Who profited from Ground Zero in New York?

posted by ewing2001 on Saturday June 07, @07:24PM

An obscure journey from Hilton to Halliburton

Investigation by ewing2001, GlobalFreePress

Pt1. -From Hilton to PNAC

One month ago, on May 5th, after 18 months, the Millenium Hilton Hotel reopened in New York.

This wouldn't be further interesting, if it wasn't on the fact, that it once sat across the street from the World Trade Center and was renovated by a Pentagon-contractor.

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To start with details, the first interesting thing about the Millenium Hilton is, that it wasn't really destroyed at all. Tourists at Ground Zero often wondered, why the Hotel didn't reopen earlier.

It had only some damage by smoke, soot and excessive dust and a few dishes had been destroyed by the impact of the planes, which crashed into the Twin Towers.

A photo from Sep11th shows, that only the first floor was heavily damaged, the windows above looked pretty much undamaged.

As one WNBC article reported some weeks ago on the reopening, the hotel "survived the ..attack of Sept. 11, 2001 without suffering major structural damage", but "12 guests who were in the towers did not return".

However, due to the official version, the Owner of Millenium, CDL Hotels USA Inc., a unit of British hotel group Millennium & Copthorne Hotels Plc (MLC.L), and a group of hotel operators, decided to renovate the whole hotel, including all 565 rooms.

CDL claims, this decision happened "to limit its payout for lost business at the hotel".

This seems to be odd. Fact is, that since then, millions of tourists visited Ground Zero. It would have been reasonable to choose a room in Millennium Hotel, which definetely had the best view of the site.

Maybe it was this idea, which scared the owners, but probably it could have been a political decision on highest level?

Strange things happened since then in Millenium.

Only some hours after the attack, rumours circulated on the internet, that on the early morning of Sep11th, as usual, "not one taxicab in the circle" of Millenium was waiting for some guests.

However, Snopes debunked this story as false.

A couple of weeks after September 11th- the renovation still didn't start, the FBI visited the Hotel and claimed, that they found an aviation radio in a guest's room.

This aviation radio, called a transceiver, is marketed for use by pilots, enabling them to communicate air-to-air and air-to-ground with other pilots or to monitor other pilot conversations.

The room officially belonged to Abdallah Higazy, later accused as the so called "radio bomber".

Higazy checked into the hotel on Aug. 27, 2001 and was scheduled to check out Sept. 25.

Higazy was questioned by FBI agents Dec. 17 when he returned to the still-closed hotel to retrieve his possession.

Higazy, a 30-year-old son of an Egyptian diplomat and former student of Polytechnic University in Brooklyn, was immediately arrested and later accused, of interfering with the investigation into the Sept. 11 attack.

On January 11, 2002, Higazy was charged "with lying to the feds".

The story changed a couple of times. First it was Hotel security guard Ronald Ferry, who found the radio in a safe in Higazy's room along with his Egyptian passport, a copy of the Quran and a gold medallion, another story claimed that one aide "found the radio on a table in Higazy's room on the 51st floor"

In yet another story, Higazy stayed on the 50th floor, then it was room 5101.

His lawyer, Robert S. Dunn, said his client was a victim of circumstance "in a case based on circumstantial evidence".

However Higazy failed a polygraph test.

In Mid January 2002, after a month in detention, Higazy was released again.

It turned out, that the radio in fact belonged to an a private pilot from Ohio who had stayed in room 5012.

But his name was never disclosed.

The whole time, when Higazy was in jail, he said, he knew nothing of the hand-held radio.

The FBI went back to security guard Ronald Ferry and found out, that he lied.

Due to some local papers, it later turned out, that Ferry was a former Newark police officer, which was forced out because of drug problems. Ferry's lawyers claimed he lied in order to help the greater cause —nailing a probable terrorist.

Ferry insisted—to no contradiction from prosecutors—that he lied only about the locked safe and mentioned again this unknown second person, who had actually found the radio on a table in Higazys room.

In June 2002, Ferry was sentenced to six months of weekends, but the FBI agents, who arrested Higazy, didn't receive any charges.

Higazy since then, tried to file a lawsuit against the US Government.

In late 2002, U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff ordered to find out, whether Abdallah Higazy had been "coerced by the FBI into confessing that he owned this radio".

But on November 26th, 2002, the FBI agents who obtained a false confession from Higazy have been cleared of any wrongdoing.

On December 13th, 2002 the NY Post reported, that Higazy filed a $20 million lawsuit for being falsely charged.

Higazy is suing FBI agent Michael Templeton, who administered the disputed lie detector test that was central to the aborted prosecution. Other defendants are Ronald Ferry, the hotel's chief of security, Stuart Yule; and the Hilton Hotels Corporation, which manages the Millennium.

As the New York Post reported, Higazy's nightmare was basically orchestrated by U.S. Attorney Dan Himmelfarb, who thought of him even as one the helping hands for the official hijackers, "a potentially quite significant part of the [Sept. 11 attacks] investigation."

Dan Himmelfarb has some interesting background

Independent Research Center Namebase list him in CIA-related articles.

Looking into his most spectacular cases, in 1998, Himmelfarb assisted United States Attorney, Mary Jo White, in a six month-case of Steven Chestaro, who was accused of attacking some postal workers with a "boxcutter".

Himmelfarb is co-author of "Public Interest", who once wrote early supportive articles about the NeoCons.

John Ehrman, a historian of the neoconservative movement, cites Dan Himmelfarb's juxtaposition in "Commentary": 'neoconservatives belong to the tradition of liberal-democratic modernity, the tradition of Montesquieu, Madison and Tocqueville; paleoconservatives [an early usage – this was 1988] are the heirs to the Christian and aristocratic Middle Ages, to Augustine, Aquinas and Hooker'

Other authors of Public Interest included PNAC-members Francis Fukuyama and David Brooks, on their board is Henry Kissinger, Jeane Kirkpatrick (former member of the National Security Council, Ronald Reagan's presidential cabinet, current Member of the Trilateral Commission and CFR) and author Charles Murray (American Enterprise Institute).

It appears that another member of the Himmelfarb family, Getrude Himmelfarb, not only writes for Public Interest as well, but is also wife of the founder of Public Interest, Irving Kristol, often described as "godfather" of the neoconservative movement.

Kristol had a lot of CIA connections.

In 1953 he founded the magazine "Encounter" in England that was secretly being supported by the CIA. Co-founder of the "Public Interest" was Daniel Bell, who was subsidized by the CIA through an organization called the Congress for Cultural Freedom of which Bell was a leader.

Irvings son, William Kristol, became yet another famous PNAC-and Bilderberger member and created his own magazine, "The Weekly Standard".

Prior to that, Kristol served as chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle during the Bush administration and to Secretary of Education William Bennett under President Reagan.

Pt2. -From Building 7 to Cheney

In Mid-2002, the owner of the Millenium Hotel, started the renovation.

As GFP found out in some interviews with their employees, it was renovated by Bovis Lend Lease.

Bovis Lend Lease is one of the world's leading companies in the project management and construction services industry.

Bovis was also already involved in the removal of the rubble of the World Trade Center, together with Tully Construction, Amec Construction Management, Turner Construction, Plaza Construction and Tishman Construction.

But Bovis is also a Pentagon contractor.

They worked for the U.S. Department of Defence or with the Department of Defence in Australia.

Other clients are Johns Hopkins Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital in the United States, Nokia, Lucent, Ericsson, Cisco, Nortel Networks, AT&T, Telstra, IBM, the European Space Agency or Schering-Plough, an American pharmaceutical company.

On October 30, 2001, in the same month of the anthrax attacks, Bovis also announced their division of Bovis Lend Lease Pharmaceutical, a new company focused on providing solutions to its global customers in the pharmaceutical and allied industries.

In 1997, Bovis was joined by Pedro Ladrón de Guevara.

He hold senior management positions with Mobil Oil and BP Oil, based in Spain, Portugal, London, Brussels and Paris, in Fuels Engineering, Retail Engineering and Retail Asset Management.

At Bovis Lend Lease, Pedro became responsible for the BP global business unit and Global Procurement.

Furthermore Bovis Lend Lease is partner of British Pretoleum's (BP) "Global Alliance".

The BP-Bovis connection became even more stronger after September 11th.

Since January 2002 Roger Mabey of BP Global Alliance is member of the board of Bovis Lend Lease.

In earlier contracts for the Pentagon Bovis built the Pentagon City Mall, Pentagon City's Washington Tower office building and The Ritz-Carlton hotel in 1990.

In a well-known twist among independent 911-web-investigators, Bovis other partner at Ground Zero was AMEC, who already worked for the Pentagon in Summer 2001, completing a renovation of the same section, Wedge 1 ($150 million costs), which was later officially hit by AA77.

AMEC is also connected with the oil industry via BP Amoco.

In 1999 they awarded AMEC Process and Energy a major support services contract.

But not only AMEC produced obscure coincidences. Yet another construction partner at Ground Zero was Tully Construction, who was hired for the "cleanup of Sep11th", but decided to subcontract Controlled Demolition Inc.,Phoenix, Md, who had been involved once in the demolition of the bombed Murrah Building in Oklahoma in 1995.

Controlled Demolition is specialised in implosions of big towers, like i.e. the Landmark Hotel Tower* in Las Vegas or the Columbus Homes Housing Projects in Newark, New Jersey.

During the renovation of the Millennium Hotel, the owner, Millennium & Copthorne Hotels, got trouble because of their "sloppyness" of the renovation:

A pending lawsuit by Travelers Property Casualty Corp (TPCC).

Finally, in January 2003, TPCC announced their lawsuit against Millennium Hotel.

Travelers, which provided $400 million of coverage to the Millennium Hotel, asked a New York federal judge to declare that its policy offered business interruption coverage - which makes up for lost revenue when a business is forced to close.

In the Travelers’ suit, filed in New York Federal court, the insurer claims that CDL, New York's unit of Millennium & Copthorne and its insurance broker, a unit of Willis Group Holdings (WSH.N), failed to show Travelers the policy that it agreed to follow in issuing its coverage.

Travelers says that despite repeated requests, Willis did not send a copy of the underlying policy to Travelers before the attack of Sept. 11, 2001, and that - contrary to an agreement - the underlying policy did not limit business interruption payments to one year, as Travelers says it had requested.

Travelers asked the judge to cancel the insurance policy and order the hotel’s owners and operators to repay the $39.5 million Travelers has already paid out in claims on the insurance policy.

The lawsuit seems not to be finished yet.

Millennium & Copthorne Hotels own the most famous hotels in 17 countries:

Concorde, Doubletree, Hilton, Holiday Inn, Hyatt, Marriott, Ramada or Ritz-Carlton as only a few examples.

It is the 34th largest hotel group in the world and has alliances with American Airlines or Quantas.

M&C's biggest shareholder is the Hong Leong Group, Singapore, who stated on Sep27th, 2001, that Millenium Hotel would be reopen only six months later.

This would have been already in March 2002.

Why did it take 14 months longer?

Was the decision been made, not to force voyeurism on the former Twin Towers spot or is the answer maybe one block away: Former Building 7?

As another video loop from Sep11th shows, though Building 7 didn't burn anymore after a while, for unknown reasons it collapsed almost 8 hours after the attack on the neighbour towers.

Why?

Almost 15 months after the collapse, it was still impossible, to take a look on the site of former B7.

Meanwhile, one can take a look on the former site, but only from Vesey Street, where it used to have their main entrance.

Vesey Street was also the spot for the "undestroyable passpord in the rubble" by official hijacker Sataam Al Suqami, classified by former FBI-agent Barry Mawn, who resigned for unknown reasons in March 2002.

Building 7 has many unanswered questions.

It is still unknown, why the CIA, the DoD and the INS had an office in this building, all on the same floor

What was so interesting for Peter Peterson's Blackstone Group/TRW, yet another Pentagon contractor, to take over the mortgage of Building 7 on October, 17th 2000?

Was there any connection between the offices of Standard Chartered Bank (26-27 th floor) and wire transfers of one of their branches between former Pakistan Secret Service ISI-contact person Sheikh Saeed and Mohammed Atta?

Who exactly influenced Rudy Guilliani in 1998 to build a Bunker in Building 7?

What kind of material did Jerome Hauer use, former OEM-Chief and main constructor of this Bunker?

Why was one gas tank on the 23rd floor?

What exactly forced Building 7 to collapse?

Why is the lawsuit from Con Edison against Building 7 totally shrubbed from the Media Landscape, who lost a substation below the building?

What was the SEC working on in September 2001 in their office in B7?

A visit by Global Free Press at the former Building 7-spot brought also some other interesting results:

One of the contractors is Welsbach Electric, a subsidiary of EMCOR Group Inc.

On the board of directors of EMCOR is Larry J. Bump, who had worked for 15 years at the H.C. Price Group of Companies, managing major pipeline construction projects in the Middle East.

Other contractors at the former spot include New York Crane & Equipment Co., Verizon or General Electric, not really surprising.

Global Free Press recognised also some gas cylinders at the construction site by the BOC Group.

The BOC Group is a leading Industrial Gas Supplier.

On May, 28th 2002, they started a beginning of extreme new business deals with Poland. Their subsidiary BOC Gazy bought Praxair Polska.

BOC Gazy was established by BOC following the 1993 privatisation of Polgaz, the state-owned gases company.

Poland since then profitted also from the War against Iraq.

Only a few days after the beginning of the occupation, Pentagon's Top Contractor Lockheed signed a mega deal with Poland.

A list of 43 projects included commitments by U.S. companies to build engines for 48 jets at a Pratt & Whitney (Military, Industrial, Marine, Space & Missile Applications) plant in southern Poland, modernize a refinery in the northern city of Gdansk, expand a General Motors Corp. plant, and work with telecommunications and high-tech companies to create a Poland-wide 911 system.

The biggest "suprise" however is probably also not really anymore a surprise:

On one of the trucks, who parked on of the former site of B7 we recognised the name danella.com.

The subinfo on the label "Ingersoll" already implied the answer without any further research

Danella Construction belongs to former Dick Cheney's Company Halliburton Kellog Brown and Root, or better one of their subsidiaries, Ingersoll + Dresser, which once was involved in shady business deals with Iraq, between both Gulf Wars and who once again profited from the occupation of the oil fields in Iraq.

There is no doubt.

A lot of companies, who got involved in the reconstruction of Ground Zero, show an obvious pattern of military- and oil industry ties.

The future and further investigations will show, if this will be just twisted into yet another "coincidence" of a zeitgeist of the 21st century or if these patterns can be traced back to the real profiles of the attacker of Sep11th.

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