Wayne Madsen Reports: Fear of Assassination for those investigating 9/11

[James H. Fetzer]

 

August 16-17, 2012 -- Fear of assassination of intelligence oversight chairmen permeated post-9/11 hearings

Wayne Madsen Reports

The recent vehicular death of Nancy Hamilton, the wife of former House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence chairman and 9/11 Commission co-chair Lee Hamilton, who was said to have been run over by her own car, has served as an uncomfortable reminder of the fear of assassination felt by two of Lee Hamilton's colleagues on the two congressional intelligence oversight committees -- the House and Senate Select Committees on Intelligence.

Former Florida Democratic Senator and Governor Bob Graham was the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on September 11, 2001. Graham has often pointed out that the committee was not told everything by the CIA and other intelligence agencies about the events surrounding the terrorist attack. Graham has written a novel titled "Keys to the Kingdom," about a fictional retired 71-year old Florida Senator named John Billington who keeps busy at his retirement home in south Florida and who tries to pass some sensitive and important information about Saudi Arabia to a State Department counter-terrorist official. The fictional senator, who sounds very much like Graham himself, ends up being run over by a black van and killed. Graham's book was written months before Nancy Hamilton was run over by her own car.

Graham told The Washington Post that a little 40 percent the material in his novel is based on fact and that his first book, "Intelligence Matters," a non-fiction book written in 2004 about the intelligence failures of 9/11 had been heavily redacted by the intelligence agencies.

A reliable source has revealed that Graham, in fact, feared for his life after 9/11. But it was not just Graham who said he felt personally threatened. The Republican House Intelligence Committee chairman, Porter Goss, also from Florida, also said he felt as though his life was in danger. Goss, a former CIA agent, resigned from his House seat after George W. Bush named him CIA director in 2004. Goss was abruptly fired from the CIA post in 2006.

Goss's predecessor as House Intelligence Committee chairman, from 1995 to 1997, was Republican Larry Combest of Texas. Just a week after winning re-election, Combest announced he was resigning his seat after winning his tenth term. The reason Combest gave was that he and his wife "realized how fragile life and health are," a rather strange statement coming from a man of 57.

As previously reported by WMR, the death by one's own vehicle scenario surrounding Nancy Hamilton's death was almost a carbon copy of that of Marvin Bush's maid Bertha Champagne in 2003. After this editor investigated the death of Champagne maid, Marvin Bush sent his golf caddy around to have a chat with me. The caddy said Marvin rejected the allegations that Champagne had stumbled across some sensitive information about Bush's role with World Trade Center and Logan and Dulles airport security firms prior to 9/11, all mentioned in the book "Jaded Tasks." The caddy had one last bit of advice: "why bother writing that book? No one will read it, anyway."