Ed Begley, Jr. -- Host: We're going to return to our panel to discuss these issues, whether or not 9/11 was unavoidable.  Still we wonder after such supported and supposed failure, shouldn't anyone be held accountable?  First of all, I want to introduce John Prados, he's a journalist and an author.  His work appears regularly in one of the nation's great old journals on military affairs, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.  Welcome John.

Jamey Hecht, Ph.D. -- Co-Host: Carl Schwartz is a principle in Global Access, and a former high-level consultant to the Republican party.  Arkansas Republicans once asked him to run for governor against Bill Clinton.  And more recently, he's been researching the background reasons for the removal of the Taliban.  Carl Schwartz.

Ed Begley, Jr. -- Host:  Mr. Prados, who, if anyone, in the government should be held accountable for 9/11?

John Prados, Author/Former Senior National Security Analyst:  Who's to be held accountable?  I think it's pretty clear.  The President of the United States, George W. Bush, who failed to exert leadership at a key moment in the nation's history; the Vice-President of the United States, Richard Cheney, who was in charge of a commission, a committee to deal with the terrorism issue and wouldn't meet with it before September 11th happened.  Attorney General of the United States, John Aschcroft, who cut money out of the terrorism budget the day before September 11.  The National Security Advisor, Condoleeza Rice, and her deputy Stephen Hadley, who held back the plan to do anything about al Qaeda for nine months during the months that something could have been happening.  The Federal Bureau of Investigation, which muffed its investigation of what was going on in terrorist circles in the United States.  The Central Intelligence Agency who failed to appreciate everything that was going on even though George Tenet was running around with his hair on fire.  There's a lot more I could talk about, but I think we've got little time here, so I'm going to pass it along.

Ed Begley, Jr. -- Host:  There's somebody I want to hear from, and thank you John, that was quite eloquent.  You know, not only was The Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, signed under President Nixon, but a lot of the recent environmental laws passed, we couldn't have done without Sherry Bollert and John Chaffey, now deceased, and Lincoln Chaffey, and wonderful Republicans who've stood up for the environment.  We have a Republican here tonight who's here to prove this is and should be a non-partisan issue.  I'd like to hear from Carl Schwartz, please.  Karl.

Karl Schwartz, Author/Pres. and CEO of Patmos Nanotechnologies:

Every time I hear the name Ashcroft, I have to remind myself, this was the guy who lost an election, in a gubernatorial, in the show-me state, to a dead guy.  And his next job is to come before every one of us and treat us all as an Al Qaeda suspect.  So I am not real proud to call myself a Republican these days.  I tell the story that I became a Republican in 1980 because of Bill and Hillary Clinton, and I became an Independent recently because of George Bush.

There have been several things said this evening, these are just factual, correcting things.  We talked about this back stage.  Because of the media and the timeline, and how people put this all together, the doctor brought up Unocal a minute ago.  Unocal is actually owned by the Venezuelan government-owned Petroleus.  They are not a U.S. owned company anymore.  If you know anything about the pegging of the dollar to oil, and the pegging of the dollar to the Euro, there's only two countries on the face of this planet that have done that:  one is Iraq, and you can see what happened to them, and the other one was Venezuela.  And you can pretty well come to a conclusion there's been that quite a bit of interference in Venezuela as to what to do about their pegging to the dollar.  We've tried to stomp Chavez to death politically down there.

To address Sibel Edmonds that came up in the clip a minute ago.  I interviewed Sibel Edmonds for a book that I wrote, and everybody thinks it's got a cute name to it, and I didn't even name it.  It's titled, "One Way Ticket to Crawford, Texas -- A Conservative Republican Speaks Out."  Where my story started in this, it started in 1999.  I left Wall Street, I've been in this city many many times, in fact I've been in the World Trade Center many many times, I used to office with ____ Capital Markets at 100 ___ Street, and then we all moved with Smith Barney, and we went up here to 1345  Avenue of the Americas, and then Smith Barney moved down to 380 Grenwich, that's when I left the company.  And preferred to do something else with my life other than travel half a million to a million miles a year.

But one of the things that I did, was I went with UUNet.  I saw telecom and IP __ as something that was interesting.  Possibly profitable if you did it right.  And I met a company in November 1999 at a telecom conference.  In the book "The Forbidden Truth," the Brisard book, they disclosed that Bridas Corporation had actually signed a contract with Turkmenistan and Pakistan to build the trans-Afghanistan pipeline.  Now they were not able to ferret out the information I was, and I did this face-to-face.  What we found is that Bridas also had a contract with the Taliban and with General Rashid Dawston.  The last remaining obstacle after our government and after our influence peddlers had put enough pressure on Turkmenistan to upend that government's agreements with Bridas, they also upended Pakistan, there's a good possibility that when Bhutto was overturned we may have been behind it, we have a lot of companies over there including four that have electrical generation power plants in Pakistan right now.  And they've had them since the mid-1990s, they wanted and need cheap natural gas to make those projects feasible.  Some of you may have heard about the Enron Dabhol fiasco in Dabhol, India.  That is not a feasible project because the cost of the natural gas is too high.  They proceeded anyway.  We've lost a a billion dollars in U.S. Government guarantees.

But the thing that stuck out to me the most is we found that this is a bipartisan problem.  It's on both sides of the aisle.  And that's why I finally decided to stand up and tell everything I knew.  We were actually putting RICO lawsuits together to go after certain parties, not about 9/11.  Our research had nothing to do with 9/11.  It had to do with international securities fraud, it had to do with telecom fraud.  Because of an interview I heard on the radio one time, that led me to Sibel Edmonds.  I'm not under a gag order.  I wanted to compare names, I want to compare trails.  What we call rabbit trails.  When you're investigating, these people will throw everything out in front of you they can to keep from getting caught.  Sometimes you have to wade through 10, 15, or 20 shell corporations just to find out who the true owner of something is.  And what we found was the same thing she found.  And she confirmed it in a conversation with me just about the time they were putting the lid on her.  She found drug trafficking, money laundering, she found foreign names, and she found American names in the financing of 9/11.  And what she found had nothing to do with counterterrorism.  I even quote in my book, sometimes it pays to, "Dick, did you check your six, did you check it three, nine and twelve to see if they were sitting right across the table or standing right next to you?  What they found inside the FBI actually came from ongoing drug investigations dating back to 1998.  And I heard just a minute ago, Mr. Thompson brought up Argentina.  The company that had the contract with the Taliban is Bridas Corporation.  They are from Argentina.  On September 9, 2003, they won a lawsuit in our Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, they had been tied up in the Texas courts since 1996, they won $500 Million in a judgment for interference of contract in Turkenistan.  The only remaining thing was to take the Taliban and Bridas out and then we controlled it all.  We controlled the Caspian Basin oil, we  have the pipeline to get it to the sea.

The oil and gas in the Caspian basin in current dollars is worth somewhere between 11 and 12 trillion dollars.

If you look at who was on the 9/11 Commission, on the Democrat side, who was directly benefited, Mr. Ben-Veniste's law firm was the lawfirm that kept Bridas tied up.  They are also the lawfirm that lost the lawsuit when it went to the Supreme Court and down to the Fifth Circuit.  They kept them tied up at least from 1998.  They're involved in Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekhistan, in about 20 different ways.  You got the guy Thompson, Republican governor, former governor of Illinois, he is sitting on the board of FMC.  They have an oil and gas subsidiary.  They make equipment.  They are selling a lot of it overseas in the Caspian.  Jamie Gorelick, I thought she was going to be a go-getter.  I mean, I was rooting for her because she acted like she knew what she was doing.  She sits on the board of Schlumberger which is a competitor to Halliburton.  Just within two weeks prior to the 9/11 Commission saying "__", and handing it over to the President and Congress to change our rights some more, which is what I think they plan to do, Schlumberger finally comes forward and admits they are having record profits in this last quarter, and they're doing a lot of big bucks business in the Caspian basin. 

If you look at the reality that Bridas had a contract with the Taliban, we had landlocked oil and gas deals.  We had to get it to the ocean.  We have people actually doing business in Pakistan.  You literally have to look at 9/11 and all of these foregoing issues as inseparable.  There is your Pearl Harbor.  And that our government can sit there and contrive policy like this, I came up with four words in this book.  One was hopelessness.  I see it all over this country, and I've seen it for a long time.  The second word that came up to my mind is the indifference of our government.  And you were speaking about the EPA.  They can literally change reality because they're afraid it may affect something.  And their policy does not have anything to do with quality of life or life.  If this snuffs your life out economically, or healthwise, so be it, if they think it's good policy.  And it's both sides of the aisle in D.C.  I call them financial terrorists, I don't know what you would call them. 

Jamey Hecht, Ph.D. -- Co-Host:  I'd like to ask the first question to Webster Tarpley.  Can you talk about the likely role of the neoconservatives, the civilians inside the Pentagon, in perpetrating 9/11.  And if you like, can you comment on their likely response to a successful 9/11 movement that might put in jeopardy their hold on power this November.

Webster G. Tarpley, Author

When Bush ran for office, he ran, frankly, as a moron, who would be a moron, but he would get the best advisors.  So it's to the advisors that we have to look.  And if we look at a Cheney or a Wolfowitz, or some of these other people, here we see people that may very well be the conduits of the rogue network into the White House.  But make no mistake, it is that rogue network which has been running the United States.

Now, if I say, "rogue network," it may make them seem a little bit too lonely, and I don't think they're lonely.  People who are old enough to remember the Iran-Contra years, can remember words like "The Invisible Government," "The Parallel Government," "The Secret Government," "The Shadow Government."  Senator Inouye said they had their own army, navy, airforce, treasury, their own policies, their own ways of making decisions.  That invisible government, that secret government, I submit, is alive and well.  The neocons are certainly a part of it.  I call them neocon fasicst madmen.  But it's deeper in my view, it's not just the neocons.  The neocons have been part of this for perhaps 20 or 30 years, but it's something that's been around significantly longer.  So I would say we have to look primarily at this network inside the U.S. Government.  Now certainly other people provide auxiliaries.  MI-6 traditionally provides services.  The Mossad obviously provides services.  When we get down to something like Saudi Intelligence or the ISI, again, these are kind of walk-on parts in the middle of all this.  But it seems to me that this is the thing that we have to confront.

Now this network is still in place.  No one has laid a glove on them, much less this fake 9/11 Commission with Kean and Hamilton.  So I would just say, that's a group that's still there, and their reaction is most likely to be what they're doing right now:  they're courting war with Iran, they're courting war with Syria, they're courting war with the Sudan, and most disturbing of all, they are courting war with Russia, because according to President Putin and the Russian press right now, the people behind the massacre at that school in Northern Ossetia, are the United States Government and the British Government, and that's all over the Russian press. 

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