"what
we’ve tried to go after on Citizen’s
Watch are the hard questions that can’t be
brushed away. They can’t be easily answered
without doing an investigation, not by
asking the NORAD brass, who have the most invested
in covering it up, but by asking the people on
the bottom, at the mechanical level, each piece
of this."
"A
Dog and Pony Show"
Sander Hicks interviews John Judge, Co-Director
of the 9/11 Citizens Watch
Judge
is also
active in the Coalition on Political Assassinations
(COPA) founded 1994; and Washington Peace Center
("it’s the oldest US peace center",
"founded ’58" "Started at
protests at Fort Detrick against US’s chemical
and biological weapons.")
Interview
Conducted 12/22/03 at Pistone’s Italian
Restaurant, Falls Church, VA
SH:
Let’s start with Governor Kean, the head
of the 9/11 Commission. Last week, he told CBS,
"Do you want to know what my dream is? We're
gonna be reporting at the end of May. The two
great political parties are having their conventions
shortly after that. – My dream is that we
make meaningful recommendations and those recommendations
become a large part of those two parties' platforms.
Because if they do, then we'll really be able
to get some action, and we won't be a commission
that just sits on the shelf."
JJ:
[laughing]: Well, they’re sitting on lots
of information, I don’t know about the shelf.
The May deadline was related to the election calendar.
This commission was ill-conceived, obstructed
from the beginning, under-funded. They boosted
the funding some but it’s nowhere near what
they spent on the shuttle investigation. That
was $55 million, this is like $12 million. What?
Seven deaths get $55 million and 3,000 get $12
million? It’s disproportionate to what this
really means. They haven’t in our view been
doing the kind of investigative work they need
to do, they haven’t been taking testimony
under oath….
SH:
I read today that if the evidence is factually-based,
and if the witness is not a President, they do
take the testimony under oath….
JJ:
They may have in private, but at least in the
public testimony they haven’t.
SH:
Condoleeza Rice is reportedly nervous to testify
in public under oath.
JJ:
Well, Kean told us that not having them under
oath would make them more forthcoming. Because
then they wouldn’t be as nervous and wouldn’t
bring their lawyers. It’s clear from what
he says that they’re focused on recommendations.
The panels that they’ve announced between
now and May are all policy-related panels, until
the end, and then the panels at the end are NORAD/FAA
and what happened on 9/11. But don’t you
think you need to know what happened on
9/11 before you formulate all your policies?
SH:
Kean was promising January was going to be aggressive….
JJ:
They had two very significant panels already,
one on the structure of US Intelligence, they
were proposing either a intelligence czar at the
White House, or a MI5 style domestic spy agency.
And then, they just had one on security and civil
liberties. Part of our concern is that the people
invited to these panel hearings are almost entirely
ex- or current intelligence people, almost nobody
from the outside advocacy sector. Can you imagine
having a thing on civil liberties and security
and not inviting the ACLU? But that’s what
they did. The testimony they’re getting is
not broad enough. I mean, maybe for their policy
purposes and what they want to get out of it.
But it’s just a dog and pony show. We really
first need to get at what actually happened that
day. Who was behind it. It’s just like when
you go into the Warren Commission, and you have
five areas of inquiry, who was Oswald,
who was Ruby, who was this and that but
you don’t have "Who Shot Kennedy."
They’ve already had a panel on "Who
are the terrorists" which was all about Al
Qaeda. So they’re investigating the official
line of the assumptions.
SH:
You were saying yesterday to me on the phone about
how Lee Hamilton responds to you often, "I
don’t agree with your premise."
JJ:
"Well what’s your premise", that’s
my response. What are these guys’ premises?
SH:
How did he use that?
JJ:
One of the times he used it was with Danny Schecter,
the film maker, who said there had been reports
between Al Qaeda and US intelligence. He went
on to ask if the Commission was going to look
into that history. Hamilton said, "I don’t
agree with your premise." Schechter said,
"I didn’t know I had a premise."
Hamilton said "Allegations of connections
sounds like a premise to me."
What does that mean? I question your premise,
you question mine, now are we going to have a
discussion? How is that not a way to talk about
something? What part of my premise do you
question and why? That’s what I said to Kean.
He said "There are a lot of theories out
there and some of them are wrong." I said
"Which ones are wrong and why?" He said,
"Oh well, we’d have to finish the investigation
before we knew that." Well then why did
you bring it up? The Families are pretty frustrated,
they have these interim reports released, and
they don’t release any substance. Even the
Joint Inquiry wouldn’t do that.
SH:
Do you think the Commission has some substance
to release? Or is it that they haven’t done
that kind of work?
JJ:
I think they do.
SH:
Based on what?
JJ:
They do have investigative teams that have been
looking into things. I don’t know if they’ve
gotten to the truth, but I’m sure they’ve
gotten to something. And this reluctance to like,
spit it all out at us? And then disappear? We
look at who are they calling in public, and what
are they doing, what leads are they pursuing?
Maybe you don’t want to put all your cards
out on the table, I can understand that. But at
the very least, the hard forensic and photographic
evidence should be released to the public, so
we can do our own analysis of it.
SH:
The 9/11 Citizens Watch has a good relationship
to the 9/11 victims’ families?
JJ:
Yes. We have a Family Liaison Group. The
families come up to me often afterwards at hearings
and say "good questions." We back them
up, too, they take a position, it’s usually
similar to ours. They’re on our list, they
get all our material. We have liaisons through
the Families for Peaceful Tomorrows.
SH:
More on the subject of what the Commission should
be looking at that they’re not looking at?
What about Dave Frasca at the FBI? According to
a recent speech I was at by Mike Ruppert, Dave
Frasca was the guy who destroyed FBI Al Qaeda
records, he sat on the Phoenix Memo, he also ignored
the Minneapolis investigation, blocking the warrant
that Coleen Rowlely wanted to get on Moussaoi.
And then after 9/11 he got promoted to #2 in charge
of domestic terrorism at the FBI.
JJ:
Because he had done such a good job before.
SH:
Right. Has the Commission called Frasca?
JJ:
Not that we’re aware of. They’re being
so secretive with me that I asked them the other
day for them to give me the names and phone numbers
of the heads of the six investigative teams and
they said "we don’t release any information
about our staff." This is a Federal Commission!
I said "This is paid for by tax dollars,
you’re not going to give me information about
your staff?"
SH:
And you’re not just Joe Schmoe, you’re
representing a citizens group dedicated to monitoring
and trying to be helpful.
JJ:
We sat down with Zelikow and Felzenberg at one
point and said, we want a more formal relationship
with the Commission, and Zelikow, beamingly
informed us that "We’re exempt from
the Federal Advisory Committee Act, so we don’t
have to."
SH:
What’s the the Federal Advisory Committee
Act?
JJ:
There’s an Act that says when Federal investigations
happen on topics and there are interested parties,
you should have an Advisory Committee made up
of those people
SH:
And they said "we don’t have to play
by those rules?"
JJ:
The way they wrote the legislation, they’re
exempt from that, and they’re also exempt
from the Freedom of Information Act! I asked a
lawyer and he said it’s because they’re
Congressional, they’re not executive. FOIA
is only for Executive records.
SH:
So you really have no recourse?
JJ:
They’ve accommodated the Families to some
extent, they’ve hired a Family Liaison, and
they’re bringing them in. But the meetings
are frustrating for the families, they don’t
get any information, they just get snookered.
You’ve got a problem of it being underfunded
and understaffed and time-limited, then you’ve
got a problem with the Agencies not being cooperative
and releasing the files, probably not cooperating
in terms of testimony either. You’ve got
a third level of problem in that the Commissioners,
at least, and probably some of the investigative
staff too, I’ve heard, are compromised in
different ways. The Families complain that a number
of people on the Commission have ties to the Airline
industry, which was certainly one of their targets.
And then, most of the people on the Commission
have ties to earlier flawed investigations into
government corruption, or intelligence in general.
And ties of course to military/industrial and
military/intelligence complex.
SH:
Can you be more specific on that?
JJ:
Well, John Lehman, former Secretary of the Navy,
has a history of a lot of corporate and Pentagon
inter-relation. Kean himself is tied in with the
National Endowment on Democracy, which replaced
the US A.I.D. as the cover for covert operations
abroad. He also has some personal investments
in companies that link him to Salem bin Laden.
Ben-Veniste was White House Counsel [for Clinton].
Jamie Gorelick was on the President’s Intelligence
Advisory Board [under Clinton]. Lee Hamilton presided
over the flawed Contragate investigation that
didn’t go far enough.
SH:
On the Kerry Commission?
JJ:
He was on an intelligence commission in the White
House. They very severely limited how far Congress
was going to go.
SH:
Isn’t is ironic that Bob Kerrey is also former
Senate Intelligence Committee?
JJ:
And Kerrey was also the one who was pooh-poohing
the CIA/Contra/crack cocaine investigation and
got in the way of it and was rude to people about
it. A former war criminal with the [Navy] SEALS
and the killing of these civilians [in Vietnam],
and was also on the Committee for the Liberation
of Iraq, which ties in tightly with the Project
for a New American Century, and all the neo-cons
in the White House now.
SH:
It’s ironic that a Democrat would be a part
of that?
JJ:
[laughing] Is that what you call it? "Ironic?"
I thought it was standard fare. The Washington
Post said it was "ironic" that Neal
Bush that going to have dinner with Scott Hinckley
the night after the Reagan shooting.
SH:
The night after.
JJ:
Yeah, so, they cancelled their plans….
SH:
Newsweek printed that with a headline with "For
Conspiracy Buffs Only" spinning it as "this
is kooky."
JJ:
They way you discount conspiracy is you put out
the facts and say, "Now this will probably
be taken as a conspiracy."
...
SH:
If you could get the 9/11 Commission to Pursue
3 Lines of Inquiry, what would your questions
be? Would you start with the FAA and NORAD?
JJ:
Yes, but I would not call the the FAA/NORAD
top brass at the Pentagon, I would call the pilots.
I would call the base commanders, people on the
horn at the air traffic controllers, in the FAA
and the specific officials in NORAD headquarters.
I would find which planes were "taskable",
[i.e. able to be assigned to scramble and intercept
wayward commercial aircraft] and why this wasn’t
done. Why a plane was called back, why the Otis
[Air Force Base] pilots when they turned to intercept
Flight 77, which they knew about and New York
was already hit, they turned to get 77 and they
were called back.
SH:
What’s #2?
JJ:
The second thing I would do would be hearings
about Bin Laden, about Bin Laden, Al Qaeda and
the US intelligence connection.
SH:
Back to the Mujahedin….
JJ:
And whether they call in the academics, like John
Cooley, or Peter Dale Scott, or the people that
have done the historical research on it, or perhaps
some current or former intelligence agents, around
that operation and Casey’s off-the-shelf
operations for that period, the 90’s out,
including Contragate. Because the funding for
Contragate and the Mujadedin is the same, half
of it comes through Saudi Arabia through BCCI,
and the other half comes from CIA and drug money
either directly or through Pakistani intelligence.
And the fact that Mohammed Atta was living with
an Iran/Contra pilot is not a negligible fact
to me.
SH:
What pilot was that?
JJ:
I don’t remember his name but it was in the
Sarasota papers, at the time that he got the $100,000
SH:
What’s #3?
JJ:
If I had a third major area to go after, I guess
at this point since they’re doing policy
stuff it would be the Civil Liberties question.
I’d re-air a hearing on that and people that
are concerned with Civil Liberties would get a
say.
SH:
People with credentials, like the ACLU….
JJ:
I mean, there are other pieces you could do, the
Bush Family connections come up, the forewarnings,
because not only did they have warnings and indications
that this was a possibility, or an imminent possibility
that summer, they had specific forewarnings, the
Mayor of San Francisco was told by his security
people not to fly that day. MS-NBC and Newsweek
were told by Pentagon Brass not to fly that day.
Rumsfeld and Ashcroft about a month ahead cancelled
any commercial flights and announced they were
doing that. On what basis were these forewarnings
given? Track them down. Who knew and what did
they know? The forewarnings are even more specific.
Now,
some people focus on the unfinished investigation,
well it’s not unfinished on the FBI side
because they say it doesn’t mean anything,
but the unfinished investigation of these put
options. I never followed that that closely or
put that much stock in it.
SH:
Ruppert does.
JJ:
Yeah, Ruppert and Kyle did.
SH:
Andreas Von Bulow, the former German member of
Parliament, said it the put options resulted in
gains of $14 billion.
JJ:
It well could be. They are things that to me,
don’t necessarily highlight government complicity,
though they would be interesting to know. If you
could show the people….I mean it just as
well could be that the people planning it that
invested in it, we just don’t know. The SEC
as far as we know never finished the investigation
although the FBI says they investigated it and
there’s nothing there.
SH:
Buzzy Krongard was the head of ABBrown, Deutschbank…
JJ:
Three years before.
SH:
yeah….
JJ:
I mean he wasn’t current at the time they
were doing it.
SH:
And now he’s #3 at the CIA.
JJ:
And he did have a previous relationship to the
Bank, I’m aware of that. But it’s just
the bank, it’s not his personal investment,
these banks put the money through on behalf of
somebody else, and that’s why you have to
have a SEC investigation, to figure that out.
We would call for the SEC investigation to finish
and then be transparent. It’s a potential
lead but it’s one that I can’t follow
on my own, it’s one the government has to
follow.
Similarly,
there are questions about whether the buildings
were imploded, or whether they fell down from
the airplane crash and the fuel exploding. Again,
I don’t know but at the same time, I don’t
know whether the same people who flew the planes
into the buildings put explosives in the buildings,
they put explosives in the buildings before. In
and of itself it doesn’t tell me…I
mean a lot of people say, ‘Well if that’s
true then it has to be an inside job.’ Not
necessarily. Somebody has to pay off their cousin,
but….
So
what we’ve tried to go after on Citizen’s
Watch are the hard questions that can’t be
brushed away. They also can’t be easily answered
without doing an investigation, but then also
to investigate it, not by asking the NORAD
brass, who have the most invested in covering
it up, but by asking the people on the bottom,
at the mechanical level, each piece of this. The
background of these guys would yield to more information.
Like Hopsicker’s been doing down there, you
go into detail about who knew them, lived around
them. And now he’s coming and saying the
FBI was apparently coming out and telling these
people to shut up. That’s an old pattern.
We know that from the Kennedy assassination, the
FBI going around and telling people, don’t
tell anybody. This guy Hoffman was a deaf/mute,
he was across the highway [in Dallas that day],
saw guys with rifles up on the grassy knoll, disassembling
rifles and putting them down the sewer, after
the shooting. The FBI said to him, "don’t
talk to anybody about it." The guy’s
a deaf/mute!
That
kind of intimidation doesn’t come with a
real investigation.
[interrupted
briefly by a citizen reading a far-right newspaper
who commented on what he had overheard of Judge’s
comments]
JJ:
That’s how I got a lot of my information
over the years, is that I’d give a lecture
and people’d come up to me and say, my father
did this, my uncles did this. If we would tell
the history of our own families, the whole thing
would fall apart.
JJ:
Mae Brussell was a mentor to me. I knew her for
about 20 years. We worked together. I picked up
on her first article that came out in the Realist:
"Why Was Martha Mitchell Kidnapped?"
It had a small connection at the end about how
Nixon came to power, and Nixon’s Nazi connections.
I had been working on some of the Nazi stuff,
in relation to JFK so I called her and we started
collaborating. I brought her to my school to speak,
about once a week I would call her, I was flipping
the Post and the New York Times, I would give
her information that I was getting on what stories
were breaking, like Watergate. She was an inspiration
to me, she really worked indefatiguable, she clipped
15 daily newspapers, 50 periodicals a month, read
300 books a year, and broke it all down into a
radio show she called "World Watchers"
she based it on "Weight Watchers" and
thought that other housewives like her would start
clipping and sharing the data and having little
clubs. As it turned out, I was the only one who
would gather a little group every time a tape
came out and we’d listen to it. We called
ourselves "Brussellsprouts." It was
a rewarding relation. She had such energy flowing
through her. She cross reference-indexed the entire
Warren Report, 1800 pages in all these folders.
She recognized the people so well she could watch
them move. She called and passed a note to Rose
Kennedy five days before Bobby Kennedy was shot,
saying the people who killed your son John are
moving on Bobby. She called Mary Jo Kopechne’s
parents three days before Chapaquidick and said,
"They’re going to murder your daughter."
And she said to me later, "I shouldn’t
have said that I’m a conspiracy researcher,
I should have said that I was a psychic, then
they’d all love me, like Jean Dixon."
JJ:
Mae cracked the code in the Kennedy Assassination
because once she did the cross-referencing she
could see who knew each other and who positioned
Oswald as a patsy who was around him and who was
behind him. It was this network of White Russian
and Nazi "Solidarists" they called themselves,
the East Euro. Revanchists, the rich who had lost
their fortunes in the Russian Revolution, the
beginnings of the Axis. They marshaled funds,
a lot through Herbert Hoover, they used Hitler
as a patsy, they drove into the Soviet Union….A
lot of people around Oswald were people in that
circle who had intelligence ties, and helped to
set him up to kill Kennedy, because Kennedy wanted
détente with the Soviet Union. She had
seen Kennedy killed, she liked Kennedy, had voted
for him. She was from the I. Magnins family the
department stores in Los Angeles.
[Fragments
from earlier in the interview, not as important
to the 9/11 investigation story, but well worth
reading:]
JJ:
"Anthrax
— didn’t come from abroad, the trail
led to door of Ft. Detrick and then it stopped.
They realized from its DNA signature that it was
Ames screen-which means U. of Iowa, which had
an archive of all the known pathenogenic strains
of anthrax….if you inhale [this strain] it’s
a lot more lethal…. People would order various
strains from them in order to work on cures for
it or work to weaponize it. Once they identified
it as Ames strain, it would have been possible
to go back to Ames and figure out which particular
batch this came from and then that batch would
have had a paper trail of who had ordered that
batch, but 10 days before the first Anthrax envelope
was mailed, (this was recorded by the NY Times,
and this was called a "bungling" of
the investigation) FBI contacted the U. at Ames
and convinced them to destroy the entire 70 year
archive. So, there’s absolutely no paper
trail left. But there is information in the public
record info about Project Jefferson and Operation
Clear Vision, both running in year up to 9/11
reported on September 4th and 5th,
it was a international scandal, USA was doing
projects and experiments with chemical and biological
elements that violated international treaties
that the US had signed. They claimed that they
had to because something similar was going on
in Russia. Project Jefferson was first ordered
by Rumsfeld when he came in to Pentagon, he tasked
the DIA to generate the next generation of Anthrax.
Anthrax should be genetically altered to be more
resistant to the normal antibiotics (which was
the case with this), and more weaponized, more
distributable. [At the Anthrax attacks this stuff
] …was weaponized at a level they had never
seen. In other words, the earlier weaponization
had gotten it down to 2 or 3 billion spores per
gram, this was over a trillion spores per gram.
It was a very lethal weapon. It couldn’t
have been developed by some guy in a lab. But
on September the 9th, two days before
the attack, the DIA held a press conference here
in DC and announced they had developed the next
generation of anthrax. Also, right on 9/11 the
White House staff was told to go on Cipro. There
was also a huge contract with Bioport, who put
that out right before the attack. The Peace Center
began when all this was a twinkle in some geneticist’s
eye.
SH:
What are your conclusions about Anthrax?
JJ:
Well,
I think that this was another domestic terrorist
attack that had the signature of US intelligence,
or military intelligence on it. I think that that’s
where people have been reluctant to look.
SH:
You
have told me you doubt the "Monarch Program"
existed, but what about the factual evidence about
the US Government’s MK-ULTRA program, and
mind control?
JJ:
There was a letter from Allen Dulles to Earl Warren
responding to a query from Warren about suspicions
that Oswald might have been programmed in the
Soviet Union, because he went into for a mastoid
operation on his ear and spent too many days in
the hospital. Dulles wrote back and said "we
have had an ongoing program of psychological manipulation
for political control since the late 1940s"
So, I believe they already had Manchurian Candidate
capability coming out of WW II. Landsdale, who
many people link to the Kennedy assassination,
and Nelson Rockefeller, were intimately involved
in ONI and other military intelligence programs
on mind control.
****
JJ:
….G.H.W.
Bush’s first big job in Texas was with Dresser
Industries, DI, a subsidiary of Halliburton, and
then there’s Kellogg, Brown & Root. Brown
and Root, when it was an independent company,
was George Brown who paid the way for LBJ all
the way to the Presidency. When LBJ reversed Kennedy’s
war policy, Brown & Root made $4 billion on
construction of Cameroon Bay and all the construction
companies in Viet Nam. And similarly, Brown &
Root under Halliburton is making big money under
Cheney’s investment package that sits there,
you know, "blind trust" but not so blind
they don’t know to give Halliburton a sweet
heart deal. And then when Halliburton recently
overcharges on this gas, Bush says, "Well
if they did, they’ll have to pay it back."
Is that what you say to a bank robber? I mean,
some could go to jail for that sort of thing,
they could certainly have their contract cancelled,
they could also pay the money back, and they’re
not allowed have future contracts. But all he
says is slap their hand, oh they’ll have
to pay it back. What world do they live in? They
live in a world in which the law means nothing.
Except when they want to kill you and then it’s
"bring them to justice." [about Iraq]
"We’ll either bring them to justice,
or we’ll bring justice to them. Wanted Dead
or Alive" was the first thing out of his
mouth about 9/11 which is the posse [mentality],
that has nothing to with justice. Things are so
perverse, you have people on the radio saying,
"given the crimes Saddam committed, he should
be given a fair trail and then be executed."
Hello? It’s like Alice in Wonderland, "‘first
the sentence, then the evidence’ said the
Queen."