The release of a White House report put together the year before the 9/11 attacks reveals there was a growing fear of terrorist attack during this period. And it begs the question why more wasn't done to prevent one.

A previously secret report authored in January 2000 by senior members of the White House's then-national security team, which concluded that US intelligence was ill equipped and ineffective in the face of a major and ever-growing domestic terror threat, has at last been declassified.

Dubbed the 'Millennium Alert After Action Review', it was compiled at the behest of the National Security Council's Counterterrorism Security Group, by representatives of each of the US government's counterterrorism and security agencies, after a major planned terror attack was thwarted at the end of 1999.

Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian living in Canada, was caught attempting to cross the border into Washington state in a car laden with explosives. He later admitted to the FBI that he'd been trained at an Al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan and intended to bomb Los Angeles Airport on New Year's Eve.

The Bureau made dozens of arrests, questioned an enormous number of individuals and placed hundreds under surveillance countrywide over the course of the ensuing investigation, although proving the targets in question were terrorists, let alone had terrorist connections, proved elusive. A feared wave of incendiary attacks during millennium celebrations that year didn't materialise, although the sense that a major incident of some kind was inevitable pervaded the White House, leading to the review's compilation.

As the 20th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, the fascinating stories of three spies who infiltrated Al-Qaeda for Western intelligence are worth reexamining. Why was more not made of the information they could have provided?

The conventional wisdom, oft-repeated in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, is that it is extremely difficult to recruit informers and deploy infiltrators against Al-Qaeda, due to its extremely compartmentalised cell structure. In reality, in the run-up to 9/11, British, French and American intelligence all had spies capable of penetrating Al-Qaeda's inner circle, including its training camps in Afghanistan.

Omar Nasiri was born in Morocco in the 1960s, but grew up in Belgium. In the early 1990s, he got involved in gun smuggling for the GIA - an Algerian Islamist militia which was slaughtering tens of thousands in the Algerian Civil War. After getting into trouble for stealing money from the gang he approached French intelligence, who recruited him as a spy inside the GIA.

Nasiri continued working as an arms trafficker, providing the weapons used in the 1994 GIA hijacking of an Air France flight, which aimed to crash the plane into the Eiffel Tower. That plot was thwarted when French special forces stormed the plane, but Omar carried on providing weapons to the gang. He even drove a car laden with explosives through France and Spain to deliver it to a GIA operative in Morocco. His French handler, Gilles, approved the mission and when a huge car bombing took place in Algiers a few weeks later, Gilles didn't appear to care.

These details came out years later when Nasiri wrote an autobiography and gave an extensive interview to the BBC.

Two carved stone balls have been discovered buried in an ancient Orkney tomb that is being lost to the sea.
Archaeologists are on site at Tresness, Sanday, are excavating the burial tomb, which dates from around 3,500BC and is thought to be one of Scotland's earliest monuments.

Two stone balls are among finds made at the site.

The objects are unique to Scotland and, although many theories exist as to their purpose, it is believed they were used as weapons - and perhaps thrown at people's heads - during the Neolithic in Orkney.

Just over 500 carved stone balls have been found in Scotland in total, mainly in Orkney and the North East, with only a small number found in burial sites.

If ever there was a man who displayed on his face the evil in his mind, it was Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security advisor for President Jimmy Carter when the US plot to start the war against the Soviet Union on the Afghan front was hatched in 1979. "Now we can lure the Russians into the Afghan trap," he wrote Carter in a secret note of February 1979. In July of that year he followed with the directive Carter signed in secret to supply arms to the mujahideen "to induce a Soviet military intervention". In December 1979 Brzezinski told Carter: "we should not be too sanguine about Afghanistan becoming a Soviet Vietnam". Later he used to boast that had been precisely his intention and also his crowning achievement.

Brzezinski's lips are sealed now because he's been dead for four years.

Carter is still alive. In 1979 he kept the evil on his mind secret behind the smile on his face. His lips are sealed now, since the retreat from Afghanistan began by the US Army, and after the rout last month in Kabul. The mainstream American press are not reporting they have asked Carter for comment, or that he has refused. Not even the alt-media investigators have pursued him.

This essay is written from the point of view of a physician, medical educator, and bioethicist who sees the deplorable fact of physician involvement in the Shoah as an opportunity to highlight enduring moral lessons for the medical professions. Medicine and law are intimately connected to one another, and, since the professionalization of medicine in the United States and Europe in the latter half of the 19th century, even more so. One discipline that connects both is moral philosophy; for both law and medicine involve reason and the will, directed toward the good of the person. Thus, the story of the Holocaust is a tragedy that unfolded because of the corruption of moral philosophy first, and medicine and law second.

Why is this important? The reason is that there are those who argue against the contemporary application of lessons learned from the horrors of Nazi medicine. Some say that "Nazi medicine" was not real medicine or science: We cannot even call what the Nazis did "medicine," since medicine contains within it an assumption of rigor and beneficence. This is an objection I hear from medical scientists, who point to safeguards such as the Nuremberg Code (1947), the Declaration of Helsinki (1964), and the Belmont Report (1978) as proof of the radically different nature of science today. But this argument is circular. It defines science as "good science," (relegating anything unethical to "bad science" or "pseudoscience") when in fact these very safeguards were born out of abuses from what was then the most scientifically advanced country in the world. Medicine then, as now, is not somehow immune from this abuse, as the horrific postwar abuses at Tuskegee and elsewhere make clear.

Other scholars have suggested that the real cause of the Holocaust was an economic, political, or racial one — not a moral one — and that, since the United States has a radically different political, economic, and cultural system, the use of the "Nazi analogy" should be restricted. Medical abuses today are somehow less likely because economic, political, and cultural considerations are highly specific. One prominent bioethicist, for example, noted:

A key component of Nazi thought was to rid Germany ... of those deemed economic drains on the state ... a fear rooted in the bitter economic experience after the First World War. ... [These themes] have little to do with contemporary debates about science, medicine, or technology.

The massive trove from the early Germanic Age, weighing nearly a kilogram, is believed to have been a sacrificial gift to the gods to prevent what is now seen as a climate catastrophe.

A historic gold trove of 22 gold objects have been found on the outskirts of a cornfield close to the town of Jelling, which served as the Royal seat for Danish kings during the Viking Age and is home to the Jelling stones.

The find, weighing nearly a kilogram, was made at the end of December 2020 by an inexperienced hobby archaeologist.

Secret talks between the Taliban and MI6 amid the evacuation of Kabul are the latest chapter in the British intelligence agency's long history of engagement with radical Islamic groups in Afghanistan. Much remains shrouded in secrecy, but one insider is speaking out.

In 1980, journalist John Fullerton sat down for lunch in London with members of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), better known as MI6. The spooks asked the restless reporter to name five cities where he would like to work. He scrawled the answers unhesitatingly on a paper napkin.

"The top one was Peshawar in Pakistan," he told Declassified, explaining his desire to move near the turbulent Afghan border. "The Soviets had invaded Afghanistan but I couldn't find ways to be a freelancer out there. There were no journalists covering it. Everyone had left Kabul. So I wanted to cover the war and that's how SIS employed me."

Çatalhöyük, one of the first urbanization models in Anatolia in Konya's Çumra district and Turkey's one of ancient sites in the UNESCO World Heritage List, continues to give new clues about the way of life of people 9,000 years ago.

Speaking to the state-run Anadolu Agency, Anadolu University's faculty member Ali Umut Türkcan, who is also the head of Çatalhöyük Neolithic City excavations, said that the concept of "street," one of the questions waiting to be answered in Çatalhöyük, started to come to light with the second neighborhood that was found recently.

Türkcan stated that in the light of the findings, they believe that there were many neighborhoods in the city. "We saw very clearly that a second neighborhood showed itself. We have an extraordinary house here, which attracted our attention especially with its wall paints, its size, much better quality floors and burials coming out from under the floors," he added.

The Native Americans who occupied the area known as Poverty Point in northern Louisiana more than 3,000 years ago long have been believed to be simple hunters and gatherers. But new Washington University in St. Louis archaeological findings paint a drastically different picture of America's first civilization.

Far from the simplicity of life sometimes portrayed in anthropology books, these early Indigenous people were highly skilled engineers capable of building massive earthen structures in a matter of months — possibly even weeks — that withstood the test of time, the findings show.

"We as a research community — and population as a whole — have undervalued native people and their ability to do this work and to do it quickly in the ways they did," said Tristram R. "T.R." Kidder, lead author and the Edward S. and Tedi Macias Professor of Anthropology in Arts & Sciences.

"One of the most remarkable things is that these earthworks have held together for more than 3,000 years with no failure or major erosion. By comparison, modern bridges, highways and dams fail with amazing regularity because building things out of dirt is more complicated than you would think. They really were incredible engineers with very sophisticated technical knowledge."

The findings were published Sept. 1 in Southeastern Archaeology. Washington University's Kai Su and Seth B. Grooms, along with graduates Edward R. Henry (Colorado State) and Kelly Ervin (USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service) also contributed to the paper.

The use of the Hegelian Dialectic of problem, reaction, solution (otherwise known as thesis, antithesis, synthesis) has served the ruling elite as its formulaic playbook for nonstop violence, death, global destabilization, and deepening human enslavement through nonstop perpetuation of false flags as the cabal answer to every perceived, heavily promoted global problem, and the covert, illegally engineered disaster through bankers' wars, state-sponsored terrorism, economic downturns, assassinations and overthrow coups, right up to today's promoted viral pandemic as the projected danger and threat posing as its causative reaction to the bogusly identified problem.

The elite's artificially created reaction rolled out in cahoots with the Mockingbird CIA-controlled press, always saturating media's staged airwaves with singularly defined false narratives, is extended over a concentrated period of time in order to adequately sell the demonized enemy lurking behind every tragic false flag attack.

If the lie gets robotically repeated often enough, the public will robotically believe almost anything. Former CIA director William Casey once smugly stated:

We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.