Tom Flocco has been covering the 9/11 Commission closely. Excerpts from his latest report:
Kean’s Commission has selected four representatives as its review team to “examine the core group of Presidential Daily Brief articles made up of those that are plainly critical to the Commission’s investigation . . .
Chairman Kean, Vice Chairman and former Congressman Lee Hamilton, Commissioner Jamie Gorelick, and Staff Executive Director Philip Zelikow will review Bush’s sensitive PDBs. . . . Only Kean, Hamilton, Gorelick, and staff member Zelikow may view their own notes--and only at the White House.
Jamie Gorelick currently serves as a Bush Administration Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) National Security Advisory panel member and also as a member of President Bush’s Review of Intelligence panel, thus providing the CIA with a direct or circuitous liaison on the Commission while also affording the Bush Administration with a direct link to the Commission and its flow of evidence procurement. . . .
Commission member and former congressman Tim Roemer revealed on a C-Span Washington Journal broadcast on Monday that the Commission had started to take testimony under oath behind closed doors, but not at the public hearings, indicating that the Commission was interviewing key players--requiring sworn testimony as opposed to current public hearings involving individuals unconnected to the actual attacks. . . .
Roemer told TomFlocco.com that “9-11 insider trading is on our list of issues to be covered and we plan to deal with it.” This, when we asked whether the commission would investigate the billions in pre-attack profits of death via criminal insider trading in world-wide securities markets. . . .
9/11 Citizens Watch Co-Founder Kyle Hence said "NSA 'minders' have been allowed to sit in on interviews and testimony taken by Commission staff; and Chairman Kean has been unwilling or unable to refuse this potential intimidation of witnesses." . . .
Former Georgia Senator and Commission member Max Cleland did not attend the hearing. Speculation by more than a few surrounded whether the Vietnam War hero was asked to stay home for remarking on CNN that “President Bush was scamming America” by denying public access to sensitive 9/11 intelligence documents in what amounts to a murder investigation.
It has emerged two intelligence warnings were ignored that the British Consul and the HSBC Bank in Istanbul were prime Al Qaeda targets. The warnings came from the CIA and Mossad. . . .
President Bush was in London when the Istanbul attacks happened. He . . . immediately ordered Americans to be once more warned they are facing an unprecedented security threat.
Over 50 people died and 700 were injured, many seriously, in the Istanbul truck bombings.
Both targets had been identified by the CIA and Mossad – as “soft targets” and in need of “urgent protection upgrading”.
Their first warnings had been passed on to MI6 last May.
The second warning came only a week ago after suicide bombers partly destroyed two Istanbul synagogues.
British Consul-General Robert Short was working on a security review for MI6 when he died in the bombing.
His report was due to be in the hands of MI6 chief Richard Dearlove this week.
So sensitive were its contents that Short had asked his personal assistant, Lisa Hallworth, 38, to personally encrypt it after typing the document. She also died in the blast.
They were together in Short’s temporary office on the first floor of the consulate gatehouse when the car bomber – in a green van bearing the logo of a local food catering company – detonated his 500-pound bomb only yards from them. . . .
Short, fluent Turkish speaker, he had developed good connections with Turkish intelligence, MIT.
Was there a more sinister reason for the failure of Turkish intelligence to anticipate the attacks virtually on the doorstep of its own headquarters?
Mossad analysts have told me that help may have come from Absar al-Islam. It has links with a shadowy group called Great Islamic Raiders of the Orient (IBDA-C). Backed by Iran, this group is violently anti-Christian.
Washington ordered its own consulate in the city to relocate to the suburbs. A team of US security experts quickly turned the building into a secure fortress, bristling with bomb-proof windows and a range of sophisticated electronic defences to warn of and repel any attack. All approaches were heavily guarded.
But the British consulate – two buildings and a gate lodge – was not similarly protected. Its entrance was directly on the road and, though guarded, its metal gate offered only token resistance to a truck bomber.
The main buildings were being renovated.
With the Bush visit to London already about to begin, last Tuesday Mossad passed on details to the MI6 officer at the British embassy in Ankara.
TOTAL INFORMATION ANALYSIS: There is some interesting info in this piece. But Gordon Thomas, who comes from a family with deep connections to British intelligence, buries it in propaganda about bin Laden, Al Qaeda and a conflict between the West and Islam. he also naturally spins the anomalies as mistakes.
But the two key points in the article is that a) The British had foreknowledge of the attacks and B) The British consulate was under information about the renovation. Such construction is ideal for false-flag operations, as thexplosives can be strategically planted and problem employees placed in death zones in preparation for the 'terrorist' attack. So here we have a man writing a report on the previous week's synagogue attacks - which had some hallmarks of a Mossad false-flag operation -- being taken out at a sublimely convenient time for the UK government -- during the Bush state visit.
THEY are thick brown ledgers that wouldn’t look out of place in a Harry Potter film. . . . the membership registers of the 600 Freemason’s lodges of Scotland, the "secret" order reputed to wield legendary influence in the corridors of power.
And last week, in a historic and unprecedented move, six volumes were thrown open to Scotland on Sunday as part of Freemasonry’s attempts to dispel its secretive image and counter a damaging association with Dunblane killer Thomas Hamilton. . . .
The Hamilton connection has haunted the Freemasons since he shot dead 16 children, one of their teachers and himself in the school gym of Dunblane Primary in 1996. Last month, a petition was submitted by a local resident to the Scottish parliament asking for the Cullen Inquiry into the murders to be reopened to re-examine alleged masonic links. . . .
Hamilton’s grandfather, James, a welder joined the Garrowhill Lodge in the working class district of Baillieston in December 1957 and, after moving home, was a regular attendee at the Royal Arch Lodge in Stirling until his death in 2000.
As the grandfather was a member, then so was the grandson, so the theory progresses. . . .
Membership records were scrutinised for the years in which Hamilton, who was born in 1952, could have been a member. They were from 1973, after he was 21 (you can only join at 18 if your father has been a member), to 1996 when he died.
TOTAL INFORMATION ANALYSIS: This is ridiculous. He still could have joined up early if his father was a member and given that his grandfather was, there is no reason to suppose he isn't. Here is some background on the case.
An official of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research Near East and South Asian division (INR/NESA), John J. Kokal, 58, was found dead in the late afternoon of November 7. . . Kokal's body was found at the bottom of a 20 foot window well, 8 floors below the roof of the State Department headquarters near the 23rd and D Street location. Kokal's death . . . has been virtually overlooked by the major media. . . .
Kokal's INR bureau was at the forefront of confronting claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Washington police have not ruled out homicide as the cause of his death. Kokal was not wearing either a jacket or shoes when his body was found. . . .
State Department officials dispute official State Department communiqués that said Kokal was not an analyst at INR. People who know Kokal told the French publication Geopolitique that Kokal was involved in the analysis of intelligence about Iraq prior to and during the war against Saddam Hussein.
Another INR official, weapons expert Greg Thielmann, said he and INR were largely ignored by Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton and his deputy, David Wurmser, a pro-Likud neo-conservative who recently became Vice President Dick Cheney's Middle East adviser. Kokal's former boss, the recently retired chief of INR, Carl W. Ford, recently said that Bolton often exaggerated information to steer people in the wrong directions.
A former INR employee revealed . . . it would have been impossible for Kokal to have gained entry to the roof on his own. INR occupies both a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) on the sixth floor that has no windows and a windowless structure on the roof that has neither windows nor access to the roof, according to the former official. The other windows at the State Department have been engineered to be shatter proof from terrorist bomb attacks and cannot be opened.
INR and other State Department officials report that a "chill" has set in at the State Department following Kokal's defenestration. A number of employees are afraid to talk about the suspicious death.
Check out this video clip from WFAA television in Dallas on November 22, 1963.
Billy Newman, seen below right with his wife shielding their children from gunfire in Dealey Plaza, was at the studio with his family minutes after President Kennedy was shot to death in front of their eyes. In this RealVideo clip, web-exclusive to Libertythink, watch as Billy Newman describes seeing two shots hit President Kennedy from the front.
The first seconds of this 8-9 minute segment appeared on the recent PBS special, "JFK: Breaking the News." PBS cut away long before Mr. Newman describes the angle of the shots and the grassy knoll.
Check out this video clip 
from WFAA television in Dallas on November 22, 1963.
In this RealVideo clip, web-exclusive to Libertythink, watch as Billy Newman describes seeing two shots hit President Kennedy from the front.