Read this very fucking carefully. If you dont get this its your last fucking day here as a spammer:

As his unclassified CIA biography states, bin Laden left Saudi Arabia to fight the Soviet army in Afghanistan after Moscow’s invasion in 1979. By 1984, he was running a front organization known as Maktab al-Khidamar - the MAK - which funneled money, arms and fighters from the outside world into the Afghan war. 

By no means was Osama bin Laden the leader of Afghanistan’s mujahedeen. His money gave him undue prominence in the Afghan struggle, but the vast majority of those who fought and died for Afghanistan’s freedom - like the Taliban regime that now holds sway over most of that tortured nation - were Afghan nationals.

Yet the CIA, concerned about the factionalism of Afghanistan made famous by Rudyard Kipling, found that Arab zealots who flocked to aid the Afghans were easier to “read” than the rivalry-ridden natives. While the Arab volunteers might well prove troublesome later, the agency reasoned, they at least were one-dimensionally anti-Soviet for now. So bin Laden, along with a small group of Islamic militants from Egypt, Pakistan, Lebanon, Syria and Palestinian refugee camps all over the Middle East, became the “reliable” partners of the CIA in its war against Moscow.

A 2006 analysis compiled jointly by US and Croatian intelligence will reveal that al-Qaeda began infiltrating the Balkans region even before the start of the Bosnian war in 1992.

The organization, called Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK) or Al-Kifah, is closely tied to al-Qaeda. Its Brooklyn, New York, branch called the Al-Kifah Refugee Center is tied to both the 1993 WTC bombers and the CIA (see 1986-1993).

MAK established recruitment and fundraising offices in many Western countries, the United States being one of their main fund-raising destinations. The first offices in the United States were established within the Al Kifah Refugee Center in Brooklyn, and at the Islamic Centre in Tucson, Arizona. On his fundraising tours Sheikh Abdullah Azzam visited the mosques of "Brooklyn, St. Louis, Kansas City, Seattle, Sacramento, Los Angeles, and San Diego - altogether there were 33 cities in America that opened branches of bin Laden and Azzam's organization, the Services Bureau, in order to support the jihad."

By 1991, the center’s parent organization in Pakistan, Maktab al-Khidamat(MAK)/Al-Kifah begins setting up al-Qaeda charity fronts in the Bosnia region (see 1991). The main regional MAK/Al-Kifah branch in Zagreb, Croatia, is also called the Al-Kifah Refugee Center like the Brooklyn branch and has very close ties with that branch (see Early 1990s). In 1992, war breaks out in Bosnia (see April 6, 1992) and the Al-Kifah Refugee Center in Brooklyn shifts its focus fully to the Bosnia cause.

This is important because the Zagreb office is closely involved in assisting mujaheddin in the Bosnian war and the Brooklyn office is closely linked to the CIA, suggesting the CIA could be assisting the Bosnia mujaheddin through the relationship between Brooklyn and Zagreb offices.

The Zagreb office will remain open after the Brooklyn office is closed in the wake of the 1993 WTC bombing (see February 26, 1993), as all of the bombers were connected to that office.

The Benevolence International Foundation (BIF) was a purported nonprofit charitable trust based in Saudi Arabia. It was a front for al-Qaeda and is now banned worldwide by the United Nations Security Council Committee 1267.

BIF's offices had been in Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Bosnia-Herzegovina (Sarajevo and Zenica), Canada, China, Croatia, Georgia (Duisi and Tbilisi), the Netherlands, Pakistan (Islamabad, Peshawar), the Palestinian Territories, Russia (Chechnya, Dagestan, Ingushetia, Moscow), Saudi Arabia (Riyadh and Jeddah), Sudan, Tajikistan, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Yemen.[1] It was known as the Benevolence International Fund in Canada and Bosanska Idealna Futura in Bosnia.

The list of 20 main financiers of al-Qaeda, composed by Osama bin Laden in 1988 and dubbed by him the Golden Chain, was found in the Bosnia office of Benevolence International Foundation when it was raided in March of 2002.

Benevolence International Corporation is said to have been started in 1988 by Mohammed Jamal Khalifa of Jeddah, the brother in law of Osama bin Laden. Back then, it was known as an "import-export" company. It is said that this group was a front for the Abu Sayyaf group.

Meanwhile, another group known as the Islamic Benevolence Committee was founded in both Jeddah and Peshawar, Pakistan by Batterjee. The group was a "charity" that openly supported fighters against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

In 1992, the Benevolence International Corporation in the Philippines folded visible operations, while the Islamic Benevolence Committee was renamed to Benevolence International Foundation. The Filipino group would become a group set up to attack U.S. interests in the Philippines. Khalid Sheik Mohammed is said to have led the rest of the group.

The group was moved to the United States, with Enaam Arnaout as the director. The organization first set shop in Plantation, Florida. Arnaout married an American woman and obtained citizenship to the United States. In 1993, the organization's headquarters moved to Chicago, Illinois.

In late 1994, Mohammed Jamal Khalifa travelled to the United States to meet with Mohamed Loay Bayazid, who was the president of Benevolence International at the time.

*sigh*

I ask you to prove that someone was lead away in handcuffs and never seen again because they were a 9/11 conspiracy theorist. You link me to a story about the existence of Gitmo in Europe. You are crazy. 

You claim the CIA created and was working with Osama as late as 1997. Then you link me to the simple story of Osama being in the Mujihadeen -- already knew that....and that the CIA helped fund the mujihadeen -- already knew that. And that Osama is an unintended consequence of that loss of funding after the soviets and the reason for the mujihadeen left.

That proves what again?

I told you guys this 3 pages ago Free ...and you responded that you had proof Osama and the CIA were working together in 1997. Well? Still waiting. Obviously you're just playing a game here regurgitating exactly what I said about the CIA/Afghanistan that prompted you in the first place. You're arguing in circles.

You're a crazy ass waste of time and a liar and if it werent for my sense of fair play Id ban your lie-spamming ass into the next millenia. Your game here is to ignore me and continually attempt to leave the thread with a huge attention grabbing post just to spam links to your fucking lie-site. If we were to rightly trash it or lock it you'd scream the "CIA dun it."


Ahk

Yeah except that I already dug into one of those stories to show us all that it doesnt say what you claim it does.

If you can't cite it with a link directly to the story you don't have shit and YOU'RE the one wasting our time. AND AGAIN you dribbler: 83% of America DOES NOT think the "CIA dun it". 83% want another investigation. That you try and bring that 83% forward to qualify the sources you dont want to show is plain evidence of your willingness to lie in order to convince at the drop of a hat.

'm afraid of wasting all f-ck-n morning posting links to sites I have posted links to over a hundred times trying to convince morons like you of something that 83% of America already knows.   

83% of America DOES NOT think the "CIA dun it". 83% want another investigation.

Why do you need to lie?

You have yet to show us these stories. Still waiting.


The stories please.



Again you cite a story I TOLD YOU ABOUT and that you still refuse to understand. Yes, Free. No one's denying "blowback". The CIA helped fund a quarter of a million Mujihadeen -- before Osama joined even. They did not know who he was. Again, saying the CIA "created" Osama is like  a billionaire that gives 200 million away to 20000 poor people and one of them uses it to blow up city hall. The billionaire created that? Of course not and of course he doesnt regret giving the money.

So yeah: the CIA doesnt regret helping the Mujihadeen and Afghanistan fight the Soviets and then backing away when the Soviets left. That was their responsibility and role. What are you trying to pitch now Free? That the CIA should've imposed a puppet dictator and taken over Afghanistan?

...again: you accept the story that the CIA never heard of him when it pleases you then turn around to claim they've been working together all along. You don't even know what story you're selling from one minute to the next. One minute it's their mistake and blowback....the next minute they've been running everything all along.




Ahk

How about proof that he was:


?

Now you base this all one some nobody who said he "should" be sent to Gitmo. In other words: nothing. No reason to post that at all. First you try to imply (since implication is all you ever do) that there IS a special prison for 9/11 freaks. But there isn't is there? no there's just some dork who said in the heat of the moment that they should.

While we're at it: how about that link you promised showing us that Gov't is spending $1.6billion to pay people to go online and spread disinformation?

Ahk

Led away in handcuffs and hopefully taken to one of those secret prisons in eastern Europe and never to be heard from again… I hope we have a special prison for 9/11 conspiracy theorists.

Again you give me a bunch of babble with no links.

Where are the links? Dont tell me to Google. If you're going to cite something give me the links.

What are you afraid of?



Ahk

More babble from you without a shred of proof.

Tase him!” His co-host adds: “Led away in handcuffs and hopefully taken to one of those secret prisons in eastern Europe and never to be heard from again… I hope we have a special prison for 9/11 conspiracy theorists.”   We can only hope.

You'll notice how the above article that you and cooperative research cites as proof the CIA and Bin Laden worked together doesnt really do that at all, does it?"



Ahk

In 1987, a Sudanese man named Elfatih Hassanein found the Third World Relief Agency (TWRA).  By mid-1991, Bosnian President Izetbegovic contacts Hassanein, who he has known since the 1970s. The two men agree to turn TWRA from an obscure charity into what the Washington Post will later call “the chief broker of black-market weapons deals by Bosnia’s Muslim-led government and the agent of money and influence in Bosnia for Islamic movements and governments around the world.” 

The TWRA is based in Vienna, Austria, and Izetbegovic personally guarantees Hassanein’s credentials with banks there. Soon, machine guns, missiles and other weapons are being shipped into Bosnia in containers marked as humanitarian aid.

Hassanein is a member of Sudan’s government party and a follower of top Sudanese leader Hassan al-Turabi. Just like al-Turabi, he works with bin Laden and the “Blind Sheikh,” Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman. He becomes the main agent in Europe for marketing and selling video and audio tapes of Abdul-Rahman’s sermons. In March 1992, the Sudanese government gives him a diplomatic passport and he uses it to illegally transport large amounts of cash from Austria into Bosnia without being searched.

The Saudi Arabian government is the biggest contributor to TWRA, but many other governments give money to it too, such as Sudan, Iran, Pakistan, Brunei, Turkey, and Malaysia. Bin Laden is also a major contributor.

In 1996, the Washington Post reports that the Saudi Arabian government spent hundreds of millions of dollars to channel weapons to the Muslim Bosnians, and that the US government knew about it and assisted it. 

An anonymous Saudi official who took part in the effort will say that the US role “was more than just turning a blind eye to what was going on.… It was consent combined with stealth cooperation.… American knowledge began under [President George] Bush and became much greater under [President] Clinton.”

The Bosnian program was modeled on Saudi and US cooperation to fund the mujaheddin in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The major difference is that if Afghanistan the Saudis and Americans split the costs, but in Bosnia the Saudis pay for everything.

The US helps because Saudi Arabia lacks the “technical sophistication” to mount the operation on their own. The Post will report, “The official refused to go into detail about the American role in the operation, other than to say that the Saudis had made use of the same ‘network’ of undercover operatives, arms salesmen, and ‘former this and former that’ set up during the Afghan operation.” The official does say, “We did not set up a formal structure, the way we did in Afghanistan. But logic tells you that without the consent of NATO, the United States, and Germany, there was no way it could have happened.”

US government officials will later deny any such arrangement took place, but British, French, and other officials believe the US was secretly involved in efforts to arm the Bosnians.

Much of the money must go through the Third World Relief Agency (TWRA), since most illegal weapons get to Bosnia through the TWRA. This charity front has ties to Osama bin Laden and other radical militants.

Clement Rodney Hampton-El will later admit that he had been smuggling money into the US for military training from the Third World Relief Agency (TWRA).  Hampton-El is linked to Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman and the Al-Kifah Refugee Center and will later be given a long prison term for involvement in the “Landmarks” plot.  He makes several trips to Europe in 1992-1993, raising over $150,000 to fund a Pennsylvania training camp (see Late 1992-Early 1993). After one trip to Vienna, Austria (where TWRA has its headquarters), he returns to the US with $20,000 hidden in his pants to avoid the scrutiny of US customs officers. [United Press International, 8/2/1995] At the time, TWRA is funneling huge amounts of weapons into Bosnia in violation of a UN embargo but with the tacit approval of the US (see Mid-1991-1996). Hampton-El also travels to Bosnia around this time.

Yahya is the chief instructor, as he is an ex-US Marine who served two tours in Vietnam and teaches at a martial arts academy.

An FBI informant named Garrett Wilson helps lead the FBI to the camp, and the FBI monitors it for two days, January 16 and 17, but the monitoring team is mysteriously pulled away before the end of the second day.

In a wiretapped conversation with an FBI informant (most likely Wilson), Siddig Ali says regarding the camp, “Our goal is that these people get extensive and very, very, very good training, so that we can get started at anyplace where jihad (holy war) is needed… And after they receive their training, they go to Bosnia… And whoever survives, I mean, could come and [instruct] somewhere else, or Egypt, or any other place, etc…”

Hampton-El makes trips to Europe to pick up money from the Third World Relief Agency (TWRA) charity front to fund the camp (see Late 1992-Early 1993). TWRA is funneling huge amounts of weapons into Bosnia in violation of a UN embargo but with the tacit approval of the US.

According to a senior Western diplomat, in 1993 the Clinton administration learns about the Third World Relief Agency (TWRA) and its real purpose of secretly violating the UN embargo to get weapons to Bosnia (see Mid-1991-1996). But the US takes no action to stop its fund-raising or arms shipments. The diplomat will later say, “We were told [by Washington] to watch them but not interfere. Bosnia was trying to get weapons from anybody, and we weren’t helping much. The least we could do is back off. So we backed off.” TWRA has key offices in Austria and Germany, but authorities in both those countries refrain from shutting down TWRA as well. Austrian officials will later admit that “public pressure to support Bosnia’s Muslims allowed them to turn a blind eye to the agency’s activities.”

FBI investigators begin monitoring Clement Rodney Hampton-El’s house in New York as they close in on the militants involved in the “Landmarks” plot (see June 24, 1993). They listen in on a call from Hampton-El’s right-hand man, Abu Ubaidah Yahya, as he is in Vienna, Austria, picking up money from the Third World Relief Agency (TWRA) for the militants in the US tied to the Landmarks plot. Over the next few months, Yahya is tracked as he makes several trips from the US to Vienna, picking up about $100,000. 

A secret 1996 CIA report will state that “according to a foreign government service” Elfatih Hassanein, the head of TWRA, “supports US Muslim extremists in Bosnia.”

German and Austrian police raid the Vienna, Austria, office of the Third World Relief Agency (TWRA). Investigators fill three vans with documents, enabling them to gain a full picture of the illegal weapons network the TWRA has been running.  One Austrian investigator will later say, “They did a lot of talking here but as long as they did not move weapons through our territory, we could not arrest them.”   “The TWRA ledgers, however, gave a full accounting of the transfer of huge sums for arms trafficking through the First Austrian Bank.” The Bosnian government officially shuts down TWRA after the Austrian raid, but in fact it remains open and active in Bosnia, and continuing to ship weapons. In fact, TWRA will still remain open and active there and elsewhere long after 9/11 (see January 25, 2002). The US government has yet to take any official action against TWRA as well.

Hey I'd click on them if you bothered to leave a link. Of course you didn't. Instead you cut and paste what you thought were damning quotes -- I have no idea why because they dont say anything by themselves --- and then didnt leave a link....oh except for the wiki bios of a couple people. Post the links and I'll follow them. Or is this just another standard FreeTX exercise in giving us out of context quotes so you can try and control what they "mean"? 

We've already addressed that someone who wants a new investigation is not crazy. YOU are crazy.


Ahk

These people can’t get any publicity on their own, because everybody knows they’re nuts. So, they come to our rallies and interrupt it.

Where’s the taser?

A new U.N. Human Rights Council official assigned to monitor Israel is calling for an official commission to study the role neoconservatives may have played in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

On March 26, Richard Falk, Milbank professor of international law emeritus at Princeton University, was named by unanimous vote to a newly created position to report on human rights in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs. While Mr. Falk's specialty is human rights and international law, since the attacks in 2001, he has devoted some of his time to challenging what he calls the "9-11 official version."

" It is possibly true that especially the neoconservatives thought there was a situation in the country and in the world where something had to happen to wake up the American people. Whether they are innocent about the contention that they made that something happen or not, I don't think we can answer definitively at this point. All we can say is there is a lot of grounds for suspicion, there should be an official investigation of the sort the 9/11 commission did not engage in and that the failure to do these things is cheating the American people and in some sense the people of the world of a greater confidence in what really happened than they presently possess."

Unlike most public intellectuals today, he is both honest and very, very knowledgeable in that he understands the probable reality of 9/11. He understands that the evidence that it was a false flag operation is very strong." 

No you didnt. You have no proof of CIA and Osama "cooperation" because there wasn't any "cooperation" between the CIA and Osama EVER. I'll say that again: there was never any "cooperation" between Osama and Bin Laden...Oh well maybe "Ben Laden" but who the hell is he?
.
Ahk

In 1994 Albanian Premier Sali Berisha reportedly helps bin Laden set up a network in Albania through Saudi charity fronts after bin Laden visits Albania (see Shortly After April 9, 1994). Berisha later uses his property to train the KLA militant group. [London Times, 11/29/1998]

Bin Laden visits Albania as a member of a Saudi government delegation. He is introduced as a friend of the Saudi government who could finance humanitarian projects. Yet, earlier the same month, the Saudi government supposedly cut all ties with bin Laden (see April 9, 1994). One former US intelligence officer will complain in 1999, “Why was he a member of that delegation? The Saudis are supposed to be our allies. They told us he was persona non grata, and yet here he was working the crowds on an official visit.” Bin Laden strengthens ties with the Albanian secret service, with an eye to assisting the fight against Serbia in the neighboring country of Bosnia. [Reeve, 1999, pp. 180-181; Washington Times, 9/18/2001; Ottawa Citizen, 12/15/2001]

US ambassador Peter Galbraith speaks with Iman Sefko Omerbasic, the religious leader of the small Muslim community in Zagreb, Croatia. Sefko later informs the Iranian ambassador that American diplomats want him to purchase arms for the Bosnian army. The CIA keeps tabs on Galbraith, concerned that he might be engaged in a secret operation. [Wiebes, 2003, pp. 166] The CIA fears that another Iran-Contra scandal is brewing. [APF Reporter, 1997]

Enaam Arnaout, head of the Benevolence International Foundation (BIF) in the US and an al-Qaeda operative, personally arranges for nine elite instructors from the Al-Sadda training camp in Afghanistan to be sent to central Bosnia to train mujaheddin there. One of the trainers is Al-Hajj Boudella, who will become the long-time director of the BIF’s office in Bosnia. He will be arrested shortly after 9/11 and renditioned to the Guantanamo Bay prison in 2002 (see January 18, 2002). [Kohlmann, 2004, pp. 19-20, 255]

Evan F. Kohlmann (b. circa 1979 (age 28–29)) is an American terrorism consultant who has worked for the FBI and other governmental organizations. [1][2][3][4][5] He runs the website Globalterroralert.com, is a contributor to the Counterterrorism Blog [1], and is a senior investigator with the Nine Eleven Finding Answers (NEFA) Foundation [2]. He is also a terrorism analyst for NBC News. [1]

Ayman al-Zawahiri, head of Islamic Jihad and Al-Qaeda’s second-in-command, sends his brother Mohammed al-Zawahiri to the Balkans to help run the mujaheddin fighters in Bosnia. He is known as a logistics expert and is said to be the military commander of Islamic Jihad. Mohammed works in Bosnia, Croatia, and Albania under the cover of being an International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO) official. He is said to make an extended stay in central Bosnia, where most of the mujaheddin are based, in 1993. He sets up an Islamic Jihad cell in Albania with over a dozen members to support the mujaheddin in Bosnia. [New Yorker, 9/9/2002; Schindler, 2007, pp. 123] Ayman also frequently visits Bosnia (see September 1992 and After) and by 1994 will move to Bulgaria to presumably work with Mohammed to manage operations in the Balkans region (see September 1994-1996).

The US government, in collaboration with Hasan Cengic and his father Halid Cengic, starts work on an airport in Visoko, Bosnia, northwest of Sarajevo. This will become a major destination of a secret US arms pipeline into Bosnia. [Wiebes, 2003, pp. 179] US Special Forces are apparently secretly involved in the construction. [Scotsman, 12/3/1995] The Cengics are radical Muslims and Hasan Cengic is heavily involved with an illegal weapons pipeline into Bosnia controlled by radical militants (see Mid-1991-1996). The airport will be completed in late 1994 (see Late 1994-Late 1995).

Albanian drug smugglers are found to be playing a prominent role in funding the Muslim arms buildup in Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo, and Macedonia. In addition to small arms and machine guns, the criminal arms deals include surface-to-surface missiles and helicopters.

Siddig Siddig Ali, Abdo Mohammed Haggag, Abu Ubaidah Yahya, Mohammed Abouhalima, and others train at a militant training camp in New Bloomfield, Pennsylvania, with weapons and ammunition provided by Yahya and Clement Rodney Hampton-El (see February 21, 1995). Abouhalima will later be convicted for a role in the 1993 WTC bombing, as will his brother (see February 26, 1993) while the others mentioned will be convicted for roles in the related “Landmarks” plot (see June 24, 1993). [USA v. Omar Ahmad Ali Abdel-Rahman et al, 7/13/1995, pp. 9] Yahya is the chief instructor, as he is an ex-US Marine who served two tours in Vietnam and teaches at a martial arts academy. Siddig Ali will later say of Yahya, An FBI informant named Garrett Wilson helps lead the FBI to the camp, and the FBI monitors it for two days, January 16 and 17, but the monitoring team is mysteriously pulled away before the end of the second day (see January 16-17, 1993). In a wiretapped conversation with an FBI informant (most likely Wilson), Siddig Ali says regarding the camp, “Our goal is that these people get extensive and very, very, very good training, so that we can get started at anyplace where jihad (holy war) is needed… And after they receive their training, they go to Bosnia… And whoever survives, I mean, could come and [instruct] somewhere else, or Egypt, or any other place, etc…” [Kohlmann, 2004, pp. 73] Hampton-El makes trips to Europe to pick up money from the Third World Relief Agency (TWRA) charity front to fund the camp (see Late 1992-Early 1993). TWRA is funneling huge amounts of weapons into Bosnia in violation of a UN embargo but with the tacit approval of the US (see Mid-1991-1996)

Double agent Ali Mohamed spends much of 1992 training al-Qaeda recruits in Afghanistan. But he also gives specialized training in Sudan, Bosnia, and other conflict zones. Using the alias Abu ‘Abdallah, he is part of a 14-man al-Qaeda team made up of retired US military personnel that enters Bosnia through Croatia to train and arm mujaheddin fighters there. Apparently this will come to light in a 1998 trial in Egypt. [Gunaratna, 2003, pp. 41, 150, 337] The training takes place at Meskovic, a village near the town of Tuzla. The 14-man team are smuggled into Bosnia one by one in December 1992. The team is said to be sponsored by a “mosque in Newark, New Jersey.” [Associated Press, 12/3/1995] Mohamed regularly trained militants at the Al-Kifah Refugee Center, an al-Qaeda front in the US (see 1987-1989), and there was a mosque associated to it in Newark. This effort takes place at a time when Al-Kifah is sending many US-based militants to fight in Bosnia (see 1992). It will later be alleged that a US Army official met with people at Al-Kifah in December 1992 and offered to help with a covert operation to support Muslims in Bosnia (see December 1992). Twelve of the Americans leave within two months after training a group of 25 mujaheddin in insurgency warfare. But Mohamed and another American only known by the code name Abu Musa remain at Meskovic until June 1993, occasionally accompanying the mujaheddin on attacks behind Serb lines.

Rohan Gunaratna is an international terrorism expert. He is the head of the International Center for Political Violence and Terrorism Research at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He is a Senior Fellow at the Jebsen Center for Counter Terrorism Studies, Fletcher School for Law and Diplomacy and an Honorary Fellow at the International Policy Institute for Counter Terrorism in Israel. He has served as a consultant to the United Kingdom and United States law enforcement communities.

In the course of the trial it was revealed that the FBI had an informant, a former Egyptian army officer named Emad A. Salem. Salem claims to have informed the FBI of the plot to bomb the towers as early as February 6, 1992. Salem's role as informant allowed the FBI to quickly pinpoint the conspirators out of the hundreds of possible suspects.

Salem, initially believing that this was to be a sting operation, claimed that the FBI's original plan was for Salem to supply the conspirators with a harmless powder instead of actual explosive to build their bomb, but that the FBI chose to use him for other purposes instead.[11] He secretly recorded hundreds of hours of telephone conversations with his FBI handlers.

March 14, 2008 | In the first chapter of David Rothkopf's "Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making," the author quotes Mark Malloch Brown, a British minister of state and former deputy secretary-general of the United Nations, recalling what it was like to walk with his wife through a reception in New York for the World Economic Forum. The WEF puts on the famous annual meeting of business leaders, political figures, NGO heads, scientists and other movers and shakers, nicknamed after the small Swiss alpine town where it takes place, Davos. After crossing the room and shaking countless manicured hands in the process, the couple turned to each other and marveled that "we walk though the Davos party and know more people than when we're walking across the village green in the town we live in."

Brown is far from the only one who could tell such a tale. "Davos man" is an epithet coined by the conservative scholar Samuel Huntington to describe the very specific type that attends the conference. These are people who, as Huntington wrote, "have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite's global operations."

Not everyone Rothkopf writes about in "Superclass" is a Davos man, but despite his efforts to remain impartial toward "the global power elite" he describes, you can tell that the elect milieu of the WEF gives him a palpable thrill. The book opens with a scene of the author making his way through the town's frozen streets, recognizing CEOs, oil company executives and Harvard professors on his way to a fondue restaurant. Suddenly, he's greeted effusively by a bestselling inspirational writer with whom he has been trading e-mail: Paulo Coelho, "an icon of the global literary scene"! (The literary scene? I don't think so, though Coelho certainly is a publishing phenomenon.)

Rothkopf's credible, if not especially original argument in "Superclass" is that over the past several decades a "global elite" has emerged whose connections to each other have become more significant than their ties to their home nations and governments. They schmooze regularly at conferences like Davos, go to the same schools, serve together on corporate and nonprofit boards, and above all do business with each other constantly -- to the point that they have become a kind of culture in themselves, a "class without a country," as Rothkopf puts it. Furthermore, these people are "the new leadership class for our era."

A former undersecretary of commerce in the Clinton administration and an officer in an assortment of "advisory" firms (including Kissinger Associates, run by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and the consulting company Rothkopf himself founded, Garten Rothkopf), Rothkopf is an insider of sorts, well enough connected to sit in on meetings of power brokers without quite being one himself. He also writes Op-Eds on international affairs for major newspapers and is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, positions that require the display of some critical distance. "Superclass" isn't as condemnatory as Naomi Klein's anti-globalization manifesto "No Logo," let alone the conspiracy theorizing of "The Iron Triangle," Dan Briody's exposé of the Carlyle Group, but it doesn't merely fawn over its subjects, either.

Rothkopf announces that he and his researchers have identified "just over 6,000" people who match his definition of the superclass -- that is, who have met complicated (and vaguely explained) metrics designed to determine "the ability to regularly influence the lives of millions of people in multiple countries worldwide." These include heads of state and religious and military leaders -- even the occasional pop star, like Bono -- but the core membership is businessmen: hedge fund managers, technology entrepreneurs and private equity investors.

  Money alone doesn't cut the mustard. A fabulously wealthy widow living out the end of a quiet life isn't in the superclass; you must not only possess power, but also freely exercise it. Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of the Blackstone Group, is the paradigm: In addition to running a huge private equity firm, he sits on the boards of a half-dozen cultural foundations and belongs to a laundry list of forums and councils, including the WEF. (He also granted Rothkopf a lunch interview at the Four Seasons Grill Room, as the author takes pains to inform his readers.)

The pope is a member of the superclass, as is Osama bin Laden, who can undoubtedly claim influence over current international affairs, even if he sometimes lives in a cave.   The Russian illegal arms dealer Viktor "Merchant of Death" Bout is a member, as are Rupert Murdoch and Bill Clinton, who, while no longer commander in chief of the world's remaining superpower, nevertheless heads the Clinton Global Intiative, a brand new dynamo in the area of international philanthropy.

Rothkopf's outlook on these players is roughly Clintonian. He believes in capitalism as an engine for prosperity, but he's leery of the free-market gospel that dictates that "market reforms" ought to be imposed on faltering economies whatever the social and political costs. "It is true," he writes, "that governments have been unable to do much of what they should do to improve the welfare of their people, and in a vast number of cases markets have done much more." But the "free-market" moniker is misleading, since such a thing doesn't really exist. All markets are tweaked by governments to some extent, and what the preachers of the free-market religion never acknowledge is that their own favorite case studies are surreptitiously finagled to benefit the already rich.

Taking a dinner party at the home of Chile's finance minister, Andres Velasco, as an example, Rothkopf describes his uneasy response to the oligarchs around him. He realizes that they embrace the market-oriented philosophy of the "Chicago Boys," Milton Friedman's University of Chicago disciples, but only so long as the attendant suffering is limited to Chile's lower classes. They quietly resist reforms that might nibble away at their iron control of the nation's industries.   "While many of the most powerful people in the country embrace 'progress,'" Rothkopf observes of Chile, "they use their energy and political capital primarily on behalf of the changes that benefit them most directly. Elites in Chile have implicitly or explicitly resisted the changes that might create more competition, more entrepreneurship, more access to capital for the poor and middle classes." As a result, though Chile is touted as Latin America's great economic success story, profound inequities in its society have gone comparatively unchanged.

"Each one of them is one in a million. They number six thousand on a planet of six billion. They run our governments, our largest corporations, the powerhouses of international finance, the media, world religions, and, from the shadows, the world’s most dangerous criminal and terrorist organizations. They are the global superclass, and they are shaping the history of our time,"

.... (These elitists)  "have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite’s global operations."

"Registration and management of Internet domain names (via a collection of organizations)"

(regarding the "anti-globalists who will resist the new world order)  "Superclass ought to be smart enough to foresee any such crisis and head it off by doing more to make the currently disenfranchised feel like "stakeholders" in the new global order."

(The Superclass mainly comprise ...)  "older males of European descent who graduated from prestigious Western colleges," are "an improvement on those of the past."

"Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible. Even if all are miserable, all will believe themselves happy, because the government will tell them that they are so."

"Gradually, by selective breeding, the congenital differences between rulers and ruled will increase until they become almost different species. A revolt of the plebs would become as unthinkable as an organized insurrection of sheep against the practice of eating mutton."

In like manner, the scientific rulers will provide one kind of education for ordinary men and women, and another for those who are to become holders
of scientific power. Ordinary men and women will be expected to be docile, industrious, punctual, thoughtless, and contented. Of these qualities,
probably contentment will be considered the most important. In order to produce it, all the researches of psycho-analysis, behaviourism, and
biochemistry will be brought into play.... All the boys and girls will learn from an early age to be what is called 'co-operative,' i.e., to do exactly
what everybody is doing. Initiative will be discouraged in these children, and insubordination, without being punished, will be scientifically trained
out of them.

On those rare occasions, when a boy or girl who has passed the age at which it is usual to determine social status shows such marked ability as to seem
the intellectual equal of the rulers, a difficult situation will arise, requiring serious consideration. If the youth is content to abandon his
previous associates and to throw in his lot whole-heartedly with the rulers, he may, after suitable tests, be promoted, but if he shows any regrettable
solidarity with his previous associates, the rulers will reluctantly conclude that there is nothing to be done with him except to send him to the
lethal chamber before his ill-disciplined intelligence has had time to spread revolt. This will be a painful duty to the rulers, but I think they
will not shrink from performing it."

An Arizona state Senator who went public with questions over the official government version of events on 9/11 has provided further details of her position and why she chose to make her views known.

"There are so many unanswered questions regarding 9/11 and there never ever would have even been a Commission called for by Mr Bush and the Federal Government if it hadn’t have been for the Jersey Girls." Johnson said, referring to the activist group of widowed mothers and wives from New Jersey and New York who have continued to question the events of 9/11.

"When Bush appointed Henry Kissinger, of all people, to head up that Commission, those Jersey Girls asked for a press conference with him. They went in there and started asking him about all his ties with the Bin Laden family… and he backed down." She continued.

On April 17, the son of Osama bin Laden appeared on Belgian Public Television. He said “they” made a “copy of my father and they say he says this and he says that.” 

Nate from Portland caught up with Clinton during another campaign event. He ask the former president about his feelings on the Bush administrations efforts to investigate 9/11.

"Do you mean do I agree with all the reports' conclusions? I don't, but I don't believe there's any chance that 9/11 was an inside job," Clinton responded.