BOOK REVIEW
Was It Murder? Philip Marshall,
Author of 'Big Bamboozle,' Dead
by William F. Wertz, Jr.
The Big Bamboozle:
9/11 and the War on Terrorby Philip Marshall
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, February 2012
166 pages, paperback, $14.99
March 9—In February 2012, Philip Marshall, a veteran airline pilot, published The Big Bamboozle: 9/11 and the War on Terror, which documents the role of Saudi Arabia in running the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and of the Bush Presidency in facilitating it by standing down. One year later, on Feb. 2, 2013, Marshall was found dead, along with his two teenage children and his dog, at his home in California.
Local police have called it a murder/suicide. But former National Security Agency officer Wayne Madsen, who spent a week at the scene investigating, says that it was a black-ops assassination, not only for what Marshall reveals in the book, but also for what he might have revealed in the future.
In addition to being an experienced pilot—Marshall had captain ratings on the Boeing 727, 737, 747, 757, and 767s—and was familiar with the training needed to fly such planes, and to carry out such manuevers as the 9/11 hijacker pilots did, Marshall had experience in a DEA sting operation against Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar, and was the pilot for Barry Seal, who participated in the George H.W. Bush/Oliver North operation to arm the Contras in the 1980s.
The story that Marshall tells, although failing to identify the role of the British, corroborates in fine detail the essential features of the assessment of 9/11/2001, presented by Lyndon LaRouche at the time that the attack was occurring. Interviewed that morning on K-TALK radio from Salt Lake City, LaRouche said: "This is not some dumb guy with a turban some place in the world, trying to get revenge for what's going on in the Middle East. This is something different." LaRouche emphasized that "this is a very systematic operation ... to get that kind of thing, to snatch planes like that, that's a pretty sophisticated operation." He also stressed that "Osama bin Laden is a controlled entity. Osama bin Laden is not an independent force." In a webcast address on Jan. 3, 2001, LaRouche had warned that a terrorist incident could be used, as in the case of the Reichstag Fire, to introduce a dictatorial policy in the United States. In that webcast LaRouche said:
"Special warfare types of the secret government, the secret police teams, will set off provocations, which will be used to bring about dictatorial powers and emotion, in the name of crisis management."
The possibility that Marshall was assassinated cannot be ruled out. In former Sen. Bob Graham's novel Keys to the Kingdom, the lead character, who is a Senator investigating 9/11, is killed. Graham was the co-chair of the Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11. In similar, true-life cases, Barry Seal was killed on Feb. 19, 1986, in Baton Rouge; J.H. Hatfield, author of The Fortunate Son, in which he reported that George W. Bush's "missing year" was spent in drug rehab, was also found dead, allegedly by suicide, on July 18, 2001; journalist Gary Webb, who exposed the fact that crack cocaine was being shipped to the U.S. to fund arms for the Contras, in a newspaper series entitled "Dark Alliance," allegedly committed suicide on Dec. 10, 2004; and on Feb. 19, 2005, Hunter S. Thompson also allegedly committed suicide while working on a major article on 9/11.
Bin Laden: A False Flag
In the introduction to his book, Marshall cites the fact that in the final version of the Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11, the indisputable evidence about the role of Saudi intelligence was redacted.
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Marshall presents evidence that bin Laden's role in 9/11 was a false flag, to cover for the fact that the funding, logistical support, tactical planning, and training of the 9/11 terrorist attack were all supplied by Saudi Arabia, whose role was covered up by blaming Osama bin Laden, who did not have the means to carry out such a sophisticated operation.
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Secondly, he demonstrates that the operation was effectively facilitated, and then exploited, by the Bush family apparatus, which effectively stood down while the attack was occurring, and ignored warnings of the impending attack.
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And thirdly, he exposes the roles in the coverup of Porter Goss, the House Chairman of the Joint Congressional Inquiry; Philip Zelikow, the director of the 9/11 Commission; and FBI Director Robert Mueller, who was appointed on Sept. 4, 2001. That coverup persists to this day.
Marshall is known to have been in contact with Bob Graham, who has demanded the declassification of the 28-page section of the 9/11 report on the Saudi role in the attack.
The book covers material already reported by EIR and LaRouchePAC from the report of the Joint Congressional Inquiry. This includes the fact that Prince Bandar's wife, the daughter of Prince Turki bin Faisal, then-head of Saudi intelligence, sent money to Saudi Intelligence agent Omar al-Bayoumi; that Bayoumi met with a member of the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles before meeting at a restaurant with the first two hijackers who came to the U.S., Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, and invited them to San Diego; that Bayoumi worked for the Saudi Civil Aviation Authority; that the two hijackers lived for a time in the home of a longtime FBI informant, whom the Joint Inquiry was prevented from interviewing. In fact, the FBI refused to serve the informant a committee subpoena.
Marshall points out that the 9/11 Commission never heard testimony from a civil aviation expert. As an expert himself, he writes that, "The flight profiles revealed that a tailored operating procedure was used to fly directly to predetermined targets, followed by a series of advanced hand-flown maneuvers that included rapid descents, steep turns and coordinated roll outs." None of this could have been done without "critical inside help from aviation and tactical experts." As a 20-year Boeing pilot and captain, he writes that he would have been "challenged to duplicate this performance without several practice flights." The pilots could not have done this on the basis of the training they received in single-engine airplanes. Moreover, their civilian flight instructors all said afterwards, that in early 2001, none of the pilots was competent to fly Boeing airliners.
His conclusion is that they received advanced training in the final phase from Saudi instructors.
The Saudis and the Pilots
Marshall presents the following evidence:
In the six months leading up to 9/11, four of the eventual hijackers travelled to Las Vegas. These hijackers were the pilots of the four planes that were used on 9/11. None of the other hijackeres went to Las Vegas. Marshall concludes that they must have received training at a site somewhere between Las Vegas and Tucson, Ariz. One possible location he identifes as Pinal Airpark, which had 757 and 747 Boeing planes on site at that time, and which is known to have been used by the CIA and the private mercenary company Blackwater.
Many sources have reported that after 9/11, a number of Saudi nationals, who were in the U.S. at the time, including members of the bin Laden family, were allowed to fly out of the country after the attacks.
Marshall also reports that a large entourage of Prince Turki was also in the United States prior to and on Sept. 11, 2001: "Tucked in the back of the commission's report (and later removed) was an account of three separate chartered airliners carrying about 100 Arab men (mostly Saudis) from Las Vegas on midnight transatlantic flights beginning on September 19." Marshall reports that Turki "was near Las Vegas during the time that the 9/11 Commission 'could not explain' why all the hijackers had made trips to Las Vegas in the months leading up to 9/11."
In the week after the attack, there were at least five chartered flights with high-ranking Saudi officials that flew out of Las Vegas, Newark, Boston, and Washington. Three of these were from Las Vegas.
"The chartered departures from Las Vegas were a four-engine DC-8 for Geneva on September 19, 2001, with 69 passengers, including 46 Saudis; a Boeing 727 for England with 18 Saudis on September 20; and on September 23, a jumbo Lockheed L-1011 for Paris. Only 34 passengers were listed on that plane, which has a capacity of nearly 400. On that flight was Prince Turki."
Marshall makes the point that the presence of Turki's entourage in the U.S. in the Summer of 2001 "entailed a perfect opportunity to get the needed Saudi Boeing flight instructors into the country and out after the attacks without anyone interviewing them."
To support this, Marshall points out that Prince Bandar—now the head of Saudi intelligence—is, himself, a pilot. He was Top Gun for his unit in the Royal Saudi Air Force, and the two Saudi intelligence operatives in San Diego, Bayoumi and Bassan, were associated with the Saudi Civil Aviation Authority.
The Saudi-Bush Connection
The role of Prince Bandar, and his relationship to the Bush family, are key. Marshall does not report on the money Bandar had at his disposal as a result of the (British) BAE-Saudi Al-Yamamah arms deal. But he does demonstrate that Bandar has a decades-long close relationship with the Bush family, and with dirty covert operations. For instance, during the Iran-Contra affair, when George H.W. Bush was Vice President, Bandar agreed to fund the Contra operation in 1984 when the Congress had banned U.S. funds for Nicaraguan Contra rebels. Oliver North testified that Bandar "had sought to keep under wraps his role in funneling millions through a Swiss bank account."
Thus Bandar has been the Bush family connection to Saudi Arabia for decades. As Marshall points out, in the past two decades, the Prince "has spent time with the President's family at their Texas ranch, their Kennebunkport home, at Camp David and of course the White House. He has had visits to the Pentagon and has been flown on Air Force One." George H.W. Bush celebrated his 80th birthday on Bandar's A-340. At one point, the Vice President proclaimed that Bandar was an official member of the Bush family. His new name in Kennebunkport was announced as Bandar Bush.
In less than 48 hours after 9/11/2001, Prince Bandar and George W. Bush would be smoking cigars together on the White House balcony. In his book State of Denial, Bob Woodward reports that when George W. Bush was planning to run for the Presidency, Bush Sr. told him to visit Bandar. According to Woodward, Bush Jr. said to the prince, "My dad told me before I make up my mind, go and talk to Bandar."
Although Marshall does not make this point, Prince Bandar, now, as head of Saudi intelligence, continues to do the bidding of the British, in arming al-Qaeda in Syria. The only difference is that today his partner in crime is President Barack Obama who, in following the Bush family tradition, has continued to cover up the Saudi role, both in the original 9/11, and also in 9/11/2012 in Benghazi.
No Defense
Marshall argues that on 9/11, all four of the planes were supposed to hit their targets at the same time, but the hijackers of two of the planes that targeted Washington, D.C., were delayed in taking over the cockpits, which resulted in those planes flying further west than intended, and thus delaying the operation. Marshall's point is that this delay exposed the fact that the Bush White House stalled in responding to the attack. Two military jets were sent up after it became clear that the first plane had been hijacked. However, no additional planes were deployed.
Not a single airplane was send out to defend Washington. Vice President Dick Cheney claimed afterwards that he recommended to Bush that orders be given to shoot down any incoming plane, but there is no record of any such orders being given, even two hours after the attack began. And even if such orders had been given, there were no planes in the air to follow the orders.
The Coverup
The coverup of 9/11 is well documented by Marshall, and echoes the coverup of the Kennedy assassination by the Warren Commission. Just as Allen Dulles was appointed to the Warren Commission to control it, similar appointments were made to obstruct the investigation of both the 9/11 Commission and the Joint Congressional Inquiry.
The person appointed as Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission was Philip Zelikow, a former member of the National Security Council for Bush Sr., and co-author of the 1995 book, Germany United, Europe Transformed, which he co-authored with Condoleezza Rice. Zelikow was a member of the G.W. Bush transition team, and the author of the policy paper that the White House used to justify a pre-emptive invasion of Iraq. The 9/11 Commission staff would describe him as a "White House mole." He was in daily contact with Bush senior advisor Karl Rove and with National Security Advisor Rice. Evidence against Bandar was hidden in the final report, because Zelikow argued that it was not conclusive.
In respect to the Joint Congressional Inquiry, Marshall asserts that the mole was former Rep. Porter Goss, the co-chair from the House. He was named by President George W. Bush in 2004 as Director of National Intelligence and Director of Central Intelligence. As to Goss's background, Marshall presents a photo taken in Mexico City on Jan. 22, 1963, which includes Felix Rodriguez of Contra fame, Barry Seal, and Porter Goss, 20 years before the Iran-Contra affair. Goss was a CIA agent at the time of the the Bay of Pigs. According to Marshall, "some independent investigators believe that this [photo] was the assassination team, nicknamed Operation 40," that was responsible for the Kennedy assassination.
Marshall also reports that Cheney tried to intimidate Senator Graham. Mueller, who was appointed FBI director one week before 9/11, also launched an investigation of the Joint Congressional Inquiry staff itself during their investigation, as a means of intimidation.
A Ploy for War
Marshall's overall thesis is that to bring about the change which has occurred since 9/11, a Pearl Harbor-style attack on the U.S. would be necessary. He quotes a document published by the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), "Rebuilding America's Defenses," which states: "the transformation would be a long one—absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor." Moreover, by blaming the attack on Osama bin Laden, it could be used to justify a policy of pre-emptive warfare, which was then carried out against Iraq, and eventually Syria and Iran.
Marshall argues that such a false flag operation was run to cover up the Saudi involvement and the true intention of the plotters of 9/11.
To support this, Marshall quotes from Steve Pieczenik, who served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State under the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations, worked under Reagan and Bush Sr., and now works as a consultant for the Department of Defense. Pieczenik, who is also a physician, stated on May 3, 2011, in two radio broadcasts shortly after it was announced that Osama bin Laden had been killed, that he knew that bin Laden had died in 2001. Back in April 2002, Pieczenik said that bin Laden had already been "dead for months."
Pieczenik had met bin Laden, and worked with him during the proxy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. According to Pieczenik, bin Laden died in 2001, "not because Special Forces had killed him, but because as a physician, I had known that the CIA physicians had treated him and it was on the intelligence roster that he had marfan syndrome. He died of marfan syndrome, Bush junior knew about it, the intelligence community knew about it." Pieczenik reported that CIA physicians had visited bin Laden in July 2001 at the American Hospital in Dubai. "He was already very sick from marfan syndrome and he was already dying, so nobody had to kill him."
Pieczenik also said that he was prepared to tell a Federal grand jury the name of a top general who told him directly that 9/11 was a false flag attack.
Marshall also argues that key to the false flag operation was producing the torture-induced confession of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the so-called mastermind of 9/11.
Time for the Truth
Unfortunately, Marshall will not write his next book. It is certainly reassuring that Attorney General Eric Holder and CIA Director-designate John Brennan have finally stated, on behalf of President Obama, that it is unconstitutional to kill an American who is a noncombatant on American soil ... with drones.
Marshall does not mention that Obama, along with Brennan, has continued the Bush policy of covering up the Saudi involvement in 9/11 by refusing to declassify the Joint Congressional Inquiry 28-page chapter on Saudi involvement in 9/11, which he promised the families of 9/11 victims he would do.
Given the explosive nature of his revelations, the time is now overripe to push for that chapter finally to be declassified. The truth must now come out.
