By Wayne Madsen

http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/Baffles.htm

The one individual who stands tall among those intelligence and law enforcement officers who was aggressively pursuing the criminal network that would carry out 911 was FBI counter-terrorism top man John O’Neill. Ever since the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, O’Neill’s pursuit of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda had been dogged. After further terrorist attacks at the Khobar Towers barracks in Dharan, Saudi Arabia; the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania; and the USS Cole in Aden harbor, O’Neill’s biggest problem was not Al Qaeda, it was resistance from top officials inside the U.S. government.

According to classified documents from French intelligence, Al Qaeda and Bin Laden had still been under the operational control of U.S. and British “security services” until 1995, fully two years after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. As of 1996, the U.S. State Department continued to refuse to list Al Qaeda as a terrorist organization. After the 1996 bombings of the Khobar Towers that killed nineteen U.S. military personnel, the State Department under Secretary of State Warren Christopher, FBI Director Louis Freeh, and the Saudi government did everything they could to obstruct O’Neill’s investigation.

In his aggressive pursuit of Al Qaeda, O’Neill, according to people who worked closely with him, began to have serious concerns over complicity by those inside the Clinton and Bush administrations.
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After 911, Dick as well as the CIA NOC were harassed by their superiors on orders “from above.” Those orders came from Chertoff. Dick was first relieved of his primary counter-espionage duties, eventually sent to Pakistan to investigate the kidnapping of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, and eventually buried in a desk job at FBI headquarters in Washington, DC. According to the CIA source, Pearl was murdered because he was getting too close to the money trail that financed 911. The CIA source said, “the same group that beheaded Pearl in Pakistan did the beheadings in Iraq.” The source added that the beheadings were “not Al Qaeda.”
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In early 2001, rumors began circulating that O’Neill would take over White House Counter-terrorism coordinator Richard Clarke’s job at the National Security Council. Clarke had been one of the few holdovers from the Clinton to Bush administrations. Suddenly, the story about the 90 minute theft of O’Neill’s brief case was leaked to the New York Times, even though the Justice Department had long before dropped its own investigation of the incident. Although the FBI continued its own investigation of the brief case incident, it prevented an investigation of the leak of the O’Neill incident to the media.

On August 22, O’Neill retired from 30 years’ service with the FBI. The next day, he began his job as Security Director for the World Trade Center. His office was on the 34^th Floor of the North Tower of the Trade Center. O’Neill’s building was the first one hit on September 11. He died while trying to save people in the South Tower, the second building hit by the hijackers.