cone design software, special missile manufacturing equipment and multiple nuclear warhead designs.

"Ding ... also obtained super computers for nuclear weapons research, missile nose cone design software, special missile manufacturing equipment and multiple nuclear warhead designs."

It may be worth reviewing my post Enter the Dragon for a look at some of the nuclear weapons technology that China has acquired from the U.S., and where some of that technology may go.

Keep in mind Dr. Lewis' impressive credentials as you consider his role in all this, especially this part: "He is an expert on ... China's nuclear weapons program".

In 1996, then Stanford Provost Condoleezza Rice investigated Dr. John Lewis, Dr. Perry and Hua Di. According to the allegations, some of the documentation used to support the Hua Mei project with the Chinese army was prepared using Stanford resources.

At the time, Rice, as an official of Stanford, was concerned whether Stanford resources had been improperly used to further this Hua Mei deal.

"We'll follow what is a normal process under these circumstances. It's not all that unusual that issues arise concerning conflict of interest," said Rice in 1994.

Nothing ever became of the Stanford investigation. Rice made no comment.

And nothing ever came of her investigation.

Why?

What did she discover?

It is possible that she was threatened by Communist thugs or something like that, and intimidated off the case... but, since then, she became National Security Advisor and now Secretary of State in the Bush-43 Administration. Her boss is the most powerful man in the world -- isn't he? Surely she has no reason to be afraid now -- assuming she ever was afraid.

Like her boss, she is dedicated to doing what it takes to enforce the laws and protect America's national security interests -- right?

So, what ever became of the Stanford investigation?

In December 1997, I tried to contact Chinese missile expert Hua Di at Stanford University in California. Curiously, Hua Di would not grant an interview on missiles or the Hua Mei project.

In fact, immediately after my call, Hua Di suddenly decided to return to China.

On Dec. 31, 1997, Hua returned to China. Later in 1998, the official Chinese press announced that Hua had been arrested and charged with passing state secrets to U.S. officials. In response, the Clinton administration and Condoleezza Rice at Stanford University worked together to lobby the Chinese government. Stanford officials wrote to the Chinese government appealing for Hua's release.

Then Stanford Provost Condoleezza Rice said, "Professor John Lewis had provided evidence to the fact that the source materials for publications written by him and Mr. Hua were provided by approved Chinese authorities or already were available through the Stanford University library."

Suddenly, they were concerned about Hua Di, and Lewis and Rice were working together to keep him out of trouble with China.

That last paragraph was an important one: "Then Stanford Provost Condoleezza Rice said, Professor John Lewis had provided evidence to the fact that the source materials for publications [about the Chinese missile program -- YD] written by him and Mr. Hua were provided by approved Chinese authorities or already were available through the Stanford University library."

So, was Hua Di really in trouble with Beijing?

Dr. Lewis, Dr. Perry and Rice have all refused repeated requests for an interview. Hua Di is in China and unavailable for comment. However, an Aug. 28 article by top reporter Bill Gertz, titled "Chinese Military Gets Lesson In U.S. Thinking," contains an interesting point about Condoleezza Rice, the George W. Bush campaign adviser.

"Mr. Bush's key campaign national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, has said she does not regard China as a threat," noted Gertz in his excellent article.

As provost it was Rice's job to investigate and document the work of Hua Di and Dr. Lewis. Rice did not make public that two top Stanford missile researchers were involved in a business deal to provide the Chinese army a secure communications system. Rice never noted that the Clinton administration's military evaluation of the Chinese missile force is based on the now-in-question Stanford works of Hua Di and Dr. Lewis.

Or, was Beijing actually happy that Hua Di had not only acquired sensitive U.S. technology, but had gone so far as to throw the U.S. off the trail about how advanced China's missile programs were?

It is worth recalling that the source materials for the publications about China's missile program "were provided by approved Chinese authorities", and that work then became the basis of the Clinton Administration's evaluation of the People's Liberation Army's missile force.

Recall also what Condoleezza Rice said about George W. Bush:

"'I know that he understands the complexities of our relationship with China,' stated the former Stanford provost of the Texas governor."

Considering how complex "our relationship with China" really is, that is quite an endorsement.

Condoleezza Rice is reported to have traveled to China in recent years. Her views on China, her close work with the Clinton administration and her involvement in the Hua Mei project raise disturbing and unanswered questions. Today, Rice continues to maintain the Clinton administration fiction that Hua Di was not a spy and nothing happened.

Remember, the article quoted here is from August of 2000.

_________________
**My apologies!**

I just realized that I have been misspelling Condoleezza Rice's name.

Apparently, her first name has two Z's.

How embarrassing; it was not intentional.

Wikipedia had it wrong at one point, too; the page is titled "Condoleezza Rice", but the URL is "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condoleeza_Rice" -- and there's a note at the page: "(Redirected from Condoleeza Rice)", so apparently I'm not the only one.

Once again, please accept my apologies, and don't worry: I'll have it right on the indictment.

Phoenix, Part 8

An article that appeared late in 2001, reproduced here in its entirety:

FBI ignored attack warning
Flight instructor told agency of terror suspect's plan
Philip Shenon, New York Times

Saturday, December 22, 2001

(12-22) 04:00 PST Washington -- An instructor at a Minnesota flight school warned the FBI in August of his suspicion that a student who was later identified as a part of Osama bin Laden's terror network might be planning to use a commercial plane loaded with fuel as a weapon, a member of Congress and other officials said yesterday.

The officials, who were briefed by the school, said the instructor warned the FBI in urgent tones about the terrorist threat posed by the student, Zacarias Moussaoui. Moussaoui, a French citizen of Morrocan descent, was indicted last week on charges of conspiring in the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

Rep. James L. Oberstar of Minnesota, who received the briefing and is the ranking Democrat on the House Transportation Committee, said the instructor called the bureau several times to find someone in authority who seemed willing to act on the information.

Oberstar said the instructor's warnings could not have been more blunt. The representative said, "He told them, 'Do you realize that a 747 loaded with fuel can be used as a bomb?"'

Oberstar described the instructor as "an American hero" whose actions resulted in Moussaoui's arrest and might have prevented another suicide hijacking.

Congressional officials said the account by the school, the Pan Am International Flight Academy in Eagan, outside Minneapolis, raised new questions about why the FBI and other agencies did not prevent the hijackings.

Officials said the Arizona branch of the school alerted the Federal Aviation Administration earlier this year after finding that a student spoke little English. The Saudi student, Hani Hanjour, has been described as being at the controls of the plane that crashed into the Pentagon.

The instructor in Minnesota has not been identified. But congressional officials said he was a former military pilot who grew suspicious after encounters in which Moussaoui was belligerent and evasive about his background and because he was so adamant about learning to fly a 747 jumbo jet despite his clear incompetence as a pilot.

Moussaoui, 33, was arrested in August on immigration charges. But despite the urging of the school and federal agents in Minnesota and despite a warning from the French that Moussaoui was linked to Muslim extremists, FBI headquarters resisted opening a broader investigation until after Sept. 11. Last week, he became the first person indicted for involvement in the events of Sept. 11, charged with conspiring with bin Laden and al Qaeda. Moussaoui faces the death penalty.

Some federal law enforcement agents said they believed that Moussaoui was intended to be the 20th hijacker.

This article appeared on page A - 8 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Rep. James L. Oberstar of Minnesota ... said the instructor called the bureau several times to find someone in authority who seemed willing to act on the information.

President George W. Bush in NSPD-1, quoted in Phoenix, Part 7:

The NSC shall meet at my direction. When I am absent from a meeting of the NSC, at my direction the Vice President may preside. The Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs shall be responsible, at my direction and in consultation with the other regular attendees of the NSC, for determining the agenda, ensuring that necessary papers are prepared, and recording NSC actions and Presidential decisions.

Oberstar said the instructor's warnings could not have been more blunt. The representative said, "He told them, 'Do you realize that a 747 loaded with fuel can be used as a bomb?"'

Then-Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs Condoleeza Rice to the Press in May, 2002, as quoted in Phoenix, Part 2 and Phoenix, Part 7:

I don't think anybody could have predicted that these same people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, taken another one and slam it into the Pentagon; that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile.

Phoenix, Part 7

We pick up where we left off in Part 6.

First, we examine the text of NSPD-1

The White House
Washington

February 13, 2001

[snip]

This document is the first in a series of National Security Presidential Directives. National Security Presidential Directives shall replace both Presidential Decision Directives and Presidential Review Directives as an instrument for communicating presidential decisions about the national security policies of the United States.

National security includes the defense of the United States of America, protection of our constitutional system of government, and the advancement of United States interests around the globe. National security also depends on America's opportunity to prosper in the world economy. The National Security Act of 1947, as amended, established the National Security Council to advise the President with respect to the integration of domestic, foreign, and military policies relating to national security. That remains its purpose. The NSC shall advise and assist me in integrating all aspects of national security policy as it affects the United States - domestic, foreign, military, intelligence, and economics (in conjunction with the National Economic Council (NEC)). The National Security Council system is a process to coordinate executive departments and agencies in the effective development and implementation of those national security policies.

[snip]

The NSC shall meet at my direction. When I am absent from a meeting of the NSC, at my direction the Vice President may preside. The Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs shall be responsible, at my direction and in consultation with the other regular attendees of the NSC, for determining the agenda, ensuring that necessary papers are prepared, and recording NSC actions and Presidential decisions.

Very shortly after taking office, President George W. Bush modified the way the National Security Council conducted business. In addition to specifying that the NSC should meet at his discretion, he made the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs -- his National Security Advisor, Condoleeza Rice -- responsible for determining the agenda.

With that in mind, we continue reviewing declassified documents from the summer of 2001. These documents were declassified during the Moussaoui trial, and can be found archived in federal court records. As I present images of these documents, they have a defense exhibit number, and it is by that number that they can be located at the link.

In Defense Exhibit 538F, former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger was quoted in the Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activies Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001 report (the "JICI Report", December 20, 2002) as having testified:

I don't recall being presented with any specific threat information about an attack of this nature [the use of aircraft as weapons] or any alert highlighting this threat or indicating it was any more likely than any other.

Well, okay; he didn't recall.

But then we have the testimony of then-Deputy Under Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz:

I don't recall any warning of the possibility of a mass casualty attack using civilian airliners or any information that would have led us to contemplate the possibility of our shooting down a civilian airliner.

Okay, again: somebody didn't recall.

Then-National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice stated in a May, 2002, press briefing:

I don't think anybody could have predicted that these same people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, taken another one and slam it into the Pentagon; that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile.

But, of course, that wasn't true, was it?

As we went on to show reviewing Defense Exhibit 538F in Part 2, the intelligence community had in the previous seven years been aware of at least twelve such plots, including one specifically targeting the World Trade Center!

In fact, in Part 5, we saw how in the summer of 2001 the FBI was interested in warning the Secret Service, presumably because of the danger of a kamikaze-style attack by Al Qaeda, given that a guy connected with Al Qaeda was trying to learn how to fly a 747, even though this guy was not a pilot.

So, in the final days of August, 2001, the following information was being briefed at high-level meetings in Washington, D.C.:



















They had at least since February of that year, when Bush put Rice in charge of the meetings of the NSC, to hear about these other plots by Islamic terrorists to crash hijacked planes into targets.

And, as we see here, a man associated with Islamic extremists and Osama bin Laden was learning how to fly 747's, even though he had no corresponding background in aviation -- and this fact was being briefed in Washington in the days preceding 9/11.

But somehow, we are expected to believe, this information was not making it to the National Security Council.

Well, who was setting the agenda for the NSC's meetings? And, this person was doing so at the discretion of whom?

The answers, of course, are: National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice, doing so at the discretion of President George W. Bush.

Information Dominance, Part 11

We begin with Spying for fun and profit, December 21, 1999, which I reproduce in its entirety with quotes from other sources and my comments interspersed:

Wang Xi, an 11th century scholar in the Sung Dynasty Hanlin, or Imperial Academy, wrote commentary on the "Use of Spies." According to Wang Xi, "Dead spies are those who are fooled by their own leaders into passing on false information to the enemy; when the facts are determined, they are inevitably killed."

In 1999, according to the official Chinese news service, Chinese defector and missile scientist, Hua Di was sentenced in a People's court to 15 years for passing state secrets to the United States.

State Department spokesman James Foley said, "Based on what we know of his activities as an academic researcher in the U.S., we are aware of no reason to justify his detention and sentencing. We remain deeply concerned about Mr. Hua's reported health problems and need for medical treatment. We're concerned that his detention may have a chilling effect on academic exchanges between the U.S. and China."

So far, so good. A Chinese defector gets sentenced to prison by Beijing, and the U.S. government protests. The only hint that a surprise might be coming up is the first introductory paragraph about dead spies.

Why all the concern over a foolish missile scientist? In 1989, Hua Di defected from China, leaving after the Tiananmen Square crackdown on student democracy demonstrators. Hua Di went to work as a researcher at Stanford's Center for International Security and Arms Control, whose co-directors are former Secretary of Defense William Perry and Stanford Political Science Professor John Lewis.

Tiananmen Square crackdown, terrible thing, appalled scholar defects & winds up working at Stanford....

In late October 1998, it was announced that Hua Di had returned to China. He met with Chinese security officials in late 1997 and was assured that he would not be prosecuted. On Dec. 31, 1997, Hua Di returned to China; on Jan. 6, 1998, he was arrested and charged with passing state secrets to U.S. officials.

Guy wants to go back, Beijing says it isn't holding a grudge, guy goes back, gets arrested and thrown in prison....

The U.S. government is concerned.

Nothing suprising so far....

Stanford University officials and Dr. John Lewis have written to the Chinese government appealing for Hua Di's release. In 1998, then Stanford Provost Condoleezza Rice said Professor John Lewis "had provided evidence to the fact that the source materials for publications written by him and Mr. Hua were provided by approved Chinese authorities or already were available through the Stanford University library."

The issue on the part of Beijing was supposedly that Hua Di had worked on sensitive programs for the People's Liberation Army, and may have passed sensitive information to the U.S. about Chinese missiles. But, those concerns were unfounded, Beijing was assured by the Stanford Provost, Condoleeza Rice -- after all, the information was already publicly available, much of it approved by Chinese authorities.

Notice above the name Dr. John Lewis....

However, Stanford officials have refused all requests for a comment or interview on Hua Di. Former Stanford Provost Condoleezza Rice, now serving as a foreign policy advisor to presidential candidate George W. Bush, has refused to comment. In addition, Perry has likewise refused all requests for an interview on Hua Di.

Why the silence from the very people who have made open statements to defend Hua Di? Perhaps it is because the other Hua Di, agent of the Chinese army, fooled Stanford University and the Clinton administration.

Hmm....

Hua Di was born into a family of prominent Communist officials. He studied missiles in Russia and worked in China's missile program for 24 years. In 1984, Hua Di went to work for the China International Trust and Investment Company (CITIC), a firm part owned by the Chinese army.

In 1989, after defecting to America, Hua Di arranged for the Chinese army to obtain a secure fiber-optic communication system. Hua Di participated in the "Hua Mei" scandal documented by the General Accounting Office (GAO report GAO/NSIAD-97-5).

Some key elements of the GAO report GAO/NSIAD-97-5 are as follows:

HuaMei, while a commercial enterprise, has as its principal Chinese partner, a company controlled by the Chinese military. As shown in figure 1, SCM Brooks Telecommunications and Galaxy New Technology each own 50 percent of HuaMei. However, the Chinese military is the primary shareholder of Galaxy New Technology, with two other Chinese government agencies each holding a minority interest in the company. Several members of the HuaMei board of directors are military officers or have direct ties to the Chinese military. Such a high degree of involvement in HuaMei could indicate a strong military interest in this company.

[snip]

According to Commerce Department officials, an exporter is responsible for knowing its end user when exporting under GLX (or CIV).

[snip]

If there are no suspicious circumstances, the exporter is not required to verify the buyer's representations of civil end use. AT&T officials stated that they did not ask the Commerce Department to determine if HuaMei was a civil end user, nor were they required to under GLX.

Commerce officials stated that the civil end-user requirement in GLX was specifically included to allow Commerce to review exports going to the military. However, in the export of telecommunications equipment to HuaMei, the Commerce Department did not have an opportunity to review the end user because prior government review is not required under GLX. Consequently, the equipment was exported to HuaMei without Commerce review, even though the company was partially controlled by several high-level members of the Chinese military.

So, this Hua Di helped obtain high-tech communications equipment to upgrade the People's Liberation Army's command and control systems.

Returning now to Spying for fun and profit:

According to Hua Di's statements to the Far Eastern Economic Review, Dr. Lewis and he worked together on the Hua Mei project through an American contracting firm called SCM/Brooks. SCM/Brooks formed a joint venture with Galaxy New Technology, a newly formed Chinese company, to arrange the purchase of the fiber-optic system for "civilian" use.

However, Galaxy New Technology was actually owned by the Chinese army. In 1994, Hua Di contacted an old friend in the Chinese army, Lt. Gen. Huai Guomo. Huai arranged for a Madam Nie Li to run the project as the Chinese co-chair. Dr. Lewis, himself a board member of the project, located Adlai Stevenson III, the former Democratic Senator from Ohio, to lead the American side.

The details on all this are a little hard to follow, so I reference here one diagram of the arrangement. Some of the names are spelled a little differently, but you get the idea.

Dr. John Lewis of Stanford helped set this whole thing up.

Is this the Dr. John Lewis of Stanford? The Dr. John Lewis of Stanford University whose bio sheet says this?

John Lewis is the William Haas Professor of Chinese Politics, emeritus, and an FSI senior fellow by courtesy. He is an expert on Chinese politics, U.S.-China relations, China's nuclear weapons program, and U.S. policy toward Korea. He founded and directed the Center for East Asian Studies, in 1969-1970; the Center for International Security and Arms Control (now the Center for International Security and Cooperation, or CISAC) from 1983 to 1991; and the Northeast Asia-United States Forum on International Policy (now APARC), from 1983 to 1990. He currently directs CISAC's Project on Peace and Cooperation in the Asian-Pacific Region.

Keep in mind Dr. Lewis' extensive background and expertise regarding Chinese politics, U.S.-China relations and China's nuclear weapons program, as you continue reading from Spying for fun and profit about the organization he helped set up:

Yet, Galaxy New Technology head Madam Nie Lie was also the wife of Chinese army Gen. Ding Henggao. In fact, according to a 1997 report from the Congressional Reporting Service, Madam Nie Lie was actually Lt. Gen. Nie Lie of the Chinese army. In 1994, Gen. Ding was also the boss of Lt. Gen. Huai, the Chinese military contact for Hua Di. Ding also commanded the Chinese army unit COSTIND, the Commission on Science Technology and Industry for National Defense.

COSTIND, according to the General Accounting Office "oversees development of China's weapon systems and is responsible for identifying and acquiring telecommunications technology applicable for military use."

The U.S. firm, SCM/Brooks contracted AT&T to ship advanced, secure communication systems directly to the Chinese army using Galaxy New Technology as a front. AT&T officials who sold most of the equipment and software to SCM/Brooks were adamant that there was no need to check the Chinese firm since it was led by the "civilian" Madam Nie Lie.

Yet, the so-called "civilian" firm was actually packed with Chinese army officers and experts. One member of Galaxy New Technology management, according to a Defense Department document, was Director and President "Mr. Deng Changru." Mr. Deng Changru was also Lt. Col. Deng Changru of the People's Liberation Army, head of the PLA communications corps. Another Chinese army officer in the Galaxy New Technology staff is co-General Manager "Mr. Xie Zhichao" who is really Lt. Col. Xie Zhichao, director of the Chinese army Electronics Design Bureau.

There's no way around it: on the Chinese side, two partners were government agencies, and the controlling partner was a front company for the Red Army.

This was an operation on the part of the People's Liberation Army to gain important military technology.

Did Dr. Lewis, Stanford University's William Haas Professor Emeritus of Chinese Politics, not realize or even suspect as much?

Documents obtained from the Department of Defense using the Freedom of Information Act show that Dr. Lewis was being paid by the Chinese army while working for Secretary of Defense William Perry as a civilian "consultant."

You can go back to the link with the diagram and scroll down a little to get an idea what they're talking about.

In August 1994, Lewis and Perry traveled to Beijing to meet with Chinese army generals. Included in the meeting were Lewis' Chinese army business partners, Gens. Huai and Ding. According to the official list of attendees, Lewis accompanied Perry as his personal consultant.

In 1997, Lewis was charged with using Stanford University funding to set up the profitable Hua Mei deal. Lewis faced an investigation from Stanford Provost Ms. Rice because he had used University stationery for his Hua Mei business. No formal charges were filed. Ms. Rice dropped the investigation and left Stanford for the Bush presidential campaign.

So Condoleeza Rice left her post at Stanford to advise then-Governor Bush on his Presidential bid. When Bush won, she was appointed as National Security Advisor and from there, moved up to Secretary of State when Colin Powell left at the end of Bush's first term.

Given that, I could understand leaving as unfinished business an investigation into whether some kid cheated on a test or something, but leaving as unfinished business an investigation into the affairs of a man who used his position at Stanford to help the People's Liberation Army skirt laws and upgrade its command and control capability? That seems like something an aspiring National Security Advisor would want to have completed out of professional interest and patriotic duty.

Assuming, of course, getting to the bottom of this was the desired result....

The Galaxy New Technology deal went public in 1996, drawing a General Accounting Office report and the Department of Defense documents cited here. It also drew far too much public attention to Hua Di. Thus, Hua Di returned home to China.

While he served at Stanford, Hua Di passed incorrect and misleading information about Red army missile developments. In 1992, Hua Di and Lewis published "China's Ballistic Missile Program," in which Hua Di claimed a newly developed missile, called the DF-25, was not a success. Hua Di's work is cited by Stanford and Clinton administration officials as "gospel" in an effort to minimize the PLA's recent advances.

So, as alluded to in the first paragraph of the article, this guy's job was to get what could be gotten, and to throw us off the track of the real capabilities of the People's Liberation Army.

According to the co-author of the new book, "Red Dragon Rising," William Triplett, in August 1999, the Clinton administration was shocked by Chinese communist press announcements declaring the DF-25 to be fully operational and tipped with multiple nuclear warheads.

Despite the disinformation, Stanford continues to publish information based on the twisted and false tales spun by Hua Di. Stanford's latest report, "The Cox Committee Report: An Assessment," asserts that China's latest long range nuclear missile, the DF-31, is "less likely to be used first."

The Cox Committee Report: An Assessment is a rebuttal to The Cox Committee Report, which are a couple of TiNRATs. More on that to follow. For now, we continue with the article:

According to the Stanford report, "A mobile ICBM, the DF-31, was initially tested this year. If deployed, it could increase the survivability of Chinese land-based missile forces. ... How U.S. interests are affect by survivability of Chinese nuclear forces is a complex question, however. Survivable weapons are less likely to be used first."

The Stanford conclusion that the mobile Chinese DF-31 can survive a U.S. first strike is correct and misleading. Of all the weapons at the disposal of the Chinese 2nd Artillery Corps, the DF-31 is the most likely to be used in a first strike against the United States.

The mobile DF-31 is also very accurate, thanks to the Chinese espionage documented in the Cox Report. The DF-31 can put three nuclear warheads anywhere inside America. In fact, the "mobile" DF-31 is so accurate that, unlike other Chinese nuclear weapons, it can destroy our "fixed" silo-based U.S. missile force in a first-strike attack. A Chinese first strike with a limited number of DF-31 missiles could destroy our land-based missile force, and in the process, kill millions of Americans.

Again, information in The Cox Committee Report is very interesting, and pertinent, but will be addressed in a subsequent post.

What is key to keep in mind here is the cooperation between Beijing and Islamabad on so many issues. After all, they have a common potential enemy on their borders, India, with which both China and Pakistan have fought wars in the past few decades.

With that in mind, and in the context of the suprising capabilities of the People's Liberation Army's missile forces, we must recall the evidence we saw in The Islamic Bomb, Part 4, of Beijing's assistance to Islamabad: actual blueprints of nuclear weapons, in Chinese, turned up as far afield as Libya, via A. Q. Khan's nuclear blackmarket.

Certainly, those plans were for vintage implosion devices, and were not for state-of-the-art nuclear weapons.

But what else might be lurking in the Shadow Realm, waiting to pop up?

I am certain that Stanford officials will continue to comment on the military and political relationships between the United States and China. However, also expect Stanford officials to remain silent on questions about their former employee Hua Di. Do not be surprised if they continue to refuse all comments on the so-called "defector" in order to dodge questions of his espionage while at the university.

Hua Di served the Chinese Communist party and the People's Liberation Army by doing their dirty work in America. He passed disinformation, he was cozy with top Clinton defense officials and he was personally responsible for upgrading the Chinese army communications network, making them more "survivable" in case of nuclear war.

However, in accordance with the military theories of Wang Xi, the eleventh century Chinese espionage scholar, Hua Di may have one more service to perform. I anticipate that Hua Di will be reported as "dead" in the red Chinese controlled press.

With this post, I begin a new label, one I should have begun long ago: Espionage.

I leave you now with the image of a page from Chapter 2 of the Cox Report:

Information Dominance, Part 10

We continue our Information Dominance series (see sidebar) by reviewing a November 24, 2005, article entitled A 9/11 tip-off: Fact or fancy?

I reproduce the entire article with my comments interspersed; the article also has a timeline as an addendum, which I did not reproduce.

Debate still swirls around claims that secret military program ID'd hijackers a year before attacks.

WASHINGTON - It's either the grandest conspiracy since the JFK assassination and the grassy knoll or much ado about nothing.

Immediately, we start out with that C-word.

Able Danger, a top-secret military program set up in 1999 to probe the al-Qaida terrorist network, is rekindling fierce debate about the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Military intelligence officers and contractors who ran the clandestine mission, a computer data-mining operation within the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, claim that more than a year before the attacks, Able Danger identified four of the plot's 19 hijackers and produced a chart that fingered ringleader Mohamed Atta, displayed a photo of him and contained the names of up to 60 al-Qaida operatives around the globe.

The program also identified Condoleeza Rice in connection to proliferation of sensitive military technology to China. (See Part 4 and especially Part 9.) It is that connection that will be explored beginning in Part 11.

Those claims contradict the findings of the 9/11 commission set up by Congress, which in its final report last year spread blame for the attacks across the government but concluded that none of the 19 hijackers, some of whom had lived in the United States for months before Sept. 11, was identified until after the tragedy.

More accurately, the 9/11 Commission contradicted the information on Able Danger. It also contradicted the information supplied by Sibel Edmonds, information which had been verified at least in part -- and never contradicted or disproven -- by CBS 60 Minutes, US Senators and the US Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General. I have heard, but been unable to confirm, that the 60 Minutes information was retroactively classified. So many other things in the Sibel Edmonds case have been retroactively classified that I consider that credible.

Kristen Breitweiser, a New Jersey woman whose husband died in the World Trade Center's south tower, said she and other relatives of some of the 2,986 Sept. 11 victims have met with the military officers who worked on Able Danger, which the Pentagon ended in early 2001.

"It's very upsetting to hear people tell you that your husband and the father of your children didn't have to die because we had information to stop the attacks," Breitweiser said in an interview.

See also my Phoenix series (links in sidebar) about actionable information that was not acted upon. The series and the label are named after the famous Phoenix memo (although there are other reasons for that title as well), images of which I reproduce in the series. That series also has images of other declassified government documents, especially FBI materials, relating to 9/11.

Part of the problem in untangling the Able Danger web is that the computer-based program was designed to search open source documents - everything in the public domain - for patterns and links among al-Qaida terrorists, but the program as a whole was classified.

So, while at least some of its original material was public, it became secret after entering an Able Danger database.

Army Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, a Bronze Star recipient and former Able Danger operative who first came forward with details of the program, says Pentagon lawyers thwarted the team's attempts to pass on their findings to the FBI before the attacks. And he claims that after the attacks, staff members of the 9/11 panel met with him and other Able Danger officers, but then failed to adequately pursue their leads.

"The 9/11 commission may not have 'connected the dots' as completely as they could and should have - and that is my concern and the concern of others working this issue," Shaffer said in an e-mail to Sept. 11 family members before the Pentagon issued a gag order two months ago, forbidding him and other former Able Danger officers from discussing the program publicly.

This is what is interesting.

If there was a mistake, why the gag order? The Bush Administration, and specifically then-Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, issued this gag order, preventing these military officers from answering questions to Congress about a program that was supposedly terminated under Clinton.

It is similar to the Sibel Edmonds case, where Congress, whose job is oversight of the Executive Branch, allowed itself to be gagged right along with Edmonds.

Navy Capt. Scott Philpott, who led the Able Danger mission, said in a statement before the Pentagon gag order: "My story is consistent. Atta was identified by Able Danger by January-February of 2000."

After initial refusals to comment, Pentagon officials have acknowledged that Able Danger existed. Army Maj. Eric Kleinsmith told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Sept. 21 that he had complied with orders to destroy 2.4 terabytes of computer data produced by Able Danger - 2,400 gigabytes, or about one-quarter the size of all the books in the Library of Congress.

Kleinsmith and other Pentagon officials have cited privacy laws, which they say prohibit the government from maintaining secret files on U.S. citizens or noncitizens in the country on legal visas.

Rep. Curt Weldon, a Pennsylvania Republican with extensive foreign affairs experience, has taken up the Able Danger officers' cause. Calling Able Danger "the most important story of my lifetime," Weldon last Friday sent Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld a letter signed by 246 lawmakers, split almost evenly between Republicans and Democrats, demanding that the program's officers and contractors be allowed to testify in open congressional hearings.

"Further refusal ... can only lead us to conclude that the Department of Defense is uncomfortable with the prospect of members of Congress questioning these individuals about the circumstances surrounding Able Danger," the letter stated. "This would suggest not a concern for national security, but rather an attempt to prevent potentially embarrassing facts from coming to light."

Therein lies the key.

Sibel Edmonds points out that the government officials are not protecting sensitive national security information, but rather criminal conduct by government officials. The criminal conduct deals with proliferation of sensitive military technology, including nuclear secrets. It also connects to narcotics trafficking and international terrorism, which is increasingly funded through organized crime activities since the end of the Cold War.

A key link in all this is the Turkish Deep State, which is the name given to a cartel of Turkish political, military and government leaders who are connected with business interests and narcotraffickers. It is this link that got Edmonds, a native speaker of Turkish, involved as she was tasked to translate FBI materials from Turkish. It was also this link that caused Edmonds herself to be targeted for recruitment into this espionage web: see Sibel Edmonds and the Attack of the TiNRATs, Part 1 and the post on the 60 Minutes transcript.

In a speech on the House floor last month, Weldon said the Able Danger saga is more important than the Watergate scandal that brought down President Nixon.

"I am not a conspiracy theorist, but there is something desperately wrong," he said. "There is something outrageous at work here. This is not a third-rate burglary of a political campaign headquarters. This involved what is right now the covering-up of information that led to the deaths of 3,000 people, changed the course of history, led to the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, and has disrupted our country, our economy and people's lives."

For some interesting reading on this, go to the other parts of the Information Dominance series (see sidebar), where I review the Congressional testimony on this matter, with a focus on Congressman Weldon's testimony.

Weldon also accuses the Pentagon of engaging in a smear campaign against Shaffer, 42, since the colonel went public, by revoking his security clearance, suspending him and leaking alleged details from his personnel file to reporters and congressional aides. Among the slurs, Weldon says, are claims that Shaffer was having an affair with a Weldon aide - which Shaffer's attorney vehemently denies, that he sought reimbursement for personal cell phone calls, and even that he stole pens from a U.S. embassy where his father was based when Shaffer was 15 years old.

The smear campaign was a standard tactic of the Clinton Administration, only then it targeted women who had been harassed by Bill. Now, under the Bush Administration, the targets are whistleblowers exposing government corruption that predates the Bush Administration. Consequently, not all of the Clinton Administration's scandals came out during the Clinton years, but some have instead been continued during the Bush Administration.

Same scandals, different President.

What are they doing in Washington that neocon Republicans and liberal Democrats can agree to cover up? It must be very embarassing... and very profitable!

"There is something desperately wrong when a military officer (Shaffer) risks his life in Afghanistan time and again, embedded with our troops under an assumed name with a false beard and a false identity ... gets castigated, gets ridiculed, gets some low-life scum at the Pentagon spreading malicious lies about this individual," Weldon told fellow lawmakers.

In response to a request by Rep. Duncan Hunter, a San Diego-area Republican and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, the Defense Department's inspector general is investigating the alleged smear campaign against Shaffer.

In the Senate, Republican Sen. Arlen Specter, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, accused the Pentagon of possible "obstruction of the committee's activities" after the Defense Department forbade Shaffer, Philpott and other Able Danger analysts from testifying before the panel. Specter and Pentagon officials are negotiating conditions for an open hearing.

"The American people are entitled to some answers," Specter said. "It is not a matter of attaching blame. It is a matter of correcting errors so that we don't have a repetition of 9/11."

Both Democrats and Republicans have asked for answers from the Administration, but the scandal involves both Democrats and Republicans. As the Edmonds case points out, people on both sides of the aisle are taking bribes -- and Dennis Hastert's name has come up.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, meanwhile, has heard closed-door testimony from Able Danger members and Pentagon employees, and it is nearing completion of a report.

The gag is not just to protect sensitive national security information, as that could be protected in classified, closed-door hearings.

Weldon is an unlikely Pentagon antagonist. Since first being elected to the House in 1986, he has been a defense hawk, consistently pushing for larger Pentagon budgets and new programs. Weldon speaks Russian, has led dozens of congressional delegations to Russia and the former Soviet Union, and has traveled to Libya, North Korea and other countries to deliver stern messages to dictators.

It's not about some liberal bashing the defense establishment.

Weldon's crusade on Able Danger, though, has drawn derision in some quarters, even from some current or former lawmakers who have known him for years.

"By the way he talks about Able Danger these days, you'd think it would have prevented Pearl Harbor," said Timothy Roemer, a former Indiana Republican congressman and member of the 9/11 commission.

They could have prevented 9/11, but someone didn't want to. See my posts under the label The Killing.

Lee Hamilton, a former Indiana Democratic lawmaker who co-chaired the 9/11 panel, said he worked closely with and respects Weldon because the two shared interests in defense and intelligence matters.

But he said the commission investigated the Able Danger officers' claims exhaustively and could not find evidence to support them.

"We've asked for that chart repeatedly," Hamilton said in an interview. "The Pentagon cannot produce it, the White House cannot produce it, and Weldon cannot produce it."

That's because the chart and all related information were ordered destroyed during the Clinton years. My bet is that the higher-ups were appalled when Able Danger started connecting people like Condoleeza Rice to Chinese proliferation.

But, the information was seen as valuable, and at least some of it was kept....

Breitweiser said she is confident additional facts about Able Danger will emerge.

Oh, they will. They are. :)

"As more and more information is coming out, more and more Americans are questioning how this attack could have happened," Breitweiser said. "We're finding out we are not being told the truth. A lot of information was known, and the attacks could have been prevented."

Stay tuned! :)

Phoenix, Part 6

We continue from Part 5 reviewing exhibits for the defense at the Moussaoui trial, many of which were classified papers from the FBI and elsewhere in the US Government that had been declassified for the trial. These exhibits can be found in the court archives for the U.S.D.C. Eastern District of Virginia.

First we consider Defense Exhibit 660, which was a Top Secret briefing presented on August 23, 2001:



It was for the office of the Director of Central Intelligence.



It had some interesting information about Moussaoui and his desires to fly a 747, even though Moussaoui had no corresponding aviation background.



Although this investigation was briefable at the highest levels in Washington, in the field the next day SA Harry Samit was busy sending emails trying to get it moving.

About 10:30 in the morning, SA Samit was sending an email expressing his concerns that members of middle management were not convinced that Moussaoui was in the process of committing a federal crime, nor were they convinced that he was connected to a foreign power.



A little over an hour later, SA Samit was trying to get more convincing evidence of Moussaoui's connection to a foreign power.





The higher-ups, it seems, were not impressed, even though it had been established that Moussaoui had been a recruiter for a Chechen mujahideen group that had ties to Osama bin Laden.



About twenty minutes later, SA Samit was sending another email discussing connections to Osama bin Laden.






Later that afternoon, SA Samit was still trying.



Again, SA Samit was disagreeing with the assessment by higher-ups that there was neither an indication of impending criminal activity nor a connection to a foreign power.



Keep in mind this documentation of what was happening on Friday, August 24th, as we see in Part 7 what was being briefed on Tuesday, August 28th.

Information Dominance, Part 9

We continue from Part 8 reviewing The Writing on "The Wall" (by Thomas Ryan, FrontPageMagazine.com, August 22, 2005); if you haven't already read Part 8, you may want to.

Possible Motives

Able Danger's intelligence on Atta was dismissed not only in 2000, but was ignored a second time in 2003 by the 9/11 Commission. In their article "9/11 Coverup Commission," Ben Johnson and Lt. Col. Gordon Cucullu made the following observation:

Recent revelations about covert 'Able Danger' operations are forcing certain people to deal with subjects that they had thought swept under the rug. Despite apparent attempts to conceal the fact, the 9/11 Commission has had to admit it was informed that government agents knew of Mohammed Atta's affiliation with al-Qaeda two years before 9/11, that Clinton-era policies prevented intelligence officials from sharing that information with the FBI, that the amended time frame would allow Mohammed Atta to have made contacts with Iraqi intelligence, and – most damningly – that it kept all this out of its final report.

So, it was Clinton's fault. The reason "The Wall" was reinforced, beyond any legal requirement, was to keep counterintelligence from passing to criminal investigators information it had on Clinton's sale of missile technology to Communist China for contributions to Clinton's 1996 reelection campaign (see Part 8).

That "Wall" also kept the Army Information Dominance Center from passing what it had learned about Al Qaeda to the FBI, thus costing us an excellent opportunity to catch the terrorists and prevent the attack.

But, when this information was presented to the 9/11 Commission, the information was buried.

Here someone was asking why.

What could explain such a seemingly egregious lapse in judgment? To answer this, we must consider the role of President Clinton's Deputy Attorney General, Jamie Gorelick, in the 9/11 Commission. Gorelick, who (as noted earlier) authorized the creation of the communication wall between intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, was also a member of the 9/11 Commission. Thus a key individual who should have been testifying before the Commision was, instead, one of its sitting members. The seemingly inescapable conclusion is that Gorelick prevented the 9/11 Commission from including the Able Danger information so as to protect herself and the Clinton legacy from the condemnation they deserve.

Clintonite obstruction of justice on the 9/11 Commission to cover up past criminal conduct, which itself included obstruction of justice and a cover-up, as well as influence-peddling, bribery and treason...?

A second possibility is that any reference to the Able Danger intelligence was omitted (from the 9/11 Commission report) because it seemed to suggest that Iraq was somehow involved in planning or funding the 9/11 attacks. Such a revelation would constitute a deathblow to the argument that the Iraq War was unjustified because Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 or terrorist threats against the United States. Admitting that the Able Danger intelligence, like the Czech intelligence, placed Atta at a meeting with an Iraqi agent in Prague on April 9, 2001 would strongly suggest that al-Qaeda and Iraq had worked in unison on the attacks. This conclusion would not sit well with the political enemies of George W. Bush. Of this possibility, Ben Johnson and Lt. Col. Gordon Cucullu write in FrontPage:

If there was, in fact, covert direction from the top of the Commission to key members of its staff to cloak any link between Saddam and the September 11 attacks, to obfuscate evidence tying the Iraqi regime to al-Qaeda and Mohammed Atta, and to paint the most positive possible picture of the Clintons as implacable terror-warriors, then "Able Danger" had to be ignored and covered up...

By acknowledging the Iraq/al-Qaeda ties, not only to terrorism in general but to the September 11 attack, the war becomes completely justifiable as exactly what the Bush administration claimed it was: a defensive, if preemptive, war to protect the United States from a regime with cordial ties to anti-American terrorists.

Or an effort to put partisan politics ahead of foreign policy, so Bush could be bashed?

Congress had already given King George all the authority he needed for his war in Iraq; besides which, most of the Democrats that are criticizing Bush for the Iraq war now voted for it then.

Would the Clintonites put partisan politics ahead of the best interests of the United States? Oh, yes, and they did so many times. Was that the problem here, though?

Dismantling the Wall: The USA Patriot Act

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. House and Senate set about to create legislation that would provide new tools in combating the terrorist threat facing our country. On October 26, 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed, and with it new regulations regarding intelligence gathering were enacted, as well as new parameters that would pave the way for criminal investigators and intelligence agencies to cooperate on international terrorism cases. In March of 2002, the Justice Department asked the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, which was responsible for the formation of the wall in 1978, to consent to new procedures that would, in effect, dismantle it. The Justice Department affirmed that the USA Patriot Act mandated such an action, and today, because of it, collaboration on vital anti-terrorism initiatives is occurring between different agencies.

So, Clintonites caused the problem, and the Bush Administration solved it, right?

Sibel Edmonds, on the other hand, has been telling us that people in Washington are abusing the system to cover up their own criminal activity -- and this had been going on for years as of 2002, when she was fired from the FBI as a contract translator, and we know this continues today with the ongoing gag order on her by the Bush Administration.

In his April 2004 testimony before the 9/11 Commission, Attorney General John Ashcroft said that by the end of the Clinton Administration, "the Justice Department was so addicted to the wall, it actually opposed legislation to lower the wall. Finally, the USA Patriot Act tore down this wall between our intelligence and law enforcement personnel in 2001. And when the Patriot Act was challenged, the FISA Court of Review upheld the law, ruling that the 1995 guidelines were required by neither the Constitution nor the law."

The way in which the Patriot Act succeeded in dismantling the wall was a simple change in the language of the law. Prior to the Patriot Act, FISA warrants were issued only when it could be demonstrated that the "primary purpose" of a particular surveillance was the collection of foreign intelligence information. The Patriot Act changed the language of the warrant to read as "significant purpose." This simple modification purged the divider that existed between threats classified as foreign in nature and those that were classified as domestic crimes.

Jamie Gorelick, who played such a key role in the formation and reinforcement of that wall, has criticized the Patriot Act. At an October 2004 symposium titled, "Pursuing Justice and the War on Terrorism," Gorelick remarked that "the President had yet to prove the effectiveness of the Patriot Act and other controversial national security legislation," and that the Bush Administration "has also failed to show that there exist proper checks and balances to curb its expanded powers."

Although critics of the Patriot Act regularly portray it as a threat to civil liberties and decry that no proper checks and balances are in place to restrain it, its merits in the post-9/11 world are unquestionable. With regard to abuses of civil liberties, the Justice Department's Inspector General, who monitors the ACT in an effort to prevent such abuses, has reported that none have yet occurred. Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein agrees, stating, "I have never had a single abuse of the Patriot Act reported to me. My staff...asked [the ACLU] for instances of actual abuses. They...said they had none." Prior to 9/11, and because of the efforts of the Clinton Administration, the nation's intelligence and law-enforcement agencies were barred from sharing information with one another. The Patriot Act removed that barrier, and because of it, terrorist cells in Portland, Oregon; Lackawanna, New York; and Virginia were uncovered and eliminated.

Looking Ahead

The 9/11 Commission's decision to exclude any mention of Able Danger from its report merits an aggressive and immediate inquiry. As things now appear, corrupt politics enabled the 9/11 hijackers to carry out their horrifying mission. Compounding the sin, the very Commission entrusted with the task of shedding light on what led to 9/11 appears to be engaged in a cover-up that is a slap in the face to the grieving loved ones of 9/11's victims.

[End of article -- YD]

So, it was a bureaucratic rule, excessively strengthened by the Clinton Administration to cover up Slick Willie's own treasonous conduct -- selling missile technology to Beijing in exchange for money for Clinton and the Democrats in 1996 -- and the Bush Administration was the hero.

And any one of us from the conservative side of the house will believe that -- water is wet, fire is hot, and Clinton is a treasonous criminal; we know these things.

Except for one thing: why did the Bush Administration, days after this article was published, gag all military officers who were familiar with Able Danger and prevent them from testifying before Congress the following month?

What is there to hide, if it was a problem from the previous Administration that had been corrected?

Remember the words from the hearing: "Lieutenant Colonel Shaffer ... is under Rumsfeld's gag order".

Okay, so Bush didn't want to drag his predecessor through the mud; Bush is honest, Clinton is not, but Bush is taking the high road, and not exposing Clinton's treason. An accomplice after the fact is what that makes somebody.

But, why?

Recall that Able Danger, looking at Al Qaeda via open-source material, connected Condoleeza Rice to Chinese proliferation, too:

Representative Weldon. There were a combination of reasons. They had done a profile of Chinese proliferation in 1999 that John Hamre had asked for. I was aware of that presentation, and because it was massive data mined that had not yet been vetted, a couple of very sensitive names surfaced because they had been affiliated with Stanford University, where many of the students that were doing this very, very specific research, very sensitive to our country's security, were located, and I think partly because of that, there was a wave of controversy.

[snip]

Senator Biden. Is there anything to the sort of, when you get into this, the sort of buzz that it was shut down because Able Danger exceeded its authority and was dealing with targeting Americans that the Defense Department and others were concerned would cause a real brouhaha? There were even some press accounts that the now-Secretary of State came up on a list as being a suspect somehow, or something ridiculous. What part did that play in it?

Representative Weldon. It was a significant part. In fact--

The "now-Secretary of State" would be Condoleeza Rice, formerly of Stanford University. She was there from -- what was it? -- 1981 to December 17, 2000, when she stepped down from her position at Stanford to serve in the Bush-43 Administration. She served as Provost, chief budget and academic officer, and full professor.

(See also Part 7.)

Then, was it not the Bush Administration that snubbed the Congressional hearing on the A. Q. Khan nuclear proliferation network? Was it not Bush, and his "now-Secretary of State" that failed to pressure Pakistan into making Khan available to answer some questions for international investigators of nuclear proliferation?

Recall how close Pakistan is to China, and how Pakistan is sharing its nuclear weapons with Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is Bush's buddy, and Rice was connected to proliferation to China.

It is also interesting to recall how then-National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice had not imagined "that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile", when we know this idea had been circulating in the intelligence community for years, and that the President's Secret Service detail was supposedly warned about this very possibility in late August, 2001.

The highest levels of the Bush Administration know and have known for some time a great deal more than what they let on, and have been consistently obstructing any line of inquiry that might make a connection.

Are they covering up their own treasonous, criminal conduct?