Bin Laden in Iran, Documentary Claims

Monday, 26 Apr 2010 05:35 PM

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By: Ken Timmerman

A new documentary film premiering at the prestigious Tribeca film festival in New York this week presents stunning new evidence that al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden is living in Iran, where the Iranian regime is sheltering him.

The film, “Feathered Cocaine,” began as a simple documentary of the illicit trade in hunting falcons to Middle East desert sheikhs. But as filmmakers Thorkell (Keli) Hardarson and Örn Marino Arnarson delved deeper into their subject, they discovered a dark underworld in which terrorism and falcon smuggling met with astonishing regularity.

In March 2008, the filmmakers ventured into Afghanistan and the former Soviet republics along with Alan Parrot, the head of the Union for the Conservation of Raptors, a conservationist group that seeks to protect wild falcons, to interview a smuggler they code-named “T-2.”

For three days, the team waited in a mountain village while the smuggler kept them under surveillance from afar. Satisfied that they hadn’t been followed, he granted them a 55-minute interview — only if they agreed to disguise his voice and his appearance.

“He was suspicious of the cameras – probably because he had seen too many movies about the CIA and was afraid we might be able to identify him,” Hardason told Newsmax.

“T-2” told the filmmakers that he met bin Laden by chance in late November 2004 at a falcon-hunting camp in northeastern Iran.

“I met him five times after 2004,” he said. “The last time we met was in October 2007. Every time, it was in Iran.”

Newsmax was given exclusive access to the interview last year and interviewed a U.S. intelligence official who confirmed that the United States had electronic intercepts indicating the presence of a very important person in the region at the dates “T-2” mentioned.

Iranian authorities were moving the VIP from Tehran to Zahedan, a center of the falcon-hunting grounds, which were closed off to all foreign visitors for security reasons.

“There was no doubt in my mind that they were expecting a big shot, and it makes sense to think it was bin Laden,” the U.S. official said.

“Feathered Cocaine” includes excerpts from the footage with “T-2,” as well as interviews with lawyer John Loftus, former CIA clandestine officer Bob Baer, and others, including this reporter and former Washington Post reporter and terrorism expert Steve Coll.

Loftus revealed that “T-2” provided the filmmakers with the specific frequencies of small transmitters bin Laden had strapped to the backs of his hunting falcons so he could find them if they failed to return to base.

Loftus said the CIA could use that information to track bin Laden and capture him, and that he offered it to the director of the Central Intelligence Agency and to the heads of other U.S. intelligence agencies at the request of the filmmakers, with no response.

Last year, they approached “Rewards for Justice,” the State Department office that is offering a $50 million reward for information leading to bin Laden’s capture, but never received any acknowledgement of their information.

Speaking to a packed house after the Tribeca premier on Friday, Parrot was asked to speculate about why “T-2” agreed to talk to the filmmakers, because the details surely would allow bin Laden to guess his identity.

“I believe that bin Laden wanted ‘T-2’ to send a message through us,” Parrot said. “He wanted the world to know that he was in Iran, but that he couldn’t leave.”

In the movie, Parrot said the Iranian regime is giving bin Laden “a long leash” but is holding his family hostage in Tehran in the event bin Laden revealed his relationship to them. “This was confirmed by one of bin Laden’s sons last year,” Parrot said.

Omar bin Laden, who married a British woman and broke with his father before the 9/11 attacks, revealed in December 2009 that seven of his siblings were living in Tehran and seeking to leave the country.

The story of American-born falconer Alan Howell Parrot lies at the center of this extraordinary tale and lends it credibility. Parrot began breeding falcons and selling them to the king of Saudi Arabia and then to the president of the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.) in the late 1970s, and was a frequent guest at their royal palaces and elaborate hunting camps in the wilds of southern Afghanistan.

In the late 1990s, so was renegade Saudi financier Osama bin Laden. Parrot described the royal hunting camps “al-Qaida’s board room,” because they gave bin Laden the opportunity to spend weeks of quality time with wealthy backers from the U.A.E. and other gulf states.

Parrot alleges that bin Laden’s royal backers transferred “hundreds of millions of dollars” in cash to him during these hunting expeditions, as well as military equipment and off-road vehicles. The movie includes footage of a U.A.E. military C-130 transport plane landing at a makeshift airstrip in western Pakistan to deliver equipment to the hunting camps.

“I see bin Laden as a falcon smuggler,” Parrot states in the film, “and in that capacity I went after him. All the locals in Kandahar hated bin Laden because he stole all the falcons.”

After al-Qaida blew up two U.S. embassies in Africa in July 1998, the CIA also began hunting for bin Laden in earnest. Local agents in Afghanistan spotted him at a royal hunting camp near Kandahar in February 1999, according to an account that appeared in the final report of the 9/11 Commission.

CIA Director George Tenet asked the White House for permission to launch a cruise missile strike on the camp on Feb. 8, 1999, but soon ran into interference from an unusual source: Richard Clarke, the top counter-terrorism adviser to President Clinton.

As the 9/11 Commission report concluded, "policymakers were concerned about the danger that a strike would kill an Emirati prince or other senior officials who might be with bin Laden or close by,” so they called off the strike.

On March 7, 1999, Richard Clarke called Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, the U.A.E. defense minister, to "express his concerns about possible associations between Emirati officials and bin Laden," the 9/11 Commission report states.

It is not clear whether Clarke told Mohammed that U.S. intelligence had evidence that U.A.E. officials were with bin Laden in Afghanistan, but after the call, bin Laden and his patrons quickly dispersed and the camps were dismantled.

Clarke claims the CIA approved the tip-off call. However, former CIA official John Mayer III told the commission it was "almost impossible" for the CIA to have approved Clarke's move.

"When the former bin Laden unit chief found out about Clarke's call, he questioned CIA officials, who denied having given such a clearance," the report states. "Imagery confirmed that, less than a week after Clarke's phone call, the camp was hurriedly dismantled and the site was deserted."

Asked by Newsmax to comment on his reported tip-off to the U.A.E. sheikh, Clarke said, "I'm not going to get into that. What I said to the 9/11 Commission is what I said to the 9/11 Commission." He similarly declined repeated requests from Parrot and his documentary film team to talk about the hunting camps on camera.



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Experts Warn of Escalating Chavez Threat

Sunday, 25 Apr 2010 07:27 PM

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By: Ken Timmerman

Latin America experts are warning about the growing threat from Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, citing new evidence of Chavez’s expanding ties with Iran and Hezbollah and other terrorist groups.

The Venezuelan president also has demonstrated his willingness to buy elections throughout the hemisphere to empower enemies of the United States, several experts said in presentations Thursday during a conference that the Center for Security Policy sponsored on Capitol Hill.

“Today, Venezuela airports are being freely used by drug cartels to export drugs to Europe and the United States,” said Luis Fleischman, senior adviser for the center’s Menges Hemispheric Security Project. “Chavez has helped the FARC fight against Colombia, [while] Hezbollah cells have increased their fund-raising and other activities in the area.”

What’s more, Fleischman said, “Young Venezuelans are being trained in Hezbollah camps in Lebanon . . . and Venezuela has reportedly produced uranium for Iran.”

Because of the close ties between Chavez and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, “there is a real possibility” that Chavez could get a nuclear weapon from Iran after Iran acquires that capability itself, he said.

Obama’s “friendly interaction” with Chavez at last year’s Summit of the Americas has only emboldened the Venezuelan strongman in thinking that the United States will do nothing to oppose his regime or his anti-American activities, a panelist said.

Also hammering that point was Republican Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the ranking member on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, who blasted the Obama administration for helping to bring back to power a communist dictator in Honduras and for empowering a return of Sandinista thugs to Nicaragua.

The Cuba-born Floridian also warned of the “growing Iranian influence throughout the hemisphere.”

“The flights that take place all the time between Tehran and Caracas should be a worry to anyone who cares deeply about our national security,” Ros-Lehtinen said.

Norman Bailey, a senior Latin America intelligence analyst whom National Intelligence Director Admiral Mike McConnell fired for warning about the Chavez threat, said Tehran-to-Caracas flights by Iran Air and the Venezuelan national carrier “are permanently full,” although ordinary citizens are not allowed to use them.

“The people on those flights don’t go through customs,” he said. “But the cargo area is always full.”

He alleged that Iranian-built factories in Venezuela are being used for nefarious purposes.

“The tractor factory doesn’t make tractors, and the cement factory doesn’t make cement,” Bailey said. “The tractor factory makes weapons, and the cement factory is used for the export of cocaine.”

Bailey believes that Iran has cultivated Chavez in part “to make it possible for Iran to retaliate against the United States in the event Iran is attacked by Israel or the U.S.”

Iranian experts have mined Venezuela’s main port and refineries, and have trained Venezuelan state oil workers to trigger the bombs in the event of a conflict, Bailey said.

“For all practical purposes, Venezuela is on a war footing,” he said.

He also noted the ability of drug traffickers tied to Venezuela to weld special compartments onto the outside of ships to carry drugs to Europe.

“They could just as easily put cylinders of high explosives on those ships instead of drugs, and blow them up in the Panama Canal,” he said.

Chavez’s strategy was to build allies in the United States by offering low-cost heating oil to lower-income Americans through Joseph Kennedy Jr. and his Citizens Energy nonprofit, in the hopes that security-conscious voices would be drowned out.

“My favorite Chavez quote is, ‘I will put my enemy to sleep, so that one day he will wake up dead,’” said Jon Perdue, Latin American programs director at the Fund for American Studies.

The Venezuelan-funded Telesur network sent a reporter and cameraman to the conference, and attempted to take over the meeting by making long speeches and challenging the evidence the experts cited about the ties between Chavez and the FARC guerillas.

At one point, former Assistant Secretary of State Otto Reich accused the Telesur reporters of “harassment,” and threatened to call the sergeant at arms to get them tossed out of the House meeting room.

“You are not reporters,” he said. “You are probably in violation of the Foreign Agent Registration Act, because you work for a foreign government.”

Reich called Chavez the “head of the snake” of a revolutionary movement aimed at subverting his neighbors. “The brain is in Havana, but the head of the snake is in Caracas,” he said.

Several years ago, the Colombian armed forces seized a computer during a raid on a FARC compound that included documents detailing the financial ties between Chavez to the FARC.

Since then, Chavez has sought the overthrow of Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, who has spearheaded the crackdown on the FARC.

Tensions between the two presidents flared during a “Unity Summit" near Cancun, Mexico, in February, when Chavez shouted that Uribe should “go to hell.”

Reich said the evidence of Venezuela’s support for the FARC and other terrorist groups is so overwhelming that the United States “should declare Venezuela as a state sponsor of terrorism. The evidence is there. The Defense Department has it. The Congress has it. The political will is missing.”

The United States should revoke the visas of Chavez’s business partners, the “Bolivarian billionaires . . . who own homes in the United States and travel back and forth and who are the ones who carry those bags of money to the Daniel Ortega’s” and other Chavez political allies in the region, Reich said.

“This is a subversion of democracy under our noses and the United States is saying nothing,” he said.

The third measure Reich advocated is to end U.S. dependence on Venezuelan oil.

“People say we can’t do this. Of course we can do this. We import 6 percent of our consumption from Venezuela.” But two years ago, with rising oil prices, “we reduced our consumption by 8 percent . . . Of course we can replace Venezuela.”

Frank Gaffney, president of the Center for Security Policy, blasted the State Department for what he described as its “malign neglect” of Chavez’s misdeeds, and warned of the peril if the United States doesn’t take action.

“We don’t have the luxury of ignoring this,” he said. “We will be hurt badly by it . . . We have enemy armies now operating from safe havens in our hemisphere that we know have the capacity to bring weapons of mass destruction” into the United States. “So the cost of waiting could be high.”


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