Excellent second post, too.

Can't say I approve of torture either, but, as near as I have been able to tell, neither does anyone in the elected government. The debate seems to be on whether to leave that as a option if needed, not as a policy.

The other issue seems to be endemic to jails of any kind. We have had much the same problems in our non political correctional facilities. I don't condone it, but it is the expected result when you put some human beings in complete control of other human beings without serious restrictions on their behavior.

You are a trauma nurse, you have seen what people can do to each other  without the slightest trace of politics involved.  Why expect any better behavior from the guards, or blame the ones much removed in the hierarchy from their actions. Do you really think  masters of spin like the Republican adminstration would have condoned all those photographs if they had known about it? That tells me they weren't paying that close attention to what was happening, and really don't deserve the blame for it.

Karen, Much of what you and I know about the 9/11 hijackers comes from what Khalid Sheik Mohammed purportedly told his interrogators. The 9/11 Commission bluntly informed us that it was not permitted to interview Mohammed nor his interrogators.

Are you willing to unconditionally accept that what you have been told thirdhand is what Khalid Sheik Mohammed told his interrogators?

If you haven't already done so, read Chapters 5 and 7 of the 9/11 Report which is available online. I had a lot of questions after reading those chapters. Generally, I wondered if this is how people act in real life.

The 9/11 Commission was openly skeptical about how Osama bin Laden met and selected Mohammed Atta to head the 9/11 mission. I f Kahlid Sheik Mohammed did not tell the truth about Atta or we were not told the truth about Atta, everything else we've been told has to brought into question.

From the early to mid-90s, Khalid Sheik Mohammed was an official employee of the government of Qatar while he traveled around the world in connection with trerrorist-related activities. Qatar is an ally. As far as I know, no one has explained the relationship between Mohammed and the ruling family of Qatar.

No explanantion was provided in the 9/11 report about how Mohammed financed his terrorist activities after he left his job in Qatar and before he showed up in Afghanistan.

The report is full of oddities. For example, we are told that Atta took a course in German in Cairo before he went to Germany and then became proficient in German. But the report never tells us when Atta became proficient in English. Remember, Atta supposedly knew stuff like when Congress was due back from recess.

Ayman al-Zawahiri is portrayed as Osama bin Laden's #2 man but, according to the 9/11 report, he was not told about the 9/11 mission until the summer of 2001. That striles me as odd.

The report stated that Osama bin Laden told important visitors during the summer of 2001 that a big attack was coming but the report never identifies the important visitors.

I have to stop here but before I do, let me remind you that the Zaid Jarrah, one of the pilots, tried to buy four GPS units in Florida on August 22, 2001. According to 9/11 report, he was only able to obtain one GPS unit and three aeronautical maps a few days later. Does this sound like a team ready to fly in the front door of the Pentagon three weeks later?

BTW, I'm looking for Johnelle Bryant. If you have any info about her, let me know.

I'm trying out for the team is what I'm doing. Even before 9/11, I knew corruption in government and business was pervasive but I don't know the full extent of it. If our system of government can be saved, I want to help.

For four years, I've been demonstrating how to search records online and look at factss in a different way. I'm a good auditor (but a lousy accountant) so this is what I can contribute.

At the same time, I can show how bad the corruption is because the crooks are so easy to catch from the comfort of my home.

I don't know what anyone else is doing or if they are doing anything. You wouldn't tell me, that's for sure. I can't keep my mouth shut. I just know I'm not the only who bought into the truth, justice and the American way bit.

randy, Let me try again. I'm a former "Big Eight" auditor and controller. Between 1998 and 2001, I worked at five different companies here on Long Island in five different industries and major fraud was committed at each one. That it was so casually carried out disturbed me.

I had a lot of time in the '90s to watch the massive amounts of wealth systematically transferred to people with power. The IPOS were fixed. You had to know someone to get on the gravy train.

One of the five companies I mentioned above was a bankrupt local telephone company in which a prominent Wall Street investment banker was working with organized crime. Another prominent Wall Street investment banker tried to swindle this company's vendors. From that one little telecom, I figured out myself how the worldwide telecom scandal was carried out.

I'm not picking on the Republicans. We all remember Terry McAuliffe's crooked Global Crossing deal. BTW, McAuliffe later teamed up with Al D'Amato on the Telergy deal. Telergy was a NY telelcom whose books were so cooked, the ipo had to be called off.

The people running the show don't care about democracy. They invest their money in communism. Doing business in China is easy because there is no rule of law. You pay the Communist Party and that's all there is to it. I hate to even bring up the Carlyle Group but it did hire the former Chinese finance minister who must be a communist.

I'm losing track of time but I think the Wall Street Journal carried an article about Stuart Bowen, Bush's own inspector general for the reconstruction of Iraq in July 2005. He reported that $9 billion targeted for Iraq reconstruction was stolen. I believe most of it was cash. The Coalition Provisional Authority had responsibility for the money. The CPA didn't let Iraqis steal $9 billion, the CPA stole it. Any Democrats in Washington DC up in arms about $9 billion being stolen?

Earlier today, I wrote about the anthrax attacks. I threw out some ideas mostly to remind everyone that the anthrax murders were unsolved. Since the strain of anthrax was American, the killer(s) are likely to be Americans. In the wake of the anthrax murders, Congress immediately spent $3 billion. Spending on bio-terrorism by 2005 was something like $4 or $5 billion. Money as a motive for murder? Happens all the time.

What is so very wrong about the anthrax attacks is that no one in Washington DC will ever talk about them. Where is the anger about the lowlifes who terrorized an already traumatized nation? Why can't we have an open discussion about the possibility of Americans committing one of the worst acts of terroism in American history? Everyone spends like another anthrax attack is around the corner but no one acts like they are looking for the pepetrators of the last ones. Robert Mueller is hardly ever seen in public, for example.

Say Americans did collude on 9/11 and say Americans did commit the anthrax murders. They, whoever "they" might be, are not going to stop terrorizing us all on their own. But I don't know if Americans are behind 9/11 and the anthrax attacks. I know that I don't have enough information to come to any conclusion. 

I picked the 9/11 report apart because it is the only "official" document about 9/11 that I have access to. 600,00 copies of the report were sold. If I have questions, so do other people but I never hear from them. Right after 9/11, I took it for granted there would be cops, firemen and Wall Streeters who would be determined to make sure they knew everything there was to know about 9/11. Four years have gone by and the only
9/11 questions I read about on the internet are about whether Builidng #7 was wired for explosives.

If people in NYC are not offended by the vice chairman of the NY-NJ Port Authority making a million bucks from fake anti-terrorism equipment while dead bodies were being pulled from the rubble of the WTC (owned by the Port Authority), what do they care about? Charlie Gargano has ultimate responsibility for security at the airports and the ports in NYC and he openly does business with organized crime while in office. I can prove it.

I suspect Charlie Gargano was the bagman for the Bush administration and picked up cash from the Libyans when he went to Malta in May 2003 but I can't prove it. So I wrote about my suspicions in case someone who was not familiar with Gargano's background was checking out corruption.

I think Gargano arranged the bizarre industrial accident that shut down offshore gas drilling in Trinidad in June 1991 but I can't prove it either. I know the people in Trinidad think the accident was suspicious enough to post about it on the government website.  Gargano was the ambassador to Trinidad and he left the country in June 1991. By 1992, Enron had taken over the the very lucrative offshore gas contracts in Trinidad from the company that experienced the bizarre industrial accident.

I know how to read 990s, SEC filings and corporate registrations. Somemtimes I have access to Lexis-Nexis. That's about the extent of my resources but I try and work them as best I can. Yesterday, someone here wrote about these astroturf immigration right wing think tanks. I spent a couple of hours putting together some info to document how they are linked together. If she can use the info, great. Meanwhile, I learned something and some of the names from my comments will show in a Google search.

A few days ago, I wrote to someone in Texas who appears to be a politically active progressive. I ran some info about Tom DeLay's "charitable" undertakings by her. Some of the info involved a very wealthy Texas foundation. She knew about some of the foundation's past problems. I'm hoping she can do something with what I found. I'm not from Texas so I couldn't go any further.

Last month, Josh Marshall mentioned a defense contractor, Matthew Pushkin and his mysterious White House contract. For fun, I put together a possible scenario involving the White House and a company that pushes up search engine rankings.

I found a Mississippi company registered to the Louisiana Coushatta Indians which previously was registerered to Travis Lott.  Right away, I started asking here in the TPM Cafe if Travis was related to Trent. I still don't know if he is but a week after I posted about the Coushattas, they changed the names of the company's officers on the Mississippi secretary of state website. When I got access to Lexis-Nexis back the other day, I found out that Travis Lott really is a crook and I later figured out that the company was doing with Harrah's. At the very least, I think we can say the Coushattas were not Jack Abramoff's "victims".

randy, You and I know how to do this kind of research but a lot of people don't. I'm trying to show them the basics. If I can help in anyway, I'm happy to do it. People need to understand how weak and ineffective government institutions like the IRS and the SEC have become as a result of deliberate underfunding and deregulation. I see the situation as dangerous and a threat to our freedom.

In a million years, I never meant to imply you didn't care about our country or wouldn't make sacrifices for it. I just meant that I personally don't know what anyone else is doing about the really serious stuff. There's a lot of very dangerous people in this world, don't think I don't know it, but I'd stick my neck out to get rid of them if I could.

Anyway, that's enough from me for the day. Thank you so very much for the compliments. They are always appreciated. I haven't responded to your other comment but I will and if the offer to email you is still open, I may take you up on it. 

randy, I think the CPA stole $9 billion or most of it, anyway. If I could, I'd put Michele Ledeen up against the wall and threaten her into telling me what was going on over there. Let's see how big and brave she really is without bodyguards. If we could catch her near a dark alley...

$350 for a Stratfor contract? You've got to be kidding. I only have acces to Lexis-Nexis sometimes because a couple of law students help me with the research (strictly within N-L guidelines, btw). Researching crooks on the internet is costing me money. I'm supposed to be looking for a job but I'm having more fun figuring out if Travis Lott is related to Trent Lott than I would have collecting somebody's dead receivables or stretching accounts payable.

You are so wrong about Charlie Gargano and Eagle Building Technologies. Eagle's financials were phony before 9/11. Between Eagle, related subs, Eagle's president and wife, more than $230k was contributed to the Republicans before 9/11. A substantial portion went to Gov. Pataki. Eagle's president, Anthony M. D'Amato and his wife, Gabriella, attended the Governors Ball during the first Bush inauguration.

Anthony M. D'Amato (apparently no relation to Senator Al) was first hooked up with Sealant Solutions, now Powerchannel. Sealant formerly was UC NWIN Systems and before that, Winners Edge. According to a great article by Leslie Eaton in the August 2002 NYT, Gargano was an investor. So he probably was the one who connected D'Amato to Pataki et al.

James "Cary" Parrish was president of Sealant in February 2002 when Sealant placed $250k of its stock privately and then invested the $250k in IFG Goldstar Cement, a front for Buck Showalter. The SEC has been after Showalter for a long time. According to SEC records, Showalter was in Lebanon some time around 2000 and spent six months in Ukraine in 2001.

Parrish then became president of Andros Development International Corporation, a private company which was first registered at sunbiz.org in 2001. Gargano, along with Sir Orville Turnquest, Gene Brehm, Lord Charles Spencer Churchill and Alfred V. Grecco, was a director. I kept copies of the website.

Prior to his stint as president of Sealant Solutions, Parrish was a vice president of Digital Products of Delaware, Inc. in 2000 (see sunbiz.org.). The company provided monitoring of electronic bracelets worn by prisoners confined to their homes, of all things. Digital Products is owned by Richard Kurtz, a New Jersey real estate developer who has long been in the penny stock company. He was the chairman of Urecoats, now Lapolla Industries. Urecoats was formerly Winners All International. Charlie Gargano was a director of Winners All until 1999.

James "Cary" Parrish and Anthony M. D'Amato got bagged in the famous joint FBI and RCMP sting named "Operation Bermuda Shorts". Parrish was sentenced to four years and is out of prison now. D'Amato got nine years for his part in Bermuda Shorts and for falsifying Eagle's financials. See SEC.

Meyer Berman is an investor worth $400 million and a well-known contributor to the Democrats. He went to dinners at the Clinton White House twice. In February 2001, he and Sam Gejdenson, former congressman from Connecticut whose district included Foxwoods, joined the Eagle board. Berman also "invested" in Eagle.

Berman had also invested sometime in late 2000 or early 2001 in Biosterile Technologies, a Fort Wayne Indiana company owned by former members of the military. Paul or Albert Reichmann, one of them, along with Arthur Goldberg and some others were also investors or on Biosterile's board. Biosterile's website is still available in the wayback machine.

Biosterile had a roster of Russian scientists working for it in Moscow and had received US State Dept. aid because it employed Russians.

According to a 9/01/01 article in a Fort Wayne newspaper about the Biosterile president being fired, Biosterile expected a big jump in sales in the latter part of 2001.

On its pre-9/11 website, Biosterile boasted of having sold three of its cargo scanning machines to military in Turkey. But as it came out after 9/11, these machines never worked. You just know that the Trukish government did not pay for these machines with their own money. If I remember correctly, Douglas Feith was the "liason" between the US and the Turkish military i.e. he got a kickback on all sales financed by the US.

Biosterile was listed as a vendor of bomb-detecting equipment for the US Navy. Again, the stuff never worked. Biosterile was also on the board of an aviation safety group. Nice, huh?

Biosterile also was in the food radiation business and employed a lobbyist who represented it at the FDA. I found a Biosterile in Oak Ridge Tennessee but I don't if it is the same company. Scanmex LLC was a Biosterile sub.

After 9/11, Eagle announced that it had bomb-detecting equipment which was Biosterile's fake cargo scanning equipment. After the anthrax attacks, it anounced that it had mail steriization equipment but the machine had never actually been built. I then announced it had software to detect money laundering but that was fake, too.

Eagle ostensibly was in the construction business so it had teamed up with Biosterile in an undisclosed relationship to sell this garbage to the federal government. No explanation was ever offered publicly as to why Biosterile needed Eagle. BTW, Biosterile filed Chapter 7 in June 2002.

Prior to May 2001, Eagle was "Eagle Capital International Ltd." A stream of press releases from Eagle Capital would have made an investor think the company was doing business worldwide. China, Russia, India, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Saudi Arabia, Yugolsavia and so on. Andros Savvides of the Excel Group and Wilfred Mango of Fuller International, two major contractors, wre on the board along with Gargano pre-9/11. Yet Charlie afterwards said he knew nothing, nothing at all about Eagle's operations. Right, a major contributor to Pataki and Gargano knew nothing.

In August 2000, Eagle first announced that it had some sort of financial interest in an Italian manufacturer of bombproof doors. In a May 1, 2001 8-K, Eagle announced that i bought 85% of the company, Masters SRL located in Piacenza Italy. I don't care what anyone says about me but I want the FBI to check this one out to see if Eagle was gearing up for a terrorist attack. As I have already proved, none of these so-called prominent people had any qualms about defrauding the government after 9/11.

In fact, I'd like to know how the FBI knows how far these crooks will go. If Meyer Berman and Charlie Gargano are willing to cheat the government out of $50 million, how does the FBI know they wouldn't kill 3,000 people to get it? How does the FBI judge the morals of Charlie Gargano? Gargano has been in charge of spending billions of dollars of 9/11 aid. That kind of is awfully tempting.  

Charlie Gargano has a history of associating with organized crime and the FBI knows it. For pete's sakes, I know it. When I worked at Orlando's Ristorante in Huntington on Long Island in 1979, he had conversations with Tony "Ducks" Corallo and Neil, as in Aniello "Neil" Migliore of the Lucchese family. BTW, Alphonse D'Amato made Orlando's a campaign stop during his 1980 run for the senate. 

In 1992, Gargano invested in the Cornerstone Group which owned property in Martin County Florida. Oneof the other investors was Carmine Avellino, Sal's brother. Sal Avellino is in prison for the Kubecka murders. The Kubeckas were carters and Avellino, a member of the Lucchese family, didn't think they should be carters so he killed them.

In the mid-90s, the FBI was wiretapping a "social club" in Huntington because an illegal gambling ring was being run out of there by "Johnny Boy" Ambrosio. The FBI overheard someone talking about crashing planes and investigated that person. Fortunately, it turned out to be a misunderstanding (I better understand now why the FBI investigated) but all the same, the FBI clearly believed the mafia was capable of terrorism, as I'm sure it still does.  

I don't need Stratfor to find out if Charlie Gargano is a crook or not. I've known that since 1979. He was part of the $2 billion Suffolk County Southwest Sewer District scandal. The only reason nobody went to jail is because the judges would have been putting their friends and relatives in prison so many people had their hand in the till. I still hear stories about the sewer district. One of the supervisors for a big construction companies told me at a wedding about how the county inspectors looked the other way.

I have to stop here because I'm out of energy but I'll respond to the rest of your post when I catch my breath. Unless, of course, you want to hear more about Charlie Garagano.

randy, I said I don't need a $350 Stratfor contract to know Gargano is a crook nor did I have to read "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" to figure out what Gargano was doing in Trinidad. He was hardly ever there and when there was an uprising, the State Dept could not find him.

I've always been curious as to what the FBI background report said about him when George H. W. Bush appointed ambassador in 1988. I think it was '87 or '88 when NY Newsday ran a story about Gargano making a million bucks on a real estate deal in Brooklyn he did with a known member of the mafia.  The FBI had to have had a file on Gargano from the Southwest Sewer District scandal. The FBI investigated the Lucchese family backwards and forwards in the '80s and Gargano, Mario Posillico, Carl Lizza, Sam Albicocco, etc were like this with the Luchese family.

Senator Alphonse D'Amato was the glue that held everyone together. I recently wrote here about a relative of "Johnny Boy" Ambrosio, a member of the Gambino family, who told me that a senator was a silent partner of Carl Lizza's. I assume it was Senator Al but I wasn't exactly bowled over when I heard the news. Ask anyone in NY if Senator Al is honest and they are guaranteed to laugh. Try it.

Until I searched the Wall Street Journal archinves, I had no idea that Enron was doing business on Long Island in the early '90s. Enron had a deal with Brooklyn Union Gas and, I think, Nassau County. Once, I went through every Enron entity registered in NYS and found some interesting stuff. LOL - There is an Enron Industries Inc. at 213 Route 110, Huntington NY 11746 that was registered to "Mr. Smith".  I am convinced that the real Enron paid off the NY politicians through that Enron. Of course, given that we are dealing with NYS, we have no idea about when the corporation was dissolved or anything else about Enron Industries.

Most people on Long Island don't know that Enron had a long term contract with Brooklyn Union Gas. At least I think it's Brooklyn Union. I'm doing this from memory but it's all in the WSJ archives. I was even nosy enough to track Richie Kessel's checkered career.

Kessel now heads LIPA, our local energy company that is being sucked dry by Pataki, Gargano et al. Long Islanders are going to be left with a shell corp. And to think they complained about LILCO! Somebody should ask Kessel why he spent $3 million on a forensic audit in, I think, 2003 or 2004. I read it in the LIPA financials online but never had time to go back to it. I'd also like to know LIPA got hooked up with Constellation, a Sam Wily deal involving an upstate NY nuclear plant. I just know Long Islanders are going to get stuck for a few billion on that one.  

People on Long Island can be so dense. Richie Kessel is a freeloader who had his free wedding at the Jones Beach outdoor theater and gave his guests free tickets to a concert held there that night. I highly doubt Kessel, the sponge, paid for those concert tickets. No one else is permitted to hold their wedding at Jones Beach but Kessel, the parasite, didn't care how he looked to anyone else. El Cheapo wanted a freebie. The bum and his freeloading bride make damned good money and they should have paid for their own goddamn wedding held elsewhere if you ask me. Trust Kessel to look after your money like it was his own?

Getting back to the mafia, what makes you more expert than the FBI? The FBI thought the mafia could be involved in terrorism in the mid-'90s. A coupleof months ago, someone told me that Nastasi-White, a NCY mafia construction company, had 60,000 sheets of plywood on hand on 9/11 that was used to board up windows around the WTC.  The person implied that the amount of plywood on hand was unusually large. There was no discussion about mafia involvement in 9/11, in fact, there was no other discussion at all. That's all I was told. The person who told me does not even work for Nastasi-White.

I'm not calling the FBI to tell them about Nastasi-White. One, I don't want to say who told me and two, I don't want to give my name to the FBI. Three, my local FBI office is much too close to Charlie Gargano for my comfort. I know for a fact that Senator Al used to drop in at Nastasi-White and pick up cash. Confidentiality is a real big issue here and I don't need the FBI giving my name to Frank Gargano, Charlie's nephew, when he drops in to shoot the breeze.

Why would I write about Nastasi-White online? Because if there is something to the story, the FBI should know about it. 9/11 is an open investigation of the worst terrorist act in this country's history and I'm not in a position to say the mafia is or is not involved in 9/11. So I wrote about Nastasi-White and the plywood in the Cunning Realist blog and here. The Cunning Realist is a NYC finance executive and I know he is very interested in the 9/11 investigation. I trust him to pass the info on to the right person. I also think some people pay attention to me here who are interested in 9/11. If someone really needs to know more, I'm not too hard to find. If Nastasi-White just happened to have a lot of plywood on 9/11 for one reason or another, end of story.  

I don't why you said the collapse of the WTC was an incredible surprise. I was with the beau when the second plane hit and he is an ex-volunteer fireman (and NYS FD state tournament champion). He said right away that the buildings would collapse but he expected them to collapse within a day, not an hour.

Right after 9/11, I wrote that I wanted the FBI to check whether any construction companies had ordered new equipment recently. I wanted hotel reservations analyzed to see if anyone anticipated a need for rooms in NYC after 9/11. I wanted the service records of the planes scrutinized for any unaccounted for time. I didn't trust anyone.  

Osama bin Laden was the least of my concerns.