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by John J. Loftus
May 31,
2002 For Immediate Release
By Atty. John J. Loftus
3560 Coquina Key Drive SE
St. Petersburg, FL 33705
Ph: 727-821-5227
Fx: 727-894-1801
About
the author: As a former federal
prosecutor, John Loftus had an insider’s knowledge of high level
intelligence operations, including obstruction of Congressional
investigations. Loftus resigned from the Justice Department in 1981 to
expose how the intelligence community had recruited Nazi war criminals and
then concealed the files from Congressional subpoena. After appearing on
an Emmy Award winning segment of 60 Minutes, Loftus has spent the next two
decades writing histories of intelligence cover-ups, and serving as an
unpaid lawyer helping other whistleblowers inside US intelligence.
A captured Al Qaida document
reveals that US energy companies were secretly negotiating with the
Taliban to build a pipeline. The document was obtained by the FBI but was
not allowed to be shared with other agencies in order to protect Enron.
Multiple sources confirm that American law enforcement agencies were
deliberately kept in the dark and systematically prevented from connecting
the dots before 9/11 in order to aid Enron’s secret and immoral Taliban
negotiations.
The suppressed Al Qaida document
tends to support recent claims of a cover-up made by several mid-level
intelligence and law enforcement figures. Their ongoing terrorist
investigations appear to have been hindered during the same sensitive time
period while the Enron Corporation was still negotiating with the Taliban.
An inadvertent result of the Taliban pipeline cover-up was that the
Taliban’s friends in Al Qaida were able to complete their last eight
months of preparations for 9/11 while the Enron secrecy block was still in
force.
Although the latest order to
block investigations allegedly resulted from Enron’s January 2002 appeal
to Vice President Dick Cheney, it appears that there were at least three
previous block orders, each building upon the other, stretching back for
decades and involving both Republican and Democratic administrations.
The first block came in the
1970’s, as a result of Congressional reaction to domestic espionage
against the anti-Vietnam war movement. In a case of blatant over-reaction,
the FBI placed all houses of worship and religious charities off-limits
for any surveillance whatsoever unless there was independent probable
cause. This meant that all Mosques and other Muslim meeting places for
terrorist groups were effectively off limits until after a crime had been
committed. The block order was not lifted until last week by Atty. General
Ashcroft.
The second block order, in force
since the 1980’s, was against any investigation that would embarrass the
Saudi Royal family. Originally, it was designed to conceal Saudi support
for Muslim extremists fighting against the Soviets in Afghanistan and
Chechnya, but it went too far. Oliver North noted in his autobiography,
that every time he tried to do something about terrorism links in the
Middle East, he was told to stop because it might embarrass the Saudis.
This block remains in place.
As the combined result of these
two blocks, the Saudis were able to fund middle eastern terrorists in
complete secrecy during the 1990’s through a network of Muslim charities
in Virginia, Tampa and Florida. The Saudi funding network was targeted at
the destruction of the State of Israel and the obstruction of the
Palestinian peace process.
The Saudi funding conduit has now
been exposed and shut down by means of a private lawsuit, Loftus vs.
Sami Al Arian, which is currently pending in Hillsborough County,
Florida. The lawsuit, filed on March 20, 2002, influenced the government
into raiding the Saudi charities in Herndon, Virginia, a few hours later.
After filing the Al-Arian
lawsuit, Attorney Loftus began to receive very detailed documents and
information about a third block: a prohibition on investigations
concerning the Taliban. In the early 1990’s, a consortium of American oil
companies (lead by Unocal) had hired Enron to determine the profitability
of building an oil and gas pipeline across Afghanistan so that America
could have access to the Caspian Sea Basin, holding 1/8th of
the worlds energy supplies.
There is no doubt that these
secret negotiations existed, and that they were known to Al Qaida. Loftus
recently received an FBI translation of a highly classified and encrypted
Al Qaida document, circa 1997-1998, which was retrieved and decrypted from
a computer laptop following the Embassy bombing in Africa. The document
was written by Osama Bin Laden’s military commander, Mohammed Atef, under
his nom de guerre, Abu Haf, and reveals extensive knowledge of the
supposedly secret pipeline negotiations, and their potential economic
worth to the Taliban, Pakistan and the U.S.
Former Afghanistan CIA agent
Robert Baer has recently published a book charging that the cover-up of
the 1990’s pipeline negotiations revealed extensive financial corruption
inside the Clinton administration, and contributed to the lack of
intelligence before 9/11. The Taliban negotiations temporarily collapsed
in 1999 after Clinton reversed his NSC advisor’s policy, and ordered a
missile strike against terrorists in Afghanistan.
However, in January 2001, Vice
President Cheney allegedly reinstated the intelligence block and expanded
it to effectively preclude any investigations whatsoever of
Saudi-Taliban-Afghan oil connections. Former FBI counter-terrorism chief
John O’Neill resigned from the FBI in disgust, stating that he was ordered
not to investigate Saudi-Al Qaida connections because of the Enron
pipeline deal. Loftus has confirmed that it was O’Neill who originally
discovered the AL Qaida pipeline memo after the Embassy bombings in
Africa.
O’Neill gave an overview of the
Enron block to two French authors who will soon be publishing in the
United States. The FBI is currently investigating Loftus’ links to John
O’Neill, and is also refusing FBI agent Robert Wright permission to
publish his own findings about the Enron block.
Loftus asserts that the Enron
block, which remained in force from January 2001 until August 2001 when
the pipeline deal collapsed, is the reason that none of FBI agent Rowley’s
requests for investigations were ever approved. As numerous British and
French authors have concluded, the information provided by European
intelligence sources prior to 9/11 was so extensive, that it is no longer
possible for either CIA or the FBI to assert a defense of incompetence.
It is time for Congress to face
the truth: In order to give Enron one last desperate chance to complete
the Taliban pipeline and save itself from bankruptcy, senior levels of US
intelligence were ordered to keep their eyes shut and their subordinates
ignorant.
The Enron cover-up confirms that
9/11 was not an intelligence failure or a law enforcement failure (at
least not entirely). Instead, it was a foreign policy failure of the
highest order. If Congress ever combines its Enron investigation with
9/11, Cheney’s whole house of cards will collapse.
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