Related: Boston Sunday Globe Censorship: Covering Up Cheney's Crimes
"2 indicted in alleged Sept. 11 loan fraud" by Megan Woolhouse, Globe Staff | July 16, 2009
Two former executives of a nowdefunct Quincy software company have been indicted for allegedly applying for loans to assist victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks without disclosing to the lender that one of the firm’s major shareholders had been identified by the government as a terrorist, according to the US Attorney’s office in Boston.
Federal officers arrested Buford George Peterson, former chief financial officer of Ptech Inc., at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York City yesterday shortly after he stepped off a plane from South Korea. A warrant has also been issued for the arrest of the company’s former chief executive, Oussama Abdul Ziade.
Both men are accused of falsely representing their identities, making false statements to the Small Business Association, and making false statements to police after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. In 2002, they applied to the Small Business Association to obtain a $650,000 loan, saying they wanted the money to help small businesses struggling as a result of the terrorist attacks.
The loan paperwork allegedly omitted the name of one of Ptech’s major shareholders, Yassin Kadi, as well as the name of his company, Sarmany Limited. Kadi had been designated as a global terrorist by the Bush administration, according to indictments unsealed yesterday.
Between 1994 and 2001, Kadi, a Saudi Arabian national, invested $10 million in Ptech through companies he owned, controlled, or held an interest in. After Sept. 11, 2001, he continued to hold $9.9 million dollars worth of Ptech shares, which he bought under the names of foreign entities he owned, officials said.
Federal officials declined to say whether Peterson and Ziade obtained the loan, or specifically how the men intended to use the money, citing the fact that Ziade remained at large. Ziade’s lawyer, Peter Saba of Boston, declined to comment other than to say his client had not been taken into custody yesterday. Peterson’s lawyer, Charles Rankin of Boston, did not return a phone call.
Questions about Ptech arose in 2002, when several banks canceled two corporate accounts and appeared poised to cancel the personal accounts of four Ptech employees, including Ziade, as part of an investigation into the company’s financial dealings. The banks offered no explanation for their actions, but members of Quincy’s Islamic community said the company and its employees - some of whom had Middle Eastern backgrounds - were the target of racial profiling.
Federal officials said yesterday that Peterson, formerly of Somerville, has been living in South Korea, and that Ziade, a Lebanese national, has been living outside the US since 2005....
Really tells you a whole lot of nothing, doesn't it?
For the REAL STORY of P-TECH and 9/11, read this:
"PTECH, 9/11, and USA-SAUDI TERROR
PART II
- The FAA & Ptech
- Debriefed by Secret Service - looking for a PROMIS
- Muslim Brotherhood, Christian Cultists, and Nazis
by Michael Kane
© Copyright 2005, From The Wilderness Publications, www.fromthewilderness.com. All Rights Reserved. May be reprinted, distributed or posted on an Internet web site for non-profit purposes only.
"I believe that Dick Cheney also had the ability using evolutions of the PROMIS software, to penetrate and override any other radar computer or communications system in the government."
- Mike Ruppert, in "Summation: Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury," from Crossing The Rubicon, p.592
[At the heart of our story is a program (we'll call it Ptech, after the company that produced it) that combines artificial intelligence, datamining, and "interoperability," the capacity for one program to read, operate, and modify the source codes of other programs. The computational power of the Ptech evolution of PROMIS represents a daunting new surveillance-and-intervention capability in the hands of the same elites who planned 9/11, prosecute the subsequent resource wars, and are presiding over what may become a full economic and military disaster for the resource-consuming citizens of America and the world. Since the "War On Terror" and the coming dollar/fossil fuel collapse will necessitate new levels of domestic repression, this is just the capability those elites require. Ptech is the functional equivalent of Total Information Awareness.
The human side of Ptech is where the thievery and murder come in: among the financiers and programmers of Ptech are apparent members of an international network of organized criminals involved in decades of narcotraffic, gunrunning, money laundering, and terrorism. Their personal and professional connections reach up into the highest levels of the American government, and their activities are still underway.
The issue of Saudi complicity in the attacks of 9/11 has played out into two different views. The first is the idea that the Saudis were solely responsible. This has been pumped up by Fox News and largely accepted as gospel in certain parts of the mainstream media. The second view is that the Saudis were set up to take the fall for having pulled off 9/11, covering up U.S. complicity. Neither view is correct, and both depend on a mistaken view of that country as a monolithic, homogeneous actor on the world stage. The opposite is true.
At the top of Arabian society is the giant royal House of Saud, descendants of Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, a charismatic warlord who used religious and marital alliances to consolidate his military conquests and, eventually, found a modern state on the Arabian Peninsula in 1932. Ibn Saud's success was partially dependent on his powerful religious allies, the inheritors of a doctrinaire form of Islam founded by the cleric Mohammed bin Abdul Wahhab (1702 - 1793). That coalition became increasingly unstable with the massive influx of oil wealth that began shortly after the first Arabian discoveries by SoCal (now Chevron) and Texaco, also in the 1930's.
Like virtually all Islamic states, Saudi Arabia has been the target of ongoing efforts by American intelligence aimed at suppressing any stirrings of incipient secular leftism. This is opposed, we believe, to what may be convenient and clandestine support for "al-Qaeda" terrorists (i.e. fundamentalists), acting as US proxies, who might destabilize the kingdom in advance of the US carving off only those regions with oil reserves. Socially polarized oil wealth, the ever-changing Arab-Israeli conflict, and American geopolitical maneuvering configure a daunting matrix of hidden forces that can't be fully understood or managed - not least because the intelligence elements are often double or triple agents with inscrutable loyalties.
The Ptech story is of intense interest for its implications about US government guilt in 9/11. As Ralph Schoenman, Michel Chossudovsky, Paul Thompson and others have argued, "al Qaeda" is not only traceable to CIA activity in Pakistan and Afghanistan during the Soviet period, it is also a current tool of American imperial ambitions. That directly contradicts the official story, in which al Qaeda is the foreign devil incarnate, a militant hate group formed straight from the soil of Saudi ideology - with no economic grievances, no interests in common with anyone in the non-Muslim world, and above all, no connections to the United States through funding, personnel, armaments, drug trafficking, visa assistance, or communications. It certainly is a militant hate group, but the rank and file may be totally unaware of real connections between their own leaders and the people they oppose with their very lives. These disturbing links would be just as agonizing - and just as unthinkable - for American citizens as they would be for a militant Islamist teenager in a ski mask jumping hurdles at some secret training camp.
Beneficiaries of the Ptech-connected MAK charities, the young men in Hezbollah and Hamas are fighting in land disputes, not heady ideological quests. They are also bitter, bereaved, murderous bigots with all the psychic rigidity and hysteria found in fundamentalists from Oklahoma to Hebron to Jeddah. Their hatred of the American national security state is surely absolute, but they are also beneficiaries of the Pentagon's need for an Enemy. That means that they can expect the United States to provide covert help of some kind at crucial points in the game. And the most despicable element in the American side of that process is the Bush-Cheney junta itself, which used its own assets inside the terrorist network associated with Osama bin Laden to murder three thousand civilians in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania as a pretext for unending warfare. This was done for reasons of state. But it was also done for personal gratifications including vast sums of money, permanent blackmail over those involved, and a heroin-like rush of criminally insane individual power. Sophisticated or naïve, cynical or grandiose and idealistic, each person involved betrayed humanity. And the apparatus that permitted this remains in place - as do most of the personnel.
The solution to the Ptech problem is not just to get all that creepy software the hell off the computers. The bigger solution is transparency and disclosure, de-militarization and political internationalism; localization of production and exchange; and a more equitable distribution of resources and opportunity. As Stan Goff has explained in these pages, the word opportunity does not necessarily refer to competition for purchasing power and domination. It means the opportunity to grow Haitian rice in Haiti and sell it in Haiti, without having to contend with the export dumping of American corporate agribusiness. It means the chance to maintain a tribal existence in an Afghanistan that is neither the proving ground for a US-Soviet proxy war nor the playground of American-funded drug lords. And though all ideals are warped by the rigors of practice, this was the point of President Kennedy's de-escalation in Laos, his Alliance for Progress in Latin America, and his refusal to invade Cuba:
What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children--not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women--not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.
Now let's get back to the business of sticking up for people who were murdered on 9/11 and in its aftermath, and to diminishing the present danger. - JAH].
January 27, 2005, PST 0900 (FTW) - Ptech - the software company whose major investors and directors are strongly linked to the Muslim Brotherhood - produced software that derived from PROMIS, had an artificial intelligence core, and was installed on virtually every computer system of the U.S. government and its military agencies on September 11, 2001.
This included the White House, Treasury Department (Secret Service), Air Force, FAA, CIA, FBI, both houses of Congress, Navy, Department of Energy, IRS, Booz Allen Hamilton, IBM, Enron and more.
Whoever plotted 9/11 definitely viewed the FAA as an enemy that morning. Overriding FAA systems would be the most effective way to ensure the attacks were successful. To do this, the FAA needed an evolution of PROMIS software installed on their systems and Ptech was just that; the White House & Secret Service had the same software on their systems - likely a superior modified version capable of "surveillance and intervention" functions.
Ptech is enterprise architecture software, which Indira planned on customizing to use as "risk architecture" software.
Enterprise architecture software is designed with the express purpose of knowing everything that is going on throughout the entirety of the enterprise in real-time. In the case of Ptech software installed on Whitehouse, Secret Service, Air Force and FAA systems, the enterprise included all of the data produced by those agencies in real-time.
Maybe this is why Ari Fleischer stated the Whitehouse didn't view Ptech as a threat; quite to the contrary.1 The Ptech software was a vital asset needed for the White House to execute the 9/11 plot, and may still be in place for possible use against professionals in government and military positions trying to do their jobs in the future.
The FAA & Ptech
In the 9/11 Commission report a "phantom flight 11" was added to the official version of what happened that day. A tape was played at the final commission hearing on June 17, 2004, of a woman from the FAA telling NORAD that flight 11 was still airborne at 9:24 am, long after it had actually struck the WTC. Originally this was reported to be the time when the FAA notified NORAD that flight 77 was off course and headed to the Pentagon.
This information was used by the commission to claim NORAD had never been informed that flight 77 was headed towards Washington D.C., leaving the FAA holding the bag for the penetration of the most heavily guarded airspace in the world. The commission's report states they were "unable to identify the source of this mistaken FAA information."
It has been clearly documented that "false blips," or radar injects, were placed on FAA radar screens on the morning of 9/11 as part of the Air Force war games that morning.2 "Phantom flight 11" fits the description of a "false blip." If it was, in fact, a radar inject, that would explain why the 9/11 commission was unable to locate the source of the "mistaken FAA information." The 9/11 war games are classified and specific information regarding such details is not publicly available. We do know by the time "phantom flight 11" appeared on FAA screens - 9:24 am - the war games had reportedly been called off.3
So what was it doing there?
FTW's position is that "phantom flight 11" was injected onto FAA radar screens by "the maestro"4 using Ptech software to override FAA systems. Let's examine the feasibility of such a scenario.
Ptech had been working on the data blueprint of the FAA's entire network for 2 years prior to 9/11. Their confidential business plan lays out just how much access they had to the FAA's data systems.
Ptech Inc. Confidential Business Plan: Page 37 of 46 11/7/2001
The FAA recognized the need for leveraging its IT investment, with a means of centralizing activities and introducing consistency and compatibility within the operating systems environment. A Ptech consulting team was organized to use activity modeling to identify key functions that could be examined for improvement in network management, network security, configuration management, fault management, performance management, application administration, network accounting management, and user help desk operations.5
What the above tells us is that Ptech had access to the entire informational barn door of the FAA's data systems. In an amazing exchange published in part 1 of this series, FTW editor Jamey Hecht was able to confirm a central thesis of Crossing the Rubicon while interviewing Wall St. Whistleblower Indira Singh. Indira is an IT professional who started First Boston's first Information Technology group in 1975 and had worked on Wall St. until 2002. She's been an IT consultant for Banker's Trust, the U.N., JP Morgan, and American Express. In 1988 she started TibetNet - a derivative of DARPA's Internet, the service you are likely reading this report on at the moment. The exchange was as follows:
Jamey Hecht: You said at the 9/11 Citizens' Commission hearings, you mentioned - its on page 139 of transcript - that Ptech was with Mitre Corporation in the basement of the FAA for 2 years prior to 9/11 and their specific job was to look at interoperability issues the FAA had with NORAD and the Air Force, in case of an emergency.
Indira Singh: Yes, I have a good diagram for that…
Jamey Hecht: And that relationship had been going on mediated by Ptech for 2 years prior to 9/11. You elsewhere say that the Secret Service is among the government entities that had a contract with Ptech. Mike Ruppert's thesis in Crossing the Rubicon, as you know, is that the software that was running information between FAA & NORAD was superseded by a parallel subsuming version of itself that was being run by the Secret Service on state of the art parallel equipment in the PEOC with a nucleus of Secret Service personnel around Cheney.
…In your view, might it have been the case that Cheney was using Ptech to surveil the function of the people who wanted to do their jobs on the day of 9/11 in FAA & NORAD, and then intervene to turn off the legitimate response?
Indira Singh: Is it possible from a software standpoint? Absolutely it's possible. Did he (Cheney) have such a capability? I don't know. But that's the ideal risk scenario - to have an over-arching view of what's going on in data. That's exactly what I wanted for JP Morgan.
You know what's ironic about this; I wanted to take my operational risk blueprint which is for an operational event going wrong and I wanted to make it generic for extreme event risk to surveil across intelligence networks. What you're describing is something that I said, 'boy if we had this in place maybe 9/11 wouldn't have happened.' When I was going down to In-Q-Tel and getting these guys excited about creating an extreme event risk blueprint to do this, I'm thinking of doing exactly what you're saying Cheney might have already had! [emphasis added]
-- end of transcript
Ptech was working with Mitre Corp. in the FAA and, according to Indira, Ptech was the Alpha dog in that relationship. Mitre has provided simulation & testing technologies for the Navy.6 They provide multiple FAA technologies and boast in their annual reports that their two biggest clients are DOD & FAA. Mitre knew the FAA's technological enterprise inside and out, including any simulation-and-testing (war game) technology operated by the FAA.
This was the perfect marriage to ensure that the capacity to covertly intervene in FAA operations on 9/11 existed - in the middle of simulated war games.It is also the perfect marriage to ensure that the command and control of these capabilities was readily available to Dick Cheney via Secret Service Ptech software in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, the bunker to which Cheney was "rushed" by the Secret Service. As already pointed out in part 1 of this series, Ptech does what Total Information Awareness (TIA, the DARPA program to monitor all electronic transactions in real-time) is supposed to do. (There are an undetermined number of other software programs in the hands of an undetermined number of corporations also capable of this. Again, enterprise architecture software is designed with the express purpose of knowing everything that is going on throughout the entirety of the "enterprise" in real-time.
In the case of Ptech software, installed on White House, Secret Service, Air Force and FAA systems (as well as most American military agencies), the enterprise included all of the real-time data of the above mentioned agencies. Indira has confirmed Ptech software could have been set up to allow Dick Cheney to surveil and intervene on FAA radar screens.
As documented by former Bush counter-terrorism advisor Richard Clarke in his book, Against All Enemies, on 9/11 the Secret Service had the capability of seeing FAA radar screens in real time; and as documented by Mike Ruppert in Crossing the Rubicon, Secret Service has the authority to take supreme command over any and all American agencies - including the Air Force.
9/11 is a prime example of what Indira Singh calls "extreme event risk." In the months prior to the attack, she was working on a program capable of providing data in real time to prevent these types of events from happening. She had pitched this very idea just one week before 9/11 at In-Q-Tel Headquarters (CIA) in Virginia, giving a final presentation for an ICH (Interoperability Clearinghouse) project code named "Blue Prophet." Indira explained to CIA why she was supporting ICH in this project.
She told the In-Q-Tel team, "The intelligence and other agencies need this now." One of the men with CIA looked at Indira with what she describes as the "blackest, coldest look anyone has ever given her."
They weren't interested in Blue Prophet's software for interoperability or risk, but rather the data it would produce because the data would point in the right directions. That data was very predictive, producing quality real-time intelligence. This is one week before 9/11. If In-Q-Tel already had this capability, it's no wonder they would be wary of someone like Indira - the woman from New York in Risk Management who resided a few minutes' walk from the Twin Towers.
Debriefed by Secret Service - looking for a PROMIS
It was Indira Singh whose investigative research into Ptech laid the groundwork for this series. One of the first reporters Indira contacted was Joe Bergantino, a 20-year veteran investigative reporter for a CBS affiliate in Boston.
"There are some great people in mainstream media," says Indira, and according to her, Joe is one of them. Joe told her that Ptech's CEO Oussama Ziade had stated, "If it wasn't for that woman in New York, none of this (the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) raid) would be happening". Neither Joe nor Indira liked the way that sounded.
Joe contacted Senator Grassley's office. A Secret Service agent, Charlie Bopp, was reassigned to Grassley's office, and put in charge of the Ptech file. An initial meeting was scheduled with Indira in January 2003.
Indira showed up with what she called, "A major Ground Zero attitude." She was supposed to be on the 106th floor of the WTC on 9/11 but instead responded as a civilian EMT that morning. This was very personal for her. Charlie understood and nevertheless made the arrangements for a debriefing at the Secret Service's National Threat Assessment Center (NTAC) in April 2003.
During the debriefing Indira was asked by a member of the Secret Service, "Is Ptech PROMIS?"
"I already knew what had happened to Danny Casolaro, and they were asking me if I had copies of Ptech," Indira told FTW.
Danny Casolaro was the investigative journalist mysteriously "suicided" in a West Virginia hotel room while investigating the theft of PROMIS software. Casolaro's investigation had uncovered a shadowy network he called "the Octopus" that seemed to have its hands in everything from drug trafficking and money laundering, all the way up to political assassinations and coups d'etat. When Casolaro's body was discovered, his arms were violently slashed and all the documents he traveled with were missing. He had told friends and relatives if anything happened to him they shouldn't believe it was by accident.
Being asked such a loaded question, she responded with her Ground Zero attitude saying:
"You have a copy of the software, why don't you tell me? This is not about the software guys, ok - was it a PROMIS? It was a place you could hide a PROMIS, a place you can drop a PROMIS."
Indira told FTW, "I was going to use Ptech software for risk surveillance at JP Morgan - Duh!"
By the very nature of risk surveillance, it is necessary to use PROMIS progeny based on artificial intelligence to achieve the capabilities we are describing. Charlie Bopp and those present for Indira's debriefing knew this, but they wanted to talk about the software and not the people behind the software. That is extremely significant. In part 1 of this series we've shown how the major people behind Ptech link to the Muslim Brotherhood, elements of the Saudi Royal Family, as well as Dick Cheney and the powerful American 'Christian' cult known as "The Fellowship," or, "The Family."
Indira wanted to name names, but Charlie wouldn't let her. "We can't investigate the people behind Ptech," said Charlie. "Just trust me, let's focus on the software." They gave no reasoning for this, they just said, "we can't."
"Well if you can't talk about the people behind this, it's a waste of time because with software like that you can't find trapdoors now. This is live stuff!" Singh told FTW. "You can't prove an intelligent agent [a small software component that reaches out to claim or insert information from another system - Ed.] went out and sent information somewhere. It's like proving you ate a piece of cake when you were 10 years old, unless you have video of it, it's not going to happen. It's that ephemeral." [emphasis added]
In other words, PROMIS-based activity leaves no footprints.
This means trapdoors are no longer necessary, or at least, no longer detectable. If Indira is correct, there would have been no "fingerprints" left of any kind showing just what Ptech software was used for on 9/11 and who used it.
"These guys debriefing me were from Military Intel, so they were trying to find out what I knew," says Singh. According to her, August of 2002 (the month before the story on Ptech was shut down by the White House, and three months before Ptech was raided) was a significant month. There were supposedly leaks of some kind coming out of the Persian Gulf. She was asked if Ptech software could have been the source of those leaks.
Singh responded, "Well if Military Intel are using Ptech in the Gulf, obviously! YES!"
During one of the initial meetings Indira threw a hat on the table from FDNY Engine 4, Ladder 15 and said, "I want you to put this on your desk, so any time you think of playing some political games you remember there were real people down there."
Indira Singh was done playing games.
Muslim Brotherhood, Christian Cultists, and Nazis
In part 1 of this series we documented the extensive ties from the Muslim Brotherhood running through Ptech. The Brotherhood was founded by Hassan Al-Banna and expanded with the help of Mahmoud Abu Saud of the House of Saud.7
This extensive network runs through various shell organizations and charities with interlocking boards, such as the New Jersey based real estate investment company BMI, CARE International, and the Northern Virginia based SAAR network - named after al Sulaiman Abdul Al-Aziz al-Rajhi, a scion of one of Saudi Arabia's richest families. Heading the SAAR network (renamed Safa) is Yakub Mirza, who also sits on the board of Ptech. It is of interest to note that claims against Al-Rajhi Banking & Investment Corp. for funding and supporting terrorism were recently dismissed by U.S. District Judge Richard Casey.
One of the central funding mechanisms in this nexus is the Al Taqwa Bank of Switzerland - now Nada Management - which the Department of Treasury says funds Al Qaeda.
Hitler supporter Albert Friedrich Armand Huber (aka Ahmed Huber) and Youseff Nada sit on the board of Al Taqwa. Nada reportedly helped the Grand Mufti escape from Nazi Germany when the Third Reich was teetering on the brink of collapse, and Ahmed Huber knew the Grand Mufti quite well; so well in fact, it was the Mufti who convinced Huber to convert to (the Brotherhood's form of) Islam.
Huber has spoken publicly of a "New Right" marriage of Nazi ideology and Islamist fascism. He has both a picture of Adolph Hitler and Osama bin Laden in his Swiss home.
Al Taqwa is a "hawala," a bank conducting transactions leaving no paper trail through a "good faith" global network that transfers funds - no questions asked.8 Bank Al Taqwa is located in the Bahamas; the parent company, Nada Management, is based in Lugarno, Switzerland, and is linked to the Royal Family of Liechtenstein.
Al Taqwa has done business with Asat Trust. The now deceased Prince Emanuel von und zu Liechtenstein became a board member of Asat Trust in May 1970 and stayed until November 1990, when he was replaced by Martin Wachter, the trust's current director.9
Asat Trust is on the American and U.N. terror list. According to the American Jewish Daily Forward, copies of business registration documents on file with authorities in Liechtenstein show that Asat Trust has been intimately involved with the Al Taqwa network during the last 30 years, registering changes in company names, personnel and financial structure.10
Most frightening of all is that this network seems to have links back to the powerful American Christian cult known as "The Fellowship," or "The Family." This organization is tied to American 'Christian' men of high political power including John Ashcroft, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, multiple Congressional members and prominent business leaders. Some "Family" members have stated they would love to have Osama bin Laden as a guest speaker because of the covenant he has with his followers. Doug Coe, the Family's leader who was praised by George H.W. Bush at the 1990 National Prayer Breakfast for his "quiet diplomacy," openly admires Hitler's "covenant."11
Yassin Al Qadi - the Saudi terrorist financier who funded Ptech and BMI - claimed to have met Dick Cheney in Jeddah before he became Vice President and the two "still share cordial relations." When Cheney's office was asked to comment on this, spokeswoman Jennifer Miller Wise stated the Vice President gave her no reason to believe he had met with Al Qadi before he assumed office.12
That is a non-answer; "no reason to believe" he met Al Qadi leaves no reason to believe he didn't. Regardless, there are more transparent connections between elements of Saudi and American elites.
In November of 2001, Halliburton was awarded a $140 million contract to develop an oil field in Saudi Arabia by the kingdom's state-owned petroleum firm, Saudi Aramco, and a Halliburton subsidiary, Kellogg Brown & Root, along with two Japanese firms, hired by the Saudis to build a $40 million ethylene plant.13
Dick Cheney is, of course, the former CEO of Haliburton.
As recently as 1991 ARAMCO had Khalid bin Mahfouz sitting on its Supreme Council or board of directors. Mahfouz, Saudi Arabia's former owner of the nation's largest bank, has been reported in several places to be Osama bin Laden's brother in law. However, he has denied this and brought intense legal pressure to bear demanding retractions of that allegation.14 He also denies any involvement in financing terror organizations.
One journalist who was sued by bin Mahfouz, Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld, is counter suing in New York Federal Court. She is the only one of some 30 authors not to retract claims that Mahfouz has financed Al Qaeda operations as published in her book, Funding Evil: How Terrorism is Financed and How to Stop it.
Khalid bin Mahfouz has major partnership investments with the multi-billion dollar BinLadin Group of companies and is a former director of BCCI, the infamous criminal drug-money laundering bank which performed a number of very useful services for the CIA before its 1991 collapse under criminal investigation by the legal apparatus of multiple countries.15
George Herbert Walker Bush, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney all have extensive ties to the Saudi Royal family and Saudi elites, who in turn have questionable ties to terrorist financiers such as Yassin al-Qadi. It is therefore not unreasonable for Dick Cheney to have met al-Qadi while in Jeddah while CEO of Haliburton.
This is the reality of the world we live in; where a covert international power structure supercedes the interests of nation states, and the misnomer of "national security" is used to keep this network's secrets hidden from the prying eyes of authentic journalists and the public at large.
--SOURCE--"