NYT: NY US Attorney Going After AIG/CIA/Mossad Drug Runners
Mort Zuckerman
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Subject: NYT: NY US Attorney Going After AIG/CIA/Mossad Drug Runners
Date: Jan 18, 2010 3:52 AM
ARTICLE BELOW
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YEAH!! GET EM!!
http://www.actionlyme.org
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AIG/Kroll's Airplanes and Drug-Running:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waEIAsqMLiA
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RECRUITERS OF THE 911 SUICIDE VOLUNTEERS:
http://www.amconmag.com/article/2009/nov/01/00006/:
GIRALDI: When they said State Department, they probably meant CIA.
EDMONDS: Okay. So these conversations, between 1997 and 2001, had to
do with a Central Asia operation that involved bin Laden. Not once did
anybody use the word “al-Qaeda.” It was always “mujahideen,” always
“bin Laden” and, in fact, not “bin Laden” but “bin Ladens” plural.
There were several bin Ladens who were going on private jets to
Azerbaijan and Tajikistan. The Turkish ambassador in Azerbaijan worked
with them.
There were bin Ladens, with the help of Pakistanis or Saudis, under
our management. Marc Grossman was leading it, 100 percent, bringing
people from East Turkestan into Kyrgyzstan, from Kyrgyzstan to
Azerbaijan, from Azerbaijan some of them were being channeled to
Chechnya, some of them were being channeled to Bosnia. From Turkey,
they were putting all these bin Ladens on NATO planes. People and
weapons went one way, drugs came back.
GIRALDI: Was the U.S. government aware of this circular deal?
EDMONDS: 100 percent. A lot of the drugs were going to Belgium with
NATO planes. After that, they went to the UK, and a lot came to the
U.S. via military planes to distribution centers in Chicago and
Paterson, New Jersey. Turkish diplomats who would never be searched
were coming with suitcases of heroin.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/18/nyregion/18terror.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print
January 18, 2010
United States Attorney Plans Drug-Terrorism Unit
By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM
The United States attorney in Manhattan is merging the two units in
his office that prosecute terrorism and international narcotics cases,
saying that he wants to focus more on extremist Islamic groups whose
members he believes are increasingly turning to the drug trade to
finance their activities.
Some Western law enforcement and intelligence agencies have long
pointed to what they say are the symbiotic relationships that
sometimes exist between terrorist groups and narcotics traffickers,
from Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Hezbollah in the Middle East to the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.
But the move by the United States attorney, Preet Bharara, comes as
United States officials have suggested that some members of Islamic
extremist groups, including Al Qaeda and some of its affiliates, are
more frequently turning to the drug trade — as well as kidnapping and
other criminal activities — to help finance their operations.
It is, they say, partly a response to increased pressure on other
financial sources, like Islamic charities and private donors.
By merging the units, Terrorism and National Security and
International Narcotics Trafficking, Mr. Bharara said he is combining
two groups that have developed many of the same skills — working
overseas, often using classified information, to build complex cases
against sophisticated targets.
The new unit, he said, would be better able to bring drug charges to
bear against some terrorists, as well as use a new law that gives
federal drug agents the authority to pursue narcotics and terrorism
crimes committed anywhere in the world if they can establish a link
between a drug offense and a terrorist act or group.
Noting the debate over the appropriateness of bringing terrorists to
trial in civilian courts, Mr. Bharara said that federal authorities
were facing people who want to kill Americans and were branching out
into narcotics distribution and transportation.
“We have these tools in the criminal justice system,” he said, noting
that in some cases, “you don’t necessarily need just the N.S.A. or the
C.I.A.; you have abilities to get at them and to infiltrate them and
to stop them — it just adds to the arsenal of ways to go after these
people.”
He added, “It would be sort of law enforcement and national security
malpractice not to also be going at it this way.”
The new unit, Terrorism and International Narcotics, will employ 21
prosecutors, including three supervisors, drawn from the two
components, Mr. Bharara said. It will be headed by Michael Farbiarz,
36, who had served as a deputy in the terrorism unit, and Anjan Sahni,
33, formerly the chief of International Narcotics; their deputy will
be Jocelyn Strauber, 36, who was Mr. Sahni’s No. 2 in the narcotics
unit.
The move effectively doubles the number of prosecutors in the office
handling terrorism cases as it prepares for the trial of the self-
described mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and
four other former Guantánamo Bay detainees. It is a major undertaking
that will unquestionably prove to be a significant draw on the unit’s
resources.
In part because groups like Al Qaeda operate in a murky netherworld,
determining with certainty the source of the money that fuels such
networks — subsidizing training, travel, weapons, day-to-day life and
actual operations — is extremely difficult.
And tracking the roles and activities of members and people associated
with these secretive groups also can present a formidable challenge,
one that at times results in divergent views among government agencies
about the level of involvement in the drug trade by members of some
groups, like Al Qaeda.
In fact, two government officials who track counterterrorism issues
played down the notion of a recent increase in narcotics activity by
Islamic extremists. One, a senior Obama administration official, said
that most extremists were reluctant to get involved with people
outside their group who do not share their ideology. But he noted that
as the need for financing grows, such concerns recede.
But officials at the Drug Enforcement Administration, who have worked
closely with the narcotics prosecutors in Mr. Bharara’s office, say
the growing use of Africa as a route to move hundreds of tons of
cocaine from South America to Europe has underscored the problem.
One of the officials, Derek Maltz, who heads the D.E.A.’s Special
Operations Division in Virginia, which works with more than a dozen
other law enforcement and intelligence agencies to stymie major
traffickers that operate across international boundaries, acknowledged
that the increase was difficult to quantify.
But he added, “Every day, in my position I see more and more examples
— real examples — either through credible informants or actually
investigative activity, where you start to see different groups
involved with drug traffickers.”
The transportation route through West and North Africa — where swaths
of desert are controlled by extremist groups tied to Al Qaeda and
corruption and instability are widespread — has brought traffickers
into closer proximity with various terror groups, several officials
said.
Indeed, the officials, as well as Mr. Bharara, pointed to a case last
month in which the D.E.A. arrested three African men in a sting based
on drug and terrorism charges brought by the prosecutor’s office. The
men, who prosecutors say are tied to Al Qaeda, were accused of
conspiring to move cocaine across the region with the assistance of Al
Qaeda and another group, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. They were
taken into custody in Ghana, expelled and flown to New York to face
the charges.
The creation of the new unit — coupled with the new law that gives the
D.E.A. more authority to investigate such cases — opens the door for
greater involvement in terrorism cases by the anti-drug agency.
The original terrorism unit in the prosecutor’s office was the first
of its kind in the nation, and its lawyers were long the pre-eminent
terrorism prosecutors in the nation, winning convictions in the first
World Trade Center bombing case and the bombing case stemming from Al
Qaeda’s 1998 attacks on United States Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania,
among others.
The new unit comes into being at a time when the United States
attorney’s office in Brooklyn has brought a series of terrorism cases
that some officials say have equaled or outpaced recent cases brought
by its counterpart in Manhattan, something that would have seemed
unimaginable in years past.
The Brooklyn office has obtained indictments against the Denver
airport shuttle bus driver arrested this fall in a Qaeda bomb plot and
against two of his associates. It has also won the cooperation of a
Long Island man who spent months in Qaeda training camps in Pakistan
and took part in two attacks against American troops, and has
dismantled the United States fund-raising operations of the Tamil
Tigers, a Sri Lankan terror group.
Gretchen Peters, whose book “Seeds of Terror: How Heroin Is
Bankrolling the Taliban and Al Qaeda” was published in May, said her
research showed a long history of Qaeda involvement in the drug trade.
But she noted that the group’s senior cadre served more as
facilitators, setting up meetings between traffickers and other
powerful figures in the region.
“It’s wrong to think that you’re going to find Osama bin Laden or
Ayman al-Zawahiri driving a jingle truck full of dope down the
Kandahar highway,” she said.
"[Real] scientists are *fiercely* independent. That's the good
news."-- NIH's Top Fool, Anthony Fauci