No, she wasn’t killed in the 9/11 attacks nor was she anywhere near the attacks.
But owing to her, I was able to see the planes coming weeks before the plotters struck and I tried stopping the plots.
My wife was under attack by the law firm of Epstein, Becker and Green whose client Awtec had harassed the both of us.
For them to successfully defend their abusive client, they needed to pry into our personal lives. They did this by approaching the counselling centre we both took refuge in to escape the stalking and harassment. The news came as a shock to me as I was made aware of it over a year after I had agreed with law enforcement through the centre for them to be the recipients of any information I shared with the counsellor.
I had full confidence in the large counselling centre and the competence of the counsellor. I was referred to the large centre by a private counsellor precisely because of their links with law enforcement and the fact crimes were committed by the law firm’s client.
I was required to sign a waiver allowing the centre to forward any information helpful to law enforcement to either prosecute or prevent a crime. I was motivated to attend my sessions for over one year – not only because of the harassment by Awtec – but because I had spent seven years in Japan as a private businessman and I had never been debriefed as is the custom for military and intelligence workers.
Islamist plotters had murdered the Japanese translator of Satanic Verses in Tokyo as part of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. In the same week, they also attacked an Italian translator of the same book by knife. He survived. They were selling tampered phone cards in Asia to make money; they were visiting explosives companies to improve their ability to blow things up. But most alarmingly, their plot to plough 12 planes into US landmark buildings was not foiled but postponed accidentally by a fire in their Cebu apartment. Blue-eyed Pakistani Ramsi Yousef boarded a flight to Tokyo using an Italian name and departed the plane before it blew up over Japan killing Haruki Ikegami. He called to take credit using his fake Italian name thinking the plane was destroyed – unaware the blast had failed to bring the plane down.
My senior thesis was on aviation security in the wake of two attacks by Soviet fighter planes on Korean airliners. I was previously a Russian study major who planned for a career in intelligence before the investigation I undertook pulled me towards journalism.
The mostly unknown but prodigious effort of Senator Harrison Jack Schmitt to safeguard civil aviation from terror and military attack in 1978 motivated my calls to look in flight schools for the Islamist Bojinka plotters whose massive airline plots were disrupted in Asia in 1995 but not foiled.
“The plotters are in our flight schools aren’t they?” I asserted. “You want the plot stopped?” she confirmed. “Yes,” I replied.
This conversation came after many weeks of conversations which were forwarded as per the agreement. I was asked where an attack might occur and I reminded the centre that with 12 planes the attack could be anywhere and would likely be against major targets. I reported that the Japanese press reports covering the Bojinka plotters had mentioned the WTC and Pentagon as potential targets.
Out of the blue, I was asked to sign an additional waiver for the sake of Epstein, Becker and Green the law firm which was defending my family’s attackers.
I became worried about who the centre was forwarding my concerns to. I reminded the centre of the agreement I had already signed and asked the counsellor to follow the protocol for passing my concerns to law enforcement. I was convinced I was helping law enforcement and the centre had encouraged me in this regard to use the centre for this purpose. The follow-up questions assured me they were taking my concerns seriously.
I asked my attorney (not the two partners, an additional attorney was brought in) what she thought about me signing the waiver and she had no objection to it. I didn’t have anything to hide; quite the opposite, I was motivated to be there week after week thinking I was helping my country avoid a potential disaster. I would have signed anything the centre handed me if I thought it would help stop the plot. I could not have foreseen the unfortunate direction the law firm was pursuing.
I am positive my concerns were being forwarded to law enforcement. The record shows that flight schools did come under greater scrutiny after my pleas. Two flight schools were successful in finding suspicious students. One of the schools contacted authorities who detained the student, Moussaoui. The other school was poised to further investigate a student who spoke very limited English. Greater success came in Minneapolis because the flight student, Moussaoui, a Frenchman, spoke English well and was the only student in many of the classes he was enrolled in. The flight instructor was able to introduce a scenario and assess Moussaui’s response to it which the FAA investigator at the other school was unable to do. The Minnesota flight instructor recalled feeling a cold shiver when Moussaui reacted to his story and query about his religion with this statement, “I am nothing.”
It is very important to note that even the suspicions of investigators of flight school students, and future hijackers, were not enough to stop the plots. Very quickly both investigations got mired in bureaucratic red tape. In Minnesota, the FBI applied for a federal warrant rather than use a perfectly adequate local warrant costing precious time. Even so, there are some questions which are left unsolved. Moussaui’s bags were left unopened, not just his computer and phone untapped. I suggest this only because in his trial the online evidence displayed hand-written notes scribbled in Moussaui’s notebook calling for the death of the Queen of England.
Bush was given memos none of which screamed out ‘Stop the Plot!” but gave a historical overview of all kinds of threats, not a focused view on any one specific, immediate threat. Condoleezza Rice revealed she was concerned about hijacking scenarios that did not involve planes being used as missiles and for this very unfortunate scenario, we have Philip Zelikow to explain. Zelikow may have been edged out by Rice in the role of National Security Adviser but it is entirely clear even with greater access to the President he would not have likely urged the President one way or another over the threat.
He wrote in 1998 that the most likely terror scenarios should never be published in a report on Catastrophic Terrorism he authored in 1988 which completely ignored airport security. Zelikow, a civil rights attorney, cut his teeth in national security precisely by NOT discussing the plot. He used the spectre of catastrophic attack to give weight to a variety of new government programs to counter everything from cyber-attack to the proliferation of biological and chemical weapons.
It was very important for me that the centre take my concerns very seriously to the extent I had pleaded to stop the plotters and offered that they were in our flight schools.
As a consequence of Epstein, Becker and Green’s outlandish efforts to defend their client, derailed attempts to stop the plot.
Exactly a year after 9/11 Epstein, Becker and Green deposed me. Only a week earlier my attorneys had blocked my path when I tried to escape after they threatened violence when I refused to accept an offer to settle out of court.
Their clients had targeted my wife and it became clear the law firm’s female attorneys had taken the same tactic. They admitted to having had regular meetings over coffee and bagels with my attorneys who had hired a female attorney to be a go-between with the two law firms.
I was going to write about a whole family of Unitarians who lost their life on 9/11 en route to Australia but I found this article which does a better job than I could right now of relating their brief stories. No single family lost more members on that awful day. Eleven UUs died in 9-11 attacks
I grew up in the Unitarian church and at the time I pleaded to stop the plotters I attended several churches including the Unitarian church in Palos Verdes. I also volunteered to teach Japanese at the Gardena Buddhist Church and attended a Japanese Baptist church in Gardena. After 9/11 a SWAT team was called in to investigate an unattended package left at a bank. After blowing it up they discovered the contents were clothes and a Bible which had been left by a member of our church as part of a care package they distributed. A lot of homeless would congregate at this bank at night so the young student thought this would be the best place to leave the package.
I am so sorry to my wife that we have completely idiot lawyers in charge of this country.
Letter from our reader: Prince Blake
