Post by RPankn on Jul 25, 2005 15:06:32 GMT -5
Someone at DU transcribed this from the audio interview. Well worth reading because Singh connects al-CIAda and Sept. 11th to, well, the CIA and US Government. It looks like what I have suspected for sometime now: Iran-Contra redux.
July 20th 2005
Inteview with Indira Singh
"Ground Zero 911, Blueprint For Terror, Part Two"
Indira Singh worked on Wall Street from 1975 Until June 28th, 2002 when she was summarily terminated due to her investigation into computer software company, Ptech. In Part One, She described her work as an emergency medical technician at ground zero, and began to describe her professional work for JPMorgan Chase and her first client meeting with software engineer, Ptech.
Bonnie Falkner: So, Indira, how did your meeting with Ptech, how did that go?
Indira Singh: Well, they came a little late, immediately there were some issues with regard to how the day would proceed, for instance they showed up without the agreed upon software in hand. The most important thing about it is that their chief scientist Dr. Hussein Ibraham came. He’s an Egyptian-American and he had a very good reputation in the field, very bright, someone you would like working with, very knowledgeable. But, they had showed up without the software. What I had done was isolated a workstation, took it off the net, after all we were testing whether the software would meet our criteria. And if I had said it did then that would be a big deal if it subsequently couldn’t, so we need to start with an out-of-the-box version of Ptech. They didn’t bring that and Dr. Ibraham said, “that’s not a problem we can develop a demo on his laptop.” And if you know anything about these things that’s like a no-no because at the end of the day he’s walking out the door and I don’t have anything – and he’s walking away with pretty much enough of how we’re thinking about doing operational risk… now, operational risk is about how to spot bad things that are going on in a financial institution – things like rogue-trading, money laundering, and so on and so forth. And it’s very subtle, our intellectual property, at least what JP Morgan was hiring me for, was to think innovatively, out of the box, in a next-generation how do you proactively design a blueprint to spot these things, and that’s pretty big. These, definitely, people are smart enough to get an “oh, they’re thinking of going down this road”, that’s a big deal, so I was risk averse and so I was aware enough not to expose our intellectual property, or that of the company I am consulting for, I am very protective of that. So, they showed up without the software and that was a huge enough red flag that I began paying attention to them. A couple of other things went on and within half an hour I just walked over to the same people who had recommended them and began calling and I said to one of them, “I have the Ptech people here”, and the reaction was not the reaction I would have ever expected. It was: what are they doing on site? And I said, well you recommended them. And they said, no, um, you should have come through a distributor, an American distributor, and I said, “uh uh, JP Morgan reserves the right to work directly with the company and besides which they are a preferred vendor of IBM, they’re a preferred vendor for program and that’s the way we work, we don’t work for small distributors. If we’re going to go with this software as the standard, we’re going to go right to the source and make the agreements there. So, I said, what is the problem? And basically this person said, “Don’t let them out of your sight”. And that’s when my stomach sank. See, you have to understand how all of a sudden I’m beginning to see these people in a different way. Because when they said: don’t let them out of your sight, I have a Middle Eastern company there and we’re taught not to discriminate and I, that was not something I was about to do and to prove that - they were there being evaluated. So, that is never going to be a bone of contention, although later people made that an issue. But, if I had a problem working with a Middle Eastern company they would have never been there in the first place, much less before Ground Zero closed. And I had no problem whatsoever having them up there. I liked the idea.
B.F.: What do you mean Ptech was a Middle Eastern company?
IS: Well, that’s what subsequently was revealed in the phone call – that their financier, their funders, their investors, were all Saudis. And I said, “so what?” and they said, one Saudi has been placed on the US Terror List, October 12, 2001. And I said, umm, it got very quiet, I said, you better have proof because having thrown that into my lap now, this is not something that I can ignore, I have to follow up on it. This is not something I can ignore, or pretend would go away, or have someone else handle. This is risk-management, at the highest levels of one of the largest banks in the world; it is my responsibility to deal with this. And I said, how can I get proof of this? And that’s when they started saying you need to talk to Jeff Goines, who was one of the only three people in Ptech who knew of this relationship. You see, it was that well hidden within Ptech, and so I subsequently called Jeff Goines and I said, well if this is true, did you not report this, particularly as a private company this relationship would have been privy only to those on the inside, I said, did you report it anywhere – that someone who has been placed on the US Terror List is key funder, angel investor, to a company whose software is utilized at the highest levels of almost every government and military and defense organization in this country, including the Secret Service, the FBI, the Department of Defense, the House of Representatives, the Treasury Department, the IRS, the US Navy, the US Air Force, and, last but not least, the Federal Aviation Administration?
B.F.: Are you saying these were all Ptech clients?
IS: These were all Ptech clients and when I was evaluating them I was pretty impressed – why not Ptech? Exactly, they’re being used at the highest levels of all of these organizations. So, I was very excited about using them and having their software be able to be at the heart of what I wanted to develop. And I had no reason to believe that if they were in use everywhere of that caliber that I would have a problem. They were also used in Enron, perhaps, I should have thought twice about that, but, umm, they were in use at IBM, of course, and the top accounting firms, and even in the FBI. In Miter..
B.F.: What is Miter?
IS: Miter is a large company that does specialized technology for defense and intelligence. You would not expect to have an exposure with a company that was so well entrenched and embedded in these kinds of organizations.
B.F.: So, what about the meeting then, did they leave? What happened?
IS: No, because, umm, basically my position was until I had proof I could not react. That would have been very unprofessional of me and so I thought of a number of scenarios that could be going on. At that point I thought it might have been, you know, competitiveness out of control, distributors wanting the JP Morgan account, it could have been anything - however, the one thing and it was true that the chief investor, Sheik Yassan Khadi, was indeed placed on the US Terror List, because while I was talking to them, while they were still there, I checked out a website that had a list of everyone who’d been placed on the Terror List. The missing piece was of course proving that Sheik Yassan Khadi was indeed affiliated with Ptech, was an owner of Ptech, because it was a private company. You could say that anybody was an investor, whether a bad guy or good guy, was an investor. Proving it was another thing, so I let everything ride, but I kept and eye on things. And, in fact, we did have a presentation that went very, very well, because in no way, shape or form was I going to jeopardize that.
B.F.: So what happened next? Did you go on working with them, or did you start to investigate Ptech?
IS: Well, I continued multi-tasking. I was working with them, I placed a few phone calls, some people got back to me later that day, while they were still on premises, so I was able to separate the concerns, accomplish the task, evaluate the software anyway, start the phone calls to start getting more information, then my report would have been: this is the software, it’s used everywhere, it can do what we want it to do, however, we have this issue with the company, and present that to my superiors and let them decide.
B.F.: Then did you start investigating the company?
IS: Yes. What happened next was, um, I spoke with Jeff Goines and he told me that basically not only was Yassan Khadi was an investor but that a Yacob Mertza was on the board of directors and he had been the subject of Operation Green Quest, many of his Herndon, Virginia vehicles and companies,and financing companies, had been raided in March 2002. And, again, that Mertza was on the board of directors. As we spoke, other names started to come out, my head was pretty much spinning at this point, and I said “have you reported any of this to the FBI?” and the answer came back: yes, well I wrote a report to the FBI, and, umm, I said, “okay, the boss in FBI has been told, I need to speak with people there”, because it’s not just by group that’s evaluating them, it’s so many other groups – but I couldn’t believe that, if this was all true that Ptech was still being used by the Department of Defense. There’s something a little bizarre about all of this and really I was beginning to understand, unwillingly, that the world was, was not the way we thought of it.
B.F.: Now, this person that you were discussing this with, Jeff Goines…
IS: Goines. Yes.
B.F.: Was he an employee of Ptech?
IS: Yes he was, he’s one of the key people at Ptech. He held several important positions. He had traveled to Saudi Arabia and he had met with Yassan Khadi and he had met with most of the investors, he, his last position was Vice-President of Sales, which for a small company is pretty significant. He worked with Ptech helping build the company for five years. And he was the one that was based in Virginia, who was responsible for getting a lot of the government accounts, with, of course, Yusaama Zihadi, who was the President. Yusaama Zihadi is a Lebanese-American, who according to Jeff, got a citizenship under very questionable circumstances, which involves the INS. Now, this is all according to Jeff, so at some point later in the week I had decided to go down to Virginia and meet with not only Jeff, but a number of other Ptech and ex-Ptech employees, because this was beginning to sound like a Tom Clancy novel, and I needed proof, I told them I needed emails, I needed documents, I needed hard evidence. But, in the meantime, within a day or two, I had contacted my Rep at IBM, and I said I need to walk outside with you and talk to you about something. If you guys are thinking about getting seriously in bed with this company, I would suggest that you do some background investigation, so that your clients, like JP Morgan and myself, don’t end up in this situation. His name was Kyle Hiligoss. Kyle told me that he quote, unquote, wrote a book report and sent it to his legal department and he was told to just back off the whole, the whole thing, in fact he would, didn’t want to have anything to do with me as I continued investigating. Jeff did get the agents at the FBI, the boss in the FBI office, to call me back, and with Kyle listening in, so it wasn’t just me reporting on what Jeff had said, we spoke to the FBI agent who had picked up the information that Jeff had reported on Ptech, when Yassan Khadi was placed on the Terror List in October 2001. Now remember this is eight or nine months later. My question to him is: if you have an investigation that’s ongoing, that’s fine, and we don’t want to get involved with it, or impede it in any way. But in the meantime, this country’s infrastructure is seriously exposed, and I cannot, if any of this is true, cannot, and I need some evidence, something that you can give me that, to hang my hat on when I report this, that this is true, that this isn’t just someone making a terrorism report, you know, but that, that you know this is true. And basically, what he said was, “Indiri, your in a better position on the out, on the outside to get the proof that’s needed than I am. And I asked him to check with the supervisor, I said, do you understand how serious this is, to have a company with, with this alleged terrorism connection, at the highest levels of corporate America and the US infrastructure? And I said, if you don’t know, I need, we need to make you aware of this. He apparently went to his supervisor, and his supervisor said that the position wouldn’t change. Now, the Boston FBI office, you can check this out, was rated as one of the worst in terms of corruption, and I believe the Whitey Bolger incident, the connections between the FBI and the Mafia have been, how should I put it?, extremely well explored and the Boston FBI office, the ex-governor of Massachusetts, I believe, anyway, this mob character, Whitey Bolger’s brother was in a very high level political position in Massachusetts, in Boston, and in fact if people were to read Peter Lance’s book, “Coverup”, he explores it very well and backs up a lot of what I had found here, the interaction between organized crime and the FBI. So, when they said they weren’t going to proceed, I…
B.F.: and by ‘they’, you’re talking about the FBI?
IS: the FBI..I said, I need something to hang my hat on, and so he sent me a videotape. And the videotape, which I have here, the substance of the videotape was a news clip. It was a news clip of a CBS affiliate, based in Boston, called WBCTV, and their investigative reporting team, the “eye team”, which was led by investigative reporter Joe Bergantino, had investigated a number of Middle Eastern men who were sought after 9-11. They were affiliated with a Muslim Islamic Terrorism financing charities. He had created this clip to show the connection between the 9-11 terror attack and the financial vehicles that were supposedly used to fund it. And what he did was very interesting. He connected, the eye-team connected, CARE International, not the big CARE International, but something called CARE International that was based in Boston all the way back to Al Keefah, which is the financing vehicle at the center of the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, all the way back to something called Maktab al-qeedah-mad, which means “the office”, which was a financing vehicle that was set up by the CIA for the Pakistani ISI, back in the days when Osama bin Laden was America’s fair-haired boy, and was on our side fighting with the Muhajadeen, fighting the Soviet Union. So, the question to me was, my goodness, when I saw the videotape, what is Maktab al-qeedah-mad doing being run out of Ptech on 9-11, and the reason I say being run out of Ptech is that the faces in the videotape were the faces of core employees at Ptech. Now, remember, this is a small company. There were only one or two people who had access to the sourcecode in Ptech, and that is a very trusted position and he was one of them, his name was Sahail Lahair. The people who started CARE International, some of them were actually on an FBI Terror Watch List, prior to 9-11, in Boston.
B.F.: What do you mean by the source code?
IS: Well, all software products has, uh, some group or organization or person writes code that is then packaged up and, uh, for instance the word processor on your desk, or spreadsheet and so on and so forth, the browser, it’s all written in some sort of code. Those are the keys to it, and if you want to improve it, add any functionality, you would change the original code, and add new functionality and then repackage it and send it out there. So, whoever had access to source code of Ptech, that was where the value was – if you lost the source code, you essentially lost the product. For all intents and purposes, marketing point of view. So, only one or two people would have access to the source code. It would be like having the formula for Coca-Cola, basically.
B.F.: Now, let’s go over that a little bit again. You were talking about a CARE International and some other funding groups that have been, what, funding international terrorism?
IS: That’s correct.
B.F.: And also have been funded by, what, the CIA..
IS: Well, the original, the roots of the al-Keefah and CARE International, if you look at it were way back in the late 80s, around the time of Iran-Contra, for instance, Maktab al-qeedah’mad was set up so that monies could be passed to Osama bin Laden and the Mujahadeen when they were fighting the Soviet…now, I won’t go into a lot of detail, but it ended up that Osama bin Laden took that over and was running al-Quaeda through that. The connections to the Pakistani ISI still stood. The connections to the CIA still stood. Not in the way that was originally set up, but through a black, or a gray, operation. That had been later confirmed to me. By the end of the day when I was finished with certain parts of the investigation, it was clear to me that there was no way that Ptech could have done all of this without a lot of inside help. And that’s what I began focusing on, that it was a cut-out, that it was a front, was it a regular CIA front, was it a clandestine front, what was it? You know there are walls within the FBI, walls within the CIA, behind which these operations take place and who is behind those operations, you know, is a key question. Now, people might say, ahh, this is all conspiracy theory, but I would like to remind people that conspiracy is very much recognized by the United States Federal Code – and it’s called RICO-racketeering and influence, and it is very much recognized because there’s so much power in these organizations that they have rules in place, for instance the DCIA, the Director of the CIA, cannot, after his term of DCIA, subsequently run for Vice-President or President, which is what happened with George Herbert Walker Bush, that rule was bent for him. He went on from being the DCIA to running for Vice-President. That’s a no-no.
BF: Well, it sounds like you’re describing an inter-locking relationship then, between this software company, funded by Saudis, and funded by whomever, the United States government, US corporations, and then known groups, globally, that are accused of staging terrorist attacks.
IS: Yes.
BF: and it’s all of a piece.
IS: Yes, absolutely. There… And one of the things I want to say is, maybe those organizations don’t fully know who their masters are. And Ptech is the one thread, the one golden thread you pull on and all of this is unraveled, because it goes into the corporations, it goes into, umm, umm, these ah government entities, it goes into the terrorism financing entities that were, that none of which have been, oh by the way, taken to task. And, umm, there’re just so many questions about what does this all mean. And as we investigated, as I investigated further, we found that the, in the origins of Ptech were very interesting – where did this company come from, obviously is the first question. And, um, how did they get to be so powerful, who were the people, who were the organizations that brought them in, who knew, who gave them the power. Who, for instance, signed off Zihadi’s citizenship without doing background checks? Who said that they had a bad feeling doing that? Who gave them influential, ummm, I remember that Ptech’s competitors, US companies, were extremely annoyed at the fact that they could not get equal time, that all the plum contracts were going to a foreign-owned company. And I said, well, did you know they were foreign-owned, and if they’re foreign-owned they couldn’t get certain classified projects, and, and he said, Oh, Indira, everyone knew that, some of them, some of the competitors knew, that umm, that they were Saudi owned and that meant that they got favorable treatment on Capitol Hill. And I said, well, are you saying that they just got favored treatment or that there was something more going on? They wouldn’t answer. Their lawyers instructed them not to answer, so, they knew a lot of what was, what was going on.
BF: Who, who were you talking to?
IS: Well, in one particular case I was talking to one of their competitors, Popkins Software, and umm, you know I have no problem naming names, because I think that in the memory of 3000 US civilians who were, and world-wide civilians, who were murdered, we are going to wage wars and spill blood around the world, we oughta take a look at this, and just have the truth come out. Because, umm, the truth has not come out and, there’s been a lot of speculation, there’s been a lot of innuendo, but there hasn’t been hard proof and Ptech is the one situation where you can get hard proof. When we investigated Ptech, and the people behind it, where they came from, we found out that one of the founding members was a man by the name of Solomon Bahairi. He was one of the founding directors and he had put together a vehicle called BMI, which stands for Bai Tal Mal. Now BMI was identified as being involved with terror financing but this is just not going to be the Muslims hate America, that’s not what it is, there is something else going on here. They’re being used as a tool, just as the good people of the United States are being used, are being misled into, and being frightened and terrorized into ‘if we don’t wage these horrific wars, you know our way of life will be over’. Who benefits from that?
BF: What else did your investigation of Ptech turn up? Didn’t you meet with several employees or former employees of Ptech?
IS: Yes. This goes back to when all of this was being revealed to me, now this is the last week of May 2002. The last day, or June 1 or so, of 2002, lo and behold out of nowhere the Chicago FBI enters the picture. We have agent Robert Wright of the Chicago FBI, who’s giving congressional testimony, and, umm, he stands on the steps of the Capitol, bursts into tears, apologizes to the 9-11 families, the victims, that he didn’t do everything he could to prevent 9-11 from happening, that his investigations were repeatedly shut down. And I almost fell over, because he announced that his investigation was the investigation into Yassan Khadi, the same Sheikh Yassan Khadi who was the money man behind Ptech. And, umm, you could not ask for a more direct connection to 9-11 than that. I will even discount the fact that some ex-Ptech employees told me that, when I went to see them I presented all the Terror List faces, whatever, and they had indicated that they had seen some pass through Ptech, in fact, one or two had mentioned that they thought one of the hijackers had actually passed through Ptech. And I said, did you report this to the FBI? Can you tell me when? Can you get evidence of it? Can you get litigation-quality evidence, something that would stand up? Whatever you can get, give it to me, make copies, give it to the FBI, I still thought they were on our side.
BF: The FBI, you mean.
IS: The FBI. In fact, and this has to be made very clear, there are some extraordinarily real patriotic Americans and good people in the FBI, as has been said by, I believe, Agent Colleen Rowley, one of the FBI whistleblowers’ bosses, that there’s a wall in the FBI, and this has been validated to me by various attorneys in Houston, who are very close to the power bases, and are pretty ticked-off at what’s happening in this country and are speaking out, as are many CIA agents who are very concerned that it has gone too far, as are many NSA agents who are concerned that it’s gone too far, and FBI agents. So we have a lot of people who are speaking out, they’ve kept quiet too long; they’re afraid, they’re afraid of what’s happening to this country. And when I say the Third Reich, what is happening to this country, they say, and I will identify ‘they’ if pressed, they say, will make the Third Reich look like a tea party. I guess we have that many more billion people to control on this planet.
BF: And when you say, “they say”, are you referring to people that you’ve spoken with in the FBI?
[Continued in next post]
July 20th 2005
Inteview with Indira Singh
"Ground Zero 911, Blueprint For Terror, Part Two"
Indira Singh worked on Wall Street from 1975 Until June 28th, 2002 when she was summarily terminated due to her investigation into computer software company, Ptech. In Part One, She described her work as an emergency medical technician at ground zero, and began to describe her professional work for JPMorgan Chase and her first client meeting with software engineer, Ptech.
Bonnie Falkner: So, Indira, how did your meeting with Ptech, how did that go?
Indira Singh: Well, they came a little late, immediately there were some issues with regard to how the day would proceed, for instance they showed up without the agreed upon software in hand. The most important thing about it is that their chief scientist Dr. Hussein Ibraham came. He’s an Egyptian-American and he had a very good reputation in the field, very bright, someone you would like working with, very knowledgeable. But, they had showed up without the software. What I had done was isolated a workstation, took it off the net, after all we were testing whether the software would meet our criteria. And if I had said it did then that would be a big deal if it subsequently couldn’t, so we need to start with an out-of-the-box version of Ptech. They didn’t bring that and Dr. Ibraham said, “that’s not a problem we can develop a demo on his laptop.” And if you know anything about these things that’s like a no-no because at the end of the day he’s walking out the door and I don’t have anything – and he’s walking away with pretty much enough of how we’re thinking about doing operational risk… now, operational risk is about how to spot bad things that are going on in a financial institution – things like rogue-trading, money laundering, and so on and so forth. And it’s very subtle, our intellectual property, at least what JP Morgan was hiring me for, was to think innovatively, out of the box, in a next-generation how do you proactively design a blueprint to spot these things, and that’s pretty big. These, definitely, people are smart enough to get an “oh, they’re thinking of going down this road”, that’s a big deal, so I was risk averse and so I was aware enough not to expose our intellectual property, or that of the company I am consulting for, I am very protective of that. So, they showed up without the software and that was a huge enough red flag that I began paying attention to them. A couple of other things went on and within half an hour I just walked over to the same people who had recommended them and began calling and I said to one of them, “I have the Ptech people here”, and the reaction was not the reaction I would have ever expected. It was: what are they doing on site? And I said, well you recommended them. And they said, no, um, you should have come through a distributor, an American distributor, and I said, “uh uh, JP Morgan reserves the right to work directly with the company and besides which they are a preferred vendor of IBM, they’re a preferred vendor for program and that’s the way we work, we don’t work for small distributors. If we’re going to go with this software as the standard, we’re going to go right to the source and make the agreements there. So, I said, what is the problem? And basically this person said, “Don’t let them out of your sight”. And that’s when my stomach sank. See, you have to understand how all of a sudden I’m beginning to see these people in a different way. Because when they said: don’t let them out of your sight, I have a Middle Eastern company there and we’re taught not to discriminate and I, that was not something I was about to do and to prove that - they were there being evaluated. So, that is never going to be a bone of contention, although later people made that an issue. But, if I had a problem working with a Middle Eastern company they would have never been there in the first place, much less before Ground Zero closed. And I had no problem whatsoever having them up there. I liked the idea.
B.F.: What do you mean Ptech was a Middle Eastern company?
IS: Well, that’s what subsequently was revealed in the phone call – that their financier, their funders, their investors, were all Saudis. And I said, “so what?” and they said, one Saudi has been placed on the US Terror List, October 12, 2001. And I said, umm, it got very quiet, I said, you better have proof because having thrown that into my lap now, this is not something that I can ignore, I have to follow up on it. This is not something I can ignore, or pretend would go away, or have someone else handle. This is risk-management, at the highest levels of one of the largest banks in the world; it is my responsibility to deal with this. And I said, how can I get proof of this? And that’s when they started saying you need to talk to Jeff Goines, who was one of the only three people in Ptech who knew of this relationship. You see, it was that well hidden within Ptech, and so I subsequently called Jeff Goines and I said, well if this is true, did you not report this, particularly as a private company this relationship would have been privy only to those on the inside, I said, did you report it anywhere – that someone who has been placed on the US Terror List is key funder, angel investor, to a company whose software is utilized at the highest levels of almost every government and military and defense organization in this country, including the Secret Service, the FBI, the Department of Defense, the House of Representatives, the Treasury Department, the IRS, the US Navy, the US Air Force, and, last but not least, the Federal Aviation Administration?
B.F.: Are you saying these were all Ptech clients?
IS: These were all Ptech clients and when I was evaluating them I was pretty impressed – why not Ptech? Exactly, they’re being used at the highest levels of all of these organizations. So, I was very excited about using them and having their software be able to be at the heart of what I wanted to develop. And I had no reason to believe that if they were in use everywhere of that caliber that I would have a problem. They were also used in Enron, perhaps, I should have thought twice about that, but, umm, they were in use at IBM, of course, and the top accounting firms, and even in the FBI. In Miter..
B.F.: What is Miter?
IS: Miter is a large company that does specialized technology for defense and intelligence. You would not expect to have an exposure with a company that was so well entrenched and embedded in these kinds of organizations.
B.F.: So, what about the meeting then, did they leave? What happened?
IS: No, because, umm, basically my position was until I had proof I could not react. That would have been very unprofessional of me and so I thought of a number of scenarios that could be going on. At that point I thought it might have been, you know, competitiveness out of control, distributors wanting the JP Morgan account, it could have been anything - however, the one thing and it was true that the chief investor, Sheik Yassan Khadi, was indeed placed on the US Terror List, because while I was talking to them, while they were still there, I checked out a website that had a list of everyone who’d been placed on the Terror List. The missing piece was of course proving that Sheik Yassan Khadi was indeed affiliated with Ptech, was an owner of Ptech, because it was a private company. You could say that anybody was an investor, whether a bad guy or good guy, was an investor. Proving it was another thing, so I let everything ride, but I kept and eye on things. And, in fact, we did have a presentation that went very, very well, because in no way, shape or form was I going to jeopardize that.
B.F.: So what happened next? Did you go on working with them, or did you start to investigate Ptech?
IS: Well, I continued multi-tasking. I was working with them, I placed a few phone calls, some people got back to me later that day, while they were still on premises, so I was able to separate the concerns, accomplish the task, evaluate the software anyway, start the phone calls to start getting more information, then my report would have been: this is the software, it’s used everywhere, it can do what we want it to do, however, we have this issue with the company, and present that to my superiors and let them decide.
B.F.: Then did you start investigating the company?
IS: Yes. What happened next was, um, I spoke with Jeff Goines and he told me that basically not only was Yassan Khadi was an investor but that a Yacob Mertza was on the board of directors and he had been the subject of Operation Green Quest, many of his Herndon, Virginia vehicles and companies,and financing companies, had been raided in March 2002. And, again, that Mertza was on the board of directors. As we spoke, other names started to come out, my head was pretty much spinning at this point, and I said “have you reported any of this to the FBI?” and the answer came back: yes, well I wrote a report to the FBI, and, umm, I said, “okay, the boss in FBI has been told, I need to speak with people there”, because it’s not just by group that’s evaluating them, it’s so many other groups – but I couldn’t believe that, if this was all true that Ptech was still being used by the Department of Defense. There’s something a little bizarre about all of this and really I was beginning to understand, unwillingly, that the world was, was not the way we thought of it.
B.F.: Now, this person that you were discussing this with, Jeff Goines…
IS: Goines. Yes.
B.F.: Was he an employee of Ptech?
IS: Yes he was, he’s one of the key people at Ptech. He held several important positions. He had traveled to Saudi Arabia and he had met with Yassan Khadi and he had met with most of the investors, he, his last position was Vice-President of Sales, which for a small company is pretty significant. He worked with Ptech helping build the company for five years. And he was the one that was based in Virginia, who was responsible for getting a lot of the government accounts, with, of course, Yusaama Zihadi, who was the President. Yusaama Zihadi is a Lebanese-American, who according to Jeff, got a citizenship under very questionable circumstances, which involves the INS. Now, this is all according to Jeff, so at some point later in the week I had decided to go down to Virginia and meet with not only Jeff, but a number of other Ptech and ex-Ptech employees, because this was beginning to sound like a Tom Clancy novel, and I needed proof, I told them I needed emails, I needed documents, I needed hard evidence. But, in the meantime, within a day or two, I had contacted my Rep at IBM, and I said I need to walk outside with you and talk to you about something. If you guys are thinking about getting seriously in bed with this company, I would suggest that you do some background investigation, so that your clients, like JP Morgan and myself, don’t end up in this situation. His name was Kyle Hiligoss. Kyle told me that he quote, unquote, wrote a book report and sent it to his legal department and he was told to just back off the whole, the whole thing, in fact he would, didn’t want to have anything to do with me as I continued investigating. Jeff did get the agents at the FBI, the boss in the FBI office, to call me back, and with Kyle listening in, so it wasn’t just me reporting on what Jeff had said, we spoke to the FBI agent who had picked up the information that Jeff had reported on Ptech, when Yassan Khadi was placed on the Terror List in October 2001. Now remember this is eight or nine months later. My question to him is: if you have an investigation that’s ongoing, that’s fine, and we don’t want to get involved with it, or impede it in any way. But in the meantime, this country’s infrastructure is seriously exposed, and I cannot, if any of this is true, cannot, and I need some evidence, something that you can give me that, to hang my hat on when I report this, that this is true, that this isn’t just someone making a terrorism report, you know, but that, that you know this is true. And basically, what he said was, “Indiri, your in a better position on the out, on the outside to get the proof that’s needed than I am. And I asked him to check with the supervisor, I said, do you understand how serious this is, to have a company with, with this alleged terrorism connection, at the highest levels of corporate America and the US infrastructure? And I said, if you don’t know, I need, we need to make you aware of this. He apparently went to his supervisor, and his supervisor said that the position wouldn’t change. Now, the Boston FBI office, you can check this out, was rated as one of the worst in terms of corruption, and I believe the Whitey Bolger incident, the connections between the FBI and the Mafia have been, how should I put it?, extremely well explored and the Boston FBI office, the ex-governor of Massachusetts, I believe, anyway, this mob character, Whitey Bolger’s brother was in a very high level political position in Massachusetts, in Boston, and in fact if people were to read Peter Lance’s book, “Coverup”, he explores it very well and backs up a lot of what I had found here, the interaction between organized crime and the FBI. So, when they said they weren’t going to proceed, I…
B.F.: and by ‘they’, you’re talking about the FBI?
IS: the FBI..I said, I need something to hang my hat on, and so he sent me a videotape. And the videotape, which I have here, the substance of the videotape was a news clip. It was a news clip of a CBS affiliate, based in Boston, called WBCTV, and their investigative reporting team, the “eye team”, which was led by investigative reporter Joe Bergantino, had investigated a number of Middle Eastern men who were sought after 9-11. They were affiliated with a Muslim Islamic Terrorism financing charities. He had created this clip to show the connection between the 9-11 terror attack and the financial vehicles that were supposedly used to fund it. And what he did was very interesting. He connected, the eye-team connected, CARE International, not the big CARE International, but something called CARE International that was based in Boston all the way back to Al Keefah, which is the financing vehicle at the center of the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, all the way back to something called Maktab al-qeedah-mad, which means “the office”, which was a financing vehicle that was set up by the CIA for the Pakistani ISI, back in the days when Osama bin Laden was America’s fair-haired boy, and was on our side fighting with the Muhajadeen, fighting the Soviet Union. So, the question to me was, my goodness, when I saw the videotape, what is Maktab al-qeedah-mad doing being run out of Ptech on 9-11, and the reason I say being run out of Ptech is that the faces in the videotape were the faces of core employees at Ptech. Now, remember, this is a small company. There were only one or two people who had access to the sourcecode in Ptech, and that is a very trusted position and he was one of them, his name was Sahail Lahair. The people who started CARE International, some of them were actually on an FBI Terror Watch List, prior to 9-11, in Boston.
B.F.: What do you mean by the source code?
IS: Well, all software products has, uh, some group or organization or person writes code that is then packaged up and, uh, for instance the word processor on your desk, or spreadsheet and so on and so forth, the browser, it’s all written in some sort of code. Those are the keys to it, and if you want to improve it, add any functionality, you would change the original code, and add new functionality and then repackage it and send it out there. So, whoever had access to source code of Ptech, that was where the value was – if you lost the source code, you essentially lost the product. For all intents and purposes, marketing point of view. So, only one or two people would have access to the source code. It would be like having the formula for Coca-Cola, basically.
B.F.: Now, let’s go over that a little bit again. You were talking about a CARE International and some other funding groups that have been, what, funding international terrorism?
IS: That’s correct.
B.F.: And also have been funded by, what, the CIA..
IS: Well, the original, the roots of the al-Keefah and CARE International, if you look at it were way back in the late 80s, around the time of Iran-Contra, for instance, Maktab al-qeedah’mad was set up so that monies could be passed to Osama bin Laden and the Mujahadeen when they were fighting the Soviet…now, I won’t go into a lot of detail, but it ended up that Osama bin Laden took that over and was running al-Quaeda through that. The connections to the Pakistani ISI still stood. The connections to the CIA still stood. Not in the way that was originally set up, but through a black, or a gray, operation. That had been later confirmed to me. By the end of the day when I was finished with certain parts of the investigation, it was clear to me that there was no way that Ptech could have done all of this without a lot of inside help. And that’s what I began focusing on, that it was a cut-out, that it was a front, was it a regular CIA front, was it a clandestine front, what was it? You know there are walls within the FBI, walls within the CIA, behind which these operations take place and who is behind those operations, you know, is a key question. Now, people might say, ahh, this is all conspiracy theory, but I would like to remind people that conspiracy is very much recognized by the United States Federal Code – and it’s called RICO-racketeering and influence, and it is very much recognized because there’s so much power in these organizations that they have rules in place, for instance the DCIA, the Director of the CIA, cannot, after his term of DCIA, subsequently run for Vice-President or President, which is what happened with George Herbert Walker Bush, that rule was bent for him. He went on from being the DCIA to running for Vice-President. That’s a no-no.
BF: Well, it sounds like you’re describing an inter-locking relationship then, between this software company, funded by Saudis, and funded by whomever, the United States government, US corporations, and then known groups, globally, that are accused of staging terrorist attacks.
IS: Yes.
BF: and it’s all of a piece.
IS: Yes, absolutely. There… And one of the things I want to say is, maybe those organizations don’t fully know who their masters are. And Ptech is the one thread, the one golden thread you pull on and all of this is unraveled, because it goes into the corporations, it goes into, umm, umm, these ah government entities, it goes into the terrorism financing entities that were, that none of which have been, oh by the way, taken to task. And, umm, there’re just so many questions about what does this all mean. And as we investigated, as I investigated further, we found that the, in the origins of Ptech were very interesting – where did this company come from, obviously is the first question. And, um, how did they get to be so powerful, who were the people, who were the organizations that brought them in, who knew, who gave them the power. Who, for instance, signed off Zihadi’s citizenship without doing background checks? Who said that they had a bad feeling doing that? Who gave them influential, ummm, I remember that Ptech’s competitors, US companies, were extremely annoyed at the fact that they could not get equal time, that all the plum contracts were going to a foreign-owned company. And I said, well, did you know they were foreign-owned, and if they’re foreign-owned they couldn’t get certain classified projects, and, and he said, Oh, Indira, everyone knew that, some of them, some of the competitors knew, that umm, that they were Saudi owned and that meant that they got favorable treatment on Capitol Hill. And I said, well, are you saying that they just got favored treatment or that there was something more going on? They wouldn’t answer. Their lawyers instructed them not to answer, so, they knew a lot of what was, what was going on.
BF: Who, who were you talking to?
IS: Well, in one particular case I was talking to one of their competitors, Popkins Software, and umm, you know I have no problem naming names, because I think that in the memory of 3000 US civilians who were, and world-wide civilians, who were murdered, we are going to wage wars and spill blood around the world, we oughta take a look at this, and just have the truth come out. Because, umm, the truth has not come out and, there’s been a lot of speculation, there’s been a lot of innuendo, but there hasn’t been hard proof and Ptech is the one situation where you can get hard proof. When we investigated Ptech, and the people behind it, where they came from, we found out that one of the founding members was a man by the name of Solomon Bahairi. He was one of the founding directors and he had put together a vehicle called BMI, which stands for Bai Tal Mal. Now BMI was identified as being involved with terror financing but this is just not going to be the Muslims hate America, that’s not what it is, there is something else going on here. They’re being used as a tool, just as the good people of the United States are being used, are being misled into, and being frightened and terrorized into ‘if we don’t wage these horrific wars, you know our way of life will be over’. Who benefits from that?
BF: What else did your investigation of Ptech turn up? Didn’t you meet with several employees or former employees of Ptech?
IS: Yes. This goes back to when all of this was being revealed to me, now this is the last week of May 2002. The last day, or June 1 or so, of 2002, lo and behold out of nowhere the Chicago FBI enters the picture. We have agent Robert Wright of the Chicago FBI, who’s giving congressional testimony, and, umm, he stands on the steps of the Capitol, bursts into tears, apologizes to the 9-11 families, the victims, that he didn’t do everything he could to prevent 9-11 from happening, that his investigations were repeatedly shut down. And I almost fell over, because he announced that his investigation was the investigation into Yassan Khadi, the same Sheikh Yassan Khadi who was the money man behind Ptech. And, umm, you could not ask for a more direct connection to 9-11 than that. I will even discount the fact that some ex-Ptech employees told me that, when I went to see them I presented all the Terror List faces, whatever, and they had indicated that they had seen some pass through Ptech, in fact, one or two had mentioned that they thought one of the hijackers had actually passed through Ptech. And I said, did you report this to the FBI? Can you tell me when? Can you get evidence of it? Can you get litigation-quality evidence, something that would stand up? Whatever you can get, give it to me, make copies, give it to the FBI, I still thought they were on our side.
BF: The FBI, you mean.
IS: The FBI. In fact, and this has to be made very clear, there are some extraordinarily real patriotic Americans and good people in the FBI, as has been said by, I believe, Agent Colleen Rowley, one of the FBI whistleblowers’ bosses, that there’s a wall in the FBI, and this has been validated to me by various attorneys in Houston, who are very close to the power bases, and are pretty ticked-off at what’s happening in this country and are speaking out, as are many CIA agents who are very concerned that it has gone too far, as are many NSA agents who are concerned that it’s gone too far, and FBI agents. So we have a lot of people who are speaking out, they’ve kept quiet too long; they’re afraid, they’re afraid of what’s happening to this country. And when I say the Third Reich, what is happening to this country, they say, and I will identify ‘they’ if pressed, they say, will make the Third Reich look like a tea party. I guess we have that many more billion people to control on this planet.
BF: And when you say, “they say”, are you referring to people that you’ve spoken with in the FBI?
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