Despite the 9-11 Commission’s mandate to provide a “full and complete accounting” of the attacks of September 11, many key points were omitted from the final report. One of these important omissions attempted to cover up the role of Pakistan and whether or not Pakistani intelligence helped to fund the 9-11 attacks.

Ties between Washington DC and the Pakistani intelligence agency, the ISI have been documented in media reports before and after the September 11th attacks. In March 2001, Pakistani regional expert and member of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Selig Harrisson, said “the CIA still has close links with the Pakistani intelligence service ISI.” Just one day before the attacks, a Pakistani newspaper in Islamabad reported that the head of the ISI was meeting with unspecified members of the Pentagon, National Security Council, and CIA Director George Tenet.

On May 18th, 2002 the Washington Post reported that:

“On the morning of Sept. 11, Porter Goss and Bob Graham were having breakfast with a Pakistani general named Mahmud Ahmed — the soon-to-be-sacked head of Pakistan’s intelligence service. Ahmed ran a spy agency notoriously close to Osama bin Laden and the Taliban.”

Specific details of that meeting have still not been released and may never have been recorded.

In 2001, various media outlets (CNN, Fox News, ABC, and AP) reported that $100,000 was wired from Pakistan to Mohammed Atta, the 9-11 lead hijacker. A “senior law enforcement source” told CNN that the paymaster was believed to be Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, who was working for the Pakistani ISI at the time.

Several media outlets reported in 2002 that the US government believed Saeed Sheikh to be an asset of the ISI, and that senior ISI officers knew him well.  Also reported was the allegation by Indian intelligence that General Mahmud Ahmed ordered the wire transfer and that Indian intelligence claimed they had assisted the FBI during the investigation. Various mainstream Indian papers reported this in 2001 along with a mainstream Pakistani newspaper.  In the West – the Wall Street Journal and Agence France Press picked up on the story in October.

On October 7th 2001, Mahmud Ahmed was fired from his role at the ISI. The official explanation was because he was too close to the Taliban. This claim has been met with criticism by some analysts given the fact that there were several pro-Taliban officers that kept their jobs.

During the 9/11 Commission hearings, the Family Steering Committee asked the Commissioners to investigate the ISI connection. However, the commission did little to “follow the money” and the 9/11 Commission Report made no mention of these allegations. Furthermore, the commission made the absurd statement that the question of who financed the terrorist attacks was “of little practical significance” [and that it had] “seen no evidence that any foreign government–or foreign government official–supplied any funding.”

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George Bush thought 9/11 plane had been shot down on his orders
Memoirs reveal former US president gave order to shoot down any hijacked planes before United Airlines flight 93 crashed

by James Meikle – Friday 29 October 2010
guardian.co.uk

George Bush initially believed the only plane not to reach its intended target during the 11 September attacks had been shot down on his orders, according to leaks from the former president’s memoir of his two terms in office.

Bush reveals that he gave the order for any further suspected hijacked planes to be shot down after the first aircraft were flown into the World Trade Centre in New York during the 2001 terror attacks.

He at first thought the crash of United Airlines flight 93 in Pennsylvania had resulted from this instruction, although it later emerged that passengers had stormed the cockpit as hijackers flew the plane towards the Capitol building in Washington.

The memoir, Decision Points, is due to be published on 9 November, in the aftermath of the US midterm elections, and Bush is already lined up for interviews on the Oprah Winfrey and NBC Today shows.

The Drudge Report website says the very personal book opens with the line: “It was a simple question: ‘Can you remember the last day you didn’t have a drink?’” as Bush deals with the well-known issue of his alcohol consumption.

His drinking has previously been said to have come to an end when he woke up with a hangover following his 40th birthday celebrations.

In a chapter about stem cell research, he describes receiving a letter from Nancy Reagan detailing a “wrenching family journey”, but says: “I did feel a responsibility to voice my pro-life convictions and lead the country toward what Pope John Paul II called a culture of life.”

Bush goes on to describes an emotional July 2001 meeting with the Pope, who had Parkinson’s disease, at the pontiff’s summer residence.

The Pope reportedly recognised the promise of science but implored Bush to support life in all its forms.

At the pontiff’s funeral in 2005, Bush – after a reminder from his wife, Laura, that it was a time to “pray for miracles” – said a prayer for the ABC news anchor Peter Jennings, who had cancer.

The book is said to stay clear of criticising Barack Obama, and a source told the Drudge Report: “You will find the president strong, loving life, and ultimately at peace with the decisions he made.”

Anxious that Wikileaks may be on the verge of publishing a batch of secret State Department cables, investigators are desperately searching for founder Julian Assange. Philip Shenon reports.

Pentagon investigators are trying to determine the whereabouts of the Australian-born founder of the secretive website Wikileaks for fear that he may be about to publish a huge cache of classified State Department cables that, if made public, could do serious damage to national security, government officials tell The Daily Beast.

The officials acknowledge that even if they found the website founder, Julian Assange, it is not clear what they could do to block publication of the cables on Wikileaks, which is nominally based on a server in Sweden and bills itself as a champion of whistleblowers.

“We’d like to know where he is; we’d like his cooperation in this,” one U.S. official said of Assange.

American officials said Pentagon investigators are convinced that Assange is in possession of at least some classified State Department cables leaked by a 22-year-old Army intelligence specialist, Bradley Manning of Potomac, Maryland, who is now in custody in Kuwait.

And given the contents of the cables, the feds have good reason to be concerned.

As The Daily Beast reported June 8, Manning, while posted in Iraq, apparently had special access to cables prepared by diplomats and State Department officials throughout the Middle East, regarding the workings of Arab governments and their leaders, according to an American diplomat.

The cables, which date back over several years, went out over interagency computer networks available to the Army and contained information related to American diplomatic and intelligence efforts in the war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq, the diplomat said.

American officials would not discuss the methods being used to find Assange, nor would they say if they had information to suggest where he is now. “We’d like to know where he is; we’d like his cooperation in this,” one U.S. official said of Assange.

Assange, who first gained notoriety as a computer hacker, is as secretive as his website and has no permanent home.

He was in the United States as recently as several weeks ago, when he gave press interviews to promote the website’s release of an explosive 2007 video of an American helicopter attack in Baghdad that left 12 people dead, including two employees of the news agency Reuters.

Wikileaks has not replied directly to email messages from The Daily Beast.

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