Why would Osama bin Laden want to kill Dubya, his former business partner?

By James Hatfield

Editor's note: In light of last week's horrific events and the Bush administration's reaction to them, we are reprising the following from the last column Jim Hatfield wrote for Online Journal prior to his tragic death on July 18:

July 3, 2001—There may be fireworks in Genoa, Italy, this month, too.

A plot by Saudi master terrorist, Osama bin Laden, to assassinate Dubya during the July 20 economic summit of world leaders, was uncovered after dozens of suspected Islamic militants linked to bin Laden's international terror network were arrested in Frankfurt, Germany, and Milan, Italy, in April.

German intelligence services have stated that bin Laden is covertly financing neo-Nazi skinhead groups throughout Europe to launch another terrorist attack at a high-profile American target—his first since the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen last October.

According to counter-terrorism experts quoted in Germany's largest newspaper, the attack on Dubya might be a James Bond-like aerial strike in the form of remote-controlled airplanes packed with plastic explosives.

Why would Osama bi Laden want to kill, Dubya, his former business partner?

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http://web.archive.org/web/20060906150015/http://www.onlinejournal.org/Special_Reports/Hatfield-R-091901/hatfield-r-091901.html

The important issue is that he and his sister reported their father -- the president's principal counselor and the nation's chief law enforcement officer -- privately thought a conspiracy was behind the assassination of President Kennedy.

RFK called the Warren Commission report "shoddy workmanship."

Attorney General Kennedy knew about the Ruby-Mafia connections immediately, which is vital when considering the Mafia were hired by Allen Dulles and the CIA during Eisenhower's administration to murder Fidel Castro -- an operation which the CIA failed to inform the president and attorney general.

The interview with Charlie Rose marked the first time members of the immediate Kennedy family have voiced the attorney general's doubts about the Warren Commission and its lone gunman theory.

Not Even Charlie Rose Could Rein in RFK Jr. in Dallas Last Night. Also: Conspiracy Theories!

By Betsy Lewis Sat., Jan. 12 2013 at 11:01 AM

It got weird when he went into a historical lecture about his father's investigation into the JFK assassination. He was speaking about it as if he had been part of it, then cited a book called The Unspeakable by Jim Douglas (sic - actually "JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters" by James Douglass) as being the best book on the subject, then kept referencing things from the book. He was losing the audience, so he burst out, "My father believed that the Warren Report was a shoddy piece of craftsmanship," to the delighted applause of the mostly Baby Boomer audience.

Whenever Charlie Rose would ask about the family, RFK Jr. would evade the question until he heard either delighted Boomer applause or delighted Boomer laughter. One of his responses to a family question was an unrelated story about World War II. A lady behind me who must have recently Netflixed The Iron Lady kept saying, "Here here!" for the benefit of us unfortunate people around her.
Some of the strangest RFK Jr. outbursts with the biggest applause were:

"We're becoming a national security state!" (applause, "Here here!&quot

"Corporations want profits!" (applause, "Here here!&quot

"Corporations are great things, but we'd be nuts to let them run our government!" (applause, "Here here!&quot

"Nationalism in Africa! The end of colonialism!"

At this point, I don't think anyone knew what the hell he was talking about. It was something about the Kennedy family airlifting President Obama's father out of Kenya to begin a new life in America.

RFK Jr.: "Yes."

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http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/mixmaster/2013/01/charlie_rose_live_the_kennedy.php

Ashcroft Flying High

CBS News
WASHINGTON, July 26, 2001

Fishing rod in hand, Attorney General John Ashcroft left on a weekend trip to Missouri Thursday afternoon aboard a chartered government jet, reports CBS News Correspondent Jim Stewart.

In response to inquiries from CBS News over why Ashcroft was traveling exclusively by leased jet aircraft instead of commercial airlines, the Justice Department cited what it called a "threat assessment" by the FBI, and said Ashcroft has been advised to travel only by private jet for the remainder of his term.

"There was a threat assessment and there are guidelines. He is acting under the guidelines," an FBI spokesman said. Neither the FBI nor the Justice Department, however, would identify what the threat was, when it was detected or who made it.

A senior official at the CIA said he was unaware of specific threats against any Cabinet member, and Ashcroft himself, in a speech in California, seemed unsure of the nature of the threat.

"I don't do threat assessments myself and I rely on those whose responsibility it is in the law enforcement community, particularly the FBI. And I try to stay within the guidelines that they've suggested I should stay within for those purposes," Ashcroft said.

Asked if he knew anything about the threat or who might have made it, the attorney general replied, "Frankly, I don't. That's the answer."

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http://www.cbsnews.com/news/ashcroft-flying-high/

Treasure trove of JFK, LBJ documents declassified by CIA

Historian calls it “an incomparable window into a how a president thinks”

No new clues for conspiracy theorists looking for signs of CIA plots

CIA brief after JFK’s death featured a poem the president liked

BY PAUL J. WEBER
The Associated Press/Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Sept. 16, 2015

As the U.S. and Russia reached the brink of nuclear war in 1962, President John F. Kennedy received top-secret intelligence from the CIA that a new warhead launcher was spotted in Cuba.

Amid those grave concerns, the memo ends on a different note. A U.S. agent in Moscow describes “packed houses and enthusiastic applause” during a run of Russian performances by the New York City Ballet.

That report, given to Kennedy a day before the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis, is among roughly 19,000 pages of newly declassified CIA documents from the Cold War released Wednesday. Stamped “For the President’s Eyes Only” on some pages, the dossiers were delivered daily by the spy agency to the White House.

Known as the President’s Daily Brief — President Barack Obama is the first to swipe through his on a tablet — they are tightly guarded rundowns of CIA intelligence from around the globe. For the first time, some of the oldest briefs are being made public, starting with those written in the 1960s for presidents Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.

Conspiracy theorists mining for signs of nefarious CIA plots are likely to be disappointed. Many of the briefs remain partially redacted, and what isn’t won’t rewrite textbooks.

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http://www.star-telegram.com/news/nation-world/article35487948.html

Freeing the President’s Daily Brief

John Prados
National Security Archive

September 16, 2015–Today the big pooh-bahs of the security services–Fearful Leader Clapper, the Machiavellian Brennan, former SEAL chieftain Admiral McRaven, and a number of their predecessors, have gathered in Austin, Texas, at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library. Their purpose is to preside over an event at which the government agencies and the National Archives formally open for research the key intelligence reports for the ages. Today these are called the President’s Daily Briefs (PDBs). Jack Kennedy knew them as the PICKL (predictably, “pickle”), or President’s Intelligence Checklist; Dwight D. Eisenhower’s staff had even more awkward names like “Synopsis of Intelligence Items Reported to the President.” (They never could find an acronym for that one.)

If you’re familiar with the PDB at all it is probably due to the now-notorious issue of August 6, 2001, in which CIA analysts reported their sense that Al Qaeda terrorists were likely to employ large aircraft as weapons. The Bush White House, which paid no attention, moved heaven and earth to keep that PDB out of the hands of 9/11 investigators. Michael Morrell, Mr. Bush’s CIA briefer, went on to great things at the agency after his time with the PDB, so you can see it’s serious business.

SNIP...

“Sources and methods” are spookspeak for intelligence tradecraft or for specific agent identifications or information compartments (such as overhead imagery, communications intelligence, or the like). But the PDBs are information reports, not efforts to create new intel channels or technologies. Names of agents and whatnot can easily be removed from ancient documents or are, in a number of instances, already known from the CIA’s declassification of specific cases. (For example, Tenet asserted sources and methods protection for PICKLs of the Cuban Missile Crisis in spite of the fact the agency had already released portions of those very documents, plus the actual transcripts of interviews with its Soviet spy Oleg Penkovskiy, whose information lay at the heart of that reporting.) A number of PDBs, bearing on Vietnam, Chinese nuclear weapons, the Six-Day war in the Middle East, and other subjects had already been declassified, with the secrecy apparatus considering them as simple information reports. Currying favor with the press and enhancing his stature as maven of top-level information, Henry Kissinger permitted the PDB to be photographed, a picture published in Newsweek on November 22, 1971. There’s no way a true “sources and methods” issue would have been treated in such a cavalier fashion. But suddenly the sources and methods bugaboo descended to chill the entire declassification process.

In 2004 the National Security Archive joined scholar Larry Berman to challenge this idiocy. Berman had requested and had been denied release of a pair of innocuous PDBs. The Archive joined him in a lawsuit for release of the material as is provided under the Freedom of Information Act. Though we lost the suit for the two specific PDBs in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2007, the justices ruled that CIA could no longer claim a blanket exemption for the class of documents, and that PDBs from the Kennedy and Johnson eras had to be considered for release.

What is happening at the LBJ Library today is a direct result of that court battle. Notice that the agency took its sweet time–8 years– to cough up any of this material. Without seeing the rest of the documents I nevertheless expect the collection will be laced with redacted passages, pages, and whole documents. The organizers of this event promise that PDBs will be posted on the CIA website, presumably today after the event. I have argued elsewhere that the agency’s declassification process has been corrupted. It functions to protect proper secrets only at the margin and is far more concerned with preventing embarrassment–a stance explicitly prohibited in the regulations supposed to govern secrecy and declassification. I’ll have more to report on the PDBs once I get the chance to see what the agency has done.

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http://johnprados.com/2015/09/16/freeing-the-presidents-daily-brief/