Democratic Underground - Part 2 of Indira Singh Interview of Pacifica (Ptech, 9-11, etc)

Democratic Underground - Part 2 of Indira Singh Interview of Pacifica (Ptech, 9-11, etc)

WARNING: I typed this from the audio online & I'm sure I've spelled all the names wrong. Please forgive me, I just heard this today, I'm sure I'll be reading more online & be really ashamed. At least I warned ya...

July 20th 2005
Inteview with Indira Singh
"Ground Zero 911, Blueprint For Terror, Part Two"

Indira Singh worked on Wall Street from 1975 Until June 28th, 2002 when she was summarily terminated due to her investigation into computer software company, Ptech. In Part One, She described her work as an emergency medical technician at ground zero, and began to describe her professional work for JPMorgan Chase and her first client meeting with software engineer, Ptech.

Bonnie Falkner: So, Indira, how did your meeting with Ptech, how did that go?

Indira Singh: Well, they came a little late, immediately there were some issues with regard to how the day would proceed, for instance they showed up without the agreed upon software in hand. The most important thing about it is that their chief scientist Dr. Hussein Ibraham came. He’s an Egyptian-American and he had a very good reputation in the field, very bright, someone you would like working with, very knowledgeable. But, they had showed up without the software. What I had done was isolated a workstation, took it off the net, after all we were testing whether the software would meet our criteria. And if I had said it did then that would be a big deal if it subsequently couldn’t, so we need to start with an out-of-the-box version of Ptech. They didn’t bring that and Dr. Ibraham said, “that’s not a problem we can develop a demo on his laptop.” And if you know anything about these things that’s like a no-no because at the end of the day he’s walking out the door and I don’t have anything – and he’s walking away with pretty much enough of how we’re thinking about doing operational risk… now, operational risk is about how to spot bad things that are going on in a financial institution – things like rogue-trading, money laundering, and so on and so forth. And it’s very subtle, our intellectual property, at least what JP Morgan was hiring me for, was to think innovatively, out of the box, in a next-generation how do you proactively design a blueprint to spot these things, and that’s pretty big. These, definitely, people are smart enough to get an “oh, they’re thinking of going down this road”, that’s a big deal, so I was risk averse and so I was aware enough not to expose our intellectual property, or that of the company I am consulting for, I am very protective of that. So, they showed up without the software and that was a huge enough red flag that I began paying attention to them. A couple of other things went on and within half an hour I just walked over to the same people who had recommended them and began calling and I said to one of them, “I have the Ptech people here”, and the reaction was not the reaction I would have ever expected. It was: what are they doing on site? And I said, well you recommended them. And they said, no, um, you should have come through a distributor, an American distributor, and I said, “uh uh, JP Morgan reserves the right to work directly with the company and besides which they are a preferred vendor of IBM, they’re a preferred vendor for program and that’s the way we work, we don’t work for small distributors. If we’re going to go with this software as the standard, we’re going to go right to the source and make the agreements there. So, I said, what is the problem? And basically this person said, “Don’t let them out of your sight”. And that’s when my stomach sank. See, you have to understand how all of a sudden I’m beginning to see these people in a different way. Because when they said: don’t let them out of your sight, I have a Middle Eastern company there and we’re taught not to discriminate and I, that was not something I was about to do and to prove that - they were there being evaluated. So, that is never going to be a bone of contention, although later people made that an issue. But, if I had a problem working with a Middle Eastern company they would have never been there in the first place, much less before Ground Zero closed. And I had no problem whatsoever having them up there. I liked the idea.

B.F.: What do you mean Ptech was a Middle Eastern company?

IS: Well, that’s what subsequently was revealed in the phone call – that their financier, their funders, their investors, were all Saudis. And I said, “so what?” and they said, one Saudi has been placed on the US Terror List, October 12, 2001. And I said, umm, it got very quiet, I said, you better have proof because having thrown that into my lap now, this is not something that I can ignore, I have to follow up on it. This is not something I can ignore, or pretend would go away, or have someone else handle. This is risk-management, at the highest levels of one of the largest banks in the world; it is my responsibility to deal with this. And I said, how can I get proof of this? And that’s when they started saying you need to talk to Jeff Goines, who was one of the only three people in Ptech who knew of this relationship. You see, it was that well hidden within Ptech, and so I subsequently called Jeff Goines and I said, well if this is true, did you not report this, particularly as a private company this relationship would have been privy only to those on the inside, I said, did you report it anywhere – that someone who has been placed on the US Terror List is key funder, angel investor, to a company whose software is utilized at the highest levels of almost every government and military and defense organization in this country, including the Secret Service, the FBI, the Department of Defense, the House of Representatives, the Treasury Department, the IRS, the US Navy, the US Air Force, and, last but not least, the Federal Aviation Administration?

B.F.: Are you saying these were all Ptech clients?

IS: These were all Ptech clients and when I was evaluating them I was pretty impressed – why not Ptech? Exactly, they’re being used at the highest levels of all of these organizations. So, I was very excited about using them and having their software be able to be at the heart of what I wanted to develop. And I had no reason to believe that if they were in use everywhere of that caliber that I would have a problem. They were also used in Enron, perhaps, I should have thought twice about that, but, umm, they were in use at IBM, of course, and the top accounting firms, and even in the FBI. In Miter..

B.F.: What is Miter?

IS: Miter is a large company that does specialized technology for defense and intelligence. You would not expect to have an exposure with a company that was so well entrenched and embedded in these kinds of organizations.
B.F.: So, what about the meeting then, did they leave? What happened?

IS: No, because, umm, basically my position was until I had proof I could not react. That would have been very unprofessional of me and so I thought of a number of scenarios that could be going on. At that point I thought it might have been, you know, competitiveness out of control, distributors wanting the JP Morgan account, it could have been anything - however, the one thing and it was true that the chief investor, Sheik Yassan Khadi, was indeed placed on the US Terror List, because while I was talking to them, while they were still there, I checked out a website that had a list of everyone who’d been placed on the Terror List. The missing piece was of course proving that Sheik Yassan Khadi was indeed affiliated with Ptech, was an owner of Ptech, because it was a private company. You could say that anybody was an investor, whether a bad guy or good guy, was an investor. Proving it was another thing, so I let everything ride, but I kept and eye on things. And, in fact, we did have a presentation that went very, very well, because in no way, shape or form was I going to jeopardize that.

B.F.: So what happened next? Did you go on working with them, or did you start to investigate Ptech?

IS: Well, I continued multi-tasking. I was working with them, I placed a few phone calls, some people got back to me later that day, while they were still on premises, so I was able to separate the concerns, accomplish the task, evaluate the software anyway, start the phone calls to start getting more information, then my report would have been: this is the software, it’s used everywhere, it can do what we want it to do, however, we have this issue with the company, and present that to my superiors and let them decide.

B.F.: Then did you start investigating the company?

IS: Yes. What happened next was, um, I spoke with Jeff Goines and he told me that basically not only was Yassan Khadi was an investor but that a Yacob Mertza was on the board of directors and he had been the subject of Operation Green Quest, many of his Herndon, Virginia vehicles and companies,and financing companies, had been raided in March 2002. And, again, that Mertza was on the board of directors. As we spoke, other names started to come out, my head was pretty much spinning at this point, and I said “have you reported any of this to the FBI?” and the answer came back: yes, well I wrote a report to the FBI, and, umm, I said, “okay, the boss in FBI has been told, I need to speak with people there”, because it’s not just by group that’s evaluating them, it’s so many other groups – but I couldn’t believe that, if this was all true that Ptech was still being used by the Department of Defense. There’s something a little bizarre about all of this and really I was beginning to understand, unwillingly, that the world was, was not the way we thought of it.

B.F.: Now, this person that you were discussing this with, Jeff Goines…

IS: Goines. Yes.

B.F.: Was he an employee of Ptech?

IS: Yes he was, he’s one of the key people at Ptech. He held several important positions. He had traveled to Saudi Arabia and he had met with Yassan Khadi and he had met with most of the investors, he, his last position was Vice-President of Sales, which for a small company is pretty significant. He worked with Ptech helping build the company for five years. And he was the one that was based in Virginia, who was responsible for getting a lot of the government accounts, with, of course, Yusaama Zihadi, who was the President. Yusaama Zihadi is a Lebanese-American, who according to Jeff, got a citizenship under very questionable circumstances, which involves the INS. Now, this is all according to Jeff, so at some point later in the week I had decided to go down to Virginia and meet with not only Jeff, but a number of other Ptech and ex-Ptech employees, because this was beginning to sound like a Tom Clancy novel, and I needed proof, I told them I needed emails, I needed documents, I needed hard evidence. But, in the meantime, within a day or two, I had contacted my Rep at IBM, and I said I need to walk outside with you and talk to you about something. If you guys are thinking about getting seriously in bed with this company, I would suggest that you do some background investigation, so that your clients, like JP Morgan and myself, don’t end up in this situation. His name was Kyle Hiligoss. Kyle told me that he quote, unquote, wrote a book report and sent it to his legal department and he was told to just back off the whole, the whole thing, in fact he would, didn’t want to have anything to do with me as I continued investigating. Jeff did get the agents at the FBI, the boss in the FBI office, to call me back, and with Kyle listening in, so it wasn’t just me reporting on what Jeff had said, we spoke to the FBI agent who had picked up the information that Jeff had reported on Ptech, when Yassan Khadi was placed on the Terror List in October 2001. Now remember this is eight or nine months later. My question to him is: if you have an investigation that’s ongoing, that’s fine, and we don’t want to get involved with it, or impede it in any way. But in the meantime, this country’s infrastructure is seriously exposed, and I cannot, if any of this is true, cannot, and I need some evidence, something that you can give me that, to hang my hat on when I report this, that this is true, that this isn’t just someone making a terrorism report, you know, but that, that you know this is true. And basically, what he said was, “Indiri, your in a better position on the out, on the outside to get the proof that’s needed than I am. And I asked him to check with the supervisor, I said, do you understand how serious this is, to have a company with, with this alleged terrorism connection, at the highest levels of corporate America and the US infrastructure? And I said, if you don’t know, I need, we need to make you aware of this. He apparently went to his supervisor, and his supervisor said that the position wouldn’t change. Now, the Boston FBI office, you can check this out, was rated as one of the worst in terms of corruption, and I believe the Whitey Bolger incident, the connections between the FBI and the Mafia have been, how should I put it?, extremely well explored and the Boston FBI office, the ex-governor of Massachusetts, I believe, anyway, this mob character, Whitey Bolger’s brother was in a very high level political position in Massachusetts, in Boston, and in fact if people were to read Peter Lance’s book, “Coverup”, he explores it very well and backs up a lot of what I had found here, the interaction between organized crime and the FBI. So, when they said they weren’t going to proceed, I…

B.F.: and by ‘they’, you’re talking about the FBI?

IS: the FBI..I said, I need something to hang my hat on, and so he sent me a videotape. And the videotape, which I have here, the substance of the videotape was a news clip. It was a news clip of a CBS affiliate, based in Boston, called WBCTV, and their investigative reporting team, the “eye team”, which was led by investigative reporter Joe Bergantino, had investigated a number of Middle Eastern men who were sought after 9-11. They were affiliated with a Muslim Islamic Terrorism financing charities. He had created this clip to show the connection between the 9-11 terror attack and the financial vehicles that were supposedly used to fund it. And what he did was very interesting. He connected, the eye-team connected, CARE International, not the big CARE International, but something called CARE International that was based in Boston all the way back to Al Keefah, which is the financing vehicle at the center of the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, all the way back to something called Maktab al-qeedah-mad, which means “the office”, which was a financing vehicle that was set up by the CIA for the Pakistani ISI, back in the days when Osama bin Laden was America’s fair-haired boy, and was on our side fighting with the Muhajadeen, fighting the Soviet Union. So, the question to me was, my goodness, when I saw the videotape, what is Maktab al-qeedah-mad doing being run out of Ptech on 9-11, and the reason I say being run out of Ptech is that the faces in the videotape were the faces of core employees at Ptech. Now, remember, this is a small company. There were only one or two people who had access to the sourcecode in Ptech, and that is a very trusted position and he was one of them, his name was Sahail Lahair. The people who started CARE International, some of them were actually on an FBI Terror Watch List, prior to 9-11, in Boston.

B.F.: What do you mean by the source code?

IS: Well, all software products has, uh, some group or organization or person writes code that is then packaged up and, uh, for instance the word processor on your desk, or spreadsheet and so on and so forth, the browser, it’s all written in some sort of code. Those are the keys to it, and if you want to improve it, add any functionality, you would change the original code, and add new functionality and then repackage it and send it out there. So, whoever had access to source code of Ptech, that was where the value was – if you lost the source code, you essentially lost the product. For all intents and purposes, marketing point of view. So, only one or two people would have access to the source code. It would be like having the formula for Coca-Cola, basically.

B.F.: Now, let’s go over that a little bit again. You were talking about a CARE International and some other funding groups that have been, what, funding international terrorism?

IS: That’s correct.

B.F.: And also have been funded by, what, the CIA..

IS: Well, the original, the roots of the al-Keefah and CARE International, if you look at it were way back in the late 80s, around the time of Iran-Contra, for instance, Maktab al-qeedah’mad was set up so that monies could be passed to Osama bin Laden and the Mujahadeen when they were fighting the Soviet…now, I won’t go into a lot of detail, but it ended up that Osama bin Laden took that over and was running al-Quaeda through that. The connections to the Pakistani ISI still stood. The connections to the CIA still stood. Not in the way that was originally set up, but through a black, or a gray, operation. That had been later confirmed to me. By the end of the day when I was finished with certain parts of the investigation, it was clear to me that there was no way that Ptech could have done all of this without a lot of inside help. And that’s what I began focusing on, that it was a cut-out, that it was a front, was it a regular CIA front, was it a clandestine front, what was it? You know there are walls within the FBI, walls within the CIA, behind which these operations take place and who is behind those operations, you know, is a key question. Now, people might say, ahh, this is all conspiracy theory, but I would like to remind people that conspiracy is very much recognized by the United States Federal Code – and it’s called RICO-racketeering and influence, and it is very much recognized because there’s so much power in these organizations that they have rules in place, for instance the DCIA, the Director of the CIA, cannot, after his term of DCIA, subsequently run for Vice-President or President, which is what happened with George Herbert Walker Bush, that rule was bent for him. He went on from being the DCIA to running for Vice-President. That’s a no-no.

BF: Well, it sounds like you’re describing an inter-locking relationship then, between this software company, funded by Saudis, and funded by whomever, the United States government, US corporations, and then known groups, globally, that are accused of staging terrorist attacks.

IS: Yes.

BF: and it’s all of a piece.

IS: Yes, absolutely. There… And one of the things I want to say is, maybe those organizations don’t fully know who their masters are. And Ptech is the one thread, the one golden thread you pull on and all of this is unraveled, because it goes into the corporations, it goes into, umm, umm, these ah government entities, it goes into the terrorism financing entities that were, that none of which have been, oh by the way, taken to task. And, umm, there’re just so many questions about what does this all mean. And as we investigated, as I investigated further, we found that the, in the origins of Ptech were very interesting – where did this company come from, obviously is the first question. And, um, how did they get to be so powerful, who were the people, who were the organizations that brought them in, who knew, who gave them the power. Who, for instance, signed off Zihadi’s citizenship without doing background checks? Who said that they had a bad feeling doing that? Who gave them influential, ummm, I remember that Ptech’s competitors, US companies, were extremely annoyed at the fact that they could not get equal time, that all the plum contracts were going to a foreign-owned company. And I said, well, did you know they were foreign-owned, and if they’re foreign-owned they couldn’t get certain classified projects, and, and he said, Oh, Indira, everyone knew that, some of them, some of the competitors knew, that umm, that they were Saudi owned and that meant that they got favorable treatment on Capitol Hill. And I said, well, are you saying that they just got favored treatment or that there was something more going on? They wouldn’t answer. Their lawyers instructed them not to answer, so, they knew a lot of what was, what was going on.

BF: Who, who were you talking to?

IS: Well, in one particular case I was talking to one of their competitors, Popkins Software, and umm, you know I have no problem naming names, because I think that in the memory of 3000 US civilians who were, and world-wide civilians, who were murdered, we are going to wage wars and spill blood around the world, we oughta take a look at this, and just have the truth come out. Because, umm, the truth has not come out and, there’s been a lot of speculation, there’s been a lot of innuendo, but there hasn’t been hard proof and Ptech is the one situation where you can get hard proof. When we investigated Ptech, and the people behind it, where they came from, we found out that one of the founding members was a man by the name of Solomon Bahairi. He was one of the founding directors and he had put together a vehicle called BMI, which stands for Bai Tal Mal. Now BMI was identified as being involved with terror financing but this is just not going to be the Muslims hate America, that’s not what it is, there is something else going on here. They’re being used as a tool, just as the good people of the United States are being used, are being misled into, and being frightened and terrorized into ‘if we don’t wage these horrific wars, you know our way of life will be over’. Who benefits from that?

BF: What else did your investigation of Ptech turn up? Didn’t you meet with several employees or former employees of Ptech?

IS: Yes. This goes back to when all of this was being revealed to me, now this is the last week of May 2002. The last day, or June 1 or so, of 2002, lo and behold out of nowhere the Chicago FBI enters the picture. We have agent Robert Wright of the Chicago FBI, who’s giving congressional testimony, and, umm, he stands on the steps of the Capitol, bursts into tears, apologizes to the 9-11 families, the victims, that he didn’t do everything he could to prevent 9-11 from happening, that his investigations were repeatedly shut down. And I almost fell over, because he announced that his investigation was the investigation into Yassan Khadi, the same Sheikh Yassan Khadi who was the money man behind Ptech. And, umm, you could not ask for a more direct connection to 9-11 than that. I will even discount the fact that some ex-Ptech employees told me that, when I went to see them I presented all the Terror List faces, whatever, and they had indicated that they had seen some pass through Ptech, in fact, one or two had mentioned that they thought one of the hijackers had actually passed through Ptech. And I said, did you report this to the FBI? Can you tell me when? Can you get evidence of it? Can you get litigation-quality evidence, something that would stand up? Whatever you can get, give it to me, make copies, give it to the FBI, I still thought they were on our side.

BF: The FBI, you mean.

IS: The FBI. In fact, and this has to be made very clear, there are some extraordinarily real patriotic Americans and good people in the FBI, as has been said by, I believe, Agent Colleen Rowley, one of the FBI whistleblowers’ bosses, that there’s a wall in the FBI, and this has been validated to me by various attorneys in Houston, who are very close to the power bases, and are pretty ticked-off at what’s happening in this country and are speaking out, as are many CIA agents who are very concerned that it has gone too far, as are many NSA agents who are concerned that it’s gone too far, and FBI agents. So we have a lot of people who are speaking out, they’ve kept quiet too long; they’re afraid, they’re afraid of what’s happening to this country. And when I say the Third Reich, what is happening to this country, they say, and I will identify ‘they’ if pressed, they say, will make the Third Reich look like a tea party. I guess we have that many more billion people to control on this planet.

BF: And when you say, “they say”, are you referring to people that you’ve spoken with in the FBI?

IS: Absolutely. Within the FBI, within the CIA. One of the things that I didn’t want to have happen is when Ptech was finally raided in December 2002, something that took all of six months and a tremendous amount of agony to have happen, the White House, Ari Fleischer, spun it to fine sugar that day, he said, oh, there’s nothing wrong, nothing here, nothing to see here, everything’s fine. So, they did a token raid and that was basically it. But, everything that I have done since that time has been for one reason, and one reason only. That there may come a time, that people will find the trail to Ptech, and it won’t be hidden or buried, I’ve kept it alive. Whether they’ve renamed their company and moved on, I want to keep the names, the details, everything alive, no matter what I have to do, so that, should there come a time for justice and accounting, for 9-11 and for what’s happening in the world today, it makes it easier for other people to unravel the truth. So, I have gone to the mainstream press, I have gone to people on the left, on the left-left, on the right and on the right of right. And I’ve talked to them face-to-face and said, this is wrong. Whatever your political inclinations, this is wrong. This is criminal. This is murder. This is world-wide atrocity. And I have reached some very good people on the left and on the right, who are willing to speak about about Ptech. I’ve contacted the alternative press – the alternative press, very much like the blind men and the elephant, they touch a piece of Ptech, they understand it and they say, ‘well this fits my theory of how things went wrong’. I have no problem with that, because, the facts are the facts. If someone wants to spin it to fit their particular viewpoint, for instance From the Wilderness has said, that well, the software that’s in Ptech is very much like Promis, the Prosecutor’s Management Information System, that has a whole cargo cult behind it, that it has these legendary capabilities, well maybe back in the 80s and 90s it was legendary, but today you can do pretty amazing things with software, its not a big deal. But, anyway, From the Wilderness and Mike Ruppert, for instance, thesis was that Dick Cheney was running an alternate command and control center that day, confusing everyone. And, in fact, there were four war games, that were going on, on 9-11, and, umm, who knows why the fighters weren’t scrambled in time, who knows all this, in fact, the fighter to Pennsylvania was scrambled in time, because we have firsthand proof, you know, whistleblowers within the correct organizations, that that was shot down. You know, it’s just that “Let’s Roll” was a better story, perhaps a story that the American people could handle, but, no, I was told at Ground Zero that day, we heard them go over, and we knew they were shot down. We were told. It was just later that it, we’re told that the passengers brought it down. Well, if you’re running a country and you’re really under terrorist attack, that might be the way to go. Empower people by saying if this, that thing happens to you, get up and do something and have a story. I really don’t have such a big problem with that, but the fact of the matter is, that it was shot down.

B.F.: Oh, and that’s interesting. And you heard that on the day of September 11th?

I.S.: Yes, I did. And it was corroborated a couple of weeks ago, by people who were in a particular situation room.

B.F.: Did you want to say anything more about that?

I.S.: Well, it is possible that there was an alternative command and control system, that could you technically use Ptech software to do surveillance and intervention? Well, gosh, yes, that’s exactly what I was planning on using it for in one of the largest banks in the world. It’s not a problem. So, if someone wants to make it their thesis, I’ve no problem with that, however, I can’t say for sure that that was going on, because I don’t have direct, first hand knowledge of that. You know, no one has told me or offered me proof of that. But, could I state that it could happen? Absolutely, it could have happened. Was it necessary for it to have happened, in order for us to have a 9-11? I don’t know. I don’t think so. Maybe. Maybe not. That’s not my point. The towers came down, 3000 people were killed what I know, is the characters behind the funding of it, were totally in bed with characters in the United States. And not only just for 9-11, but going on throughout our nation’s history. And the big question is, why? What are they up to?

B.F.: Could you describe the relationship of Ptech with the FAA? Now, Ptech worked with the FAA for several years, didn’t they?

I.S.: Yes. They worked with the FAA, it was a joint project between Ptech and Miter, and they were looking at, huh, it’s interesting, they were looking at basically holes, in the FAA’s interoperability with responding with other agencies, law enforcement, in emergencies, such as a hijacking. So, they were looking for the escalating process, what people would do, how they would respond, in case of emergency, and find the holes, and make recommendations to fix it. Now, if anyone was in a position to understand where the holes were, Ptech was, and that is exactly the point. And if anybody was in a position to write software to take advantage of those holes, it would have been Ptech.

B.F.: Explain what interoperability is.

I.S.: Hmmm. Most people are familiar with E-bay. And you know that it’s a collaborative bidding situation. You bid for a particular item, a certain amount of time passes and the winning bid is selected according to certain rules. And once a winning bid is selected, then something else happens. Then something else happens, the thing is bought, and it’s taken down, off, off E-bay. Well, these are a sequence of steps, that occur, it’s a process. And, it’s a process that a lot of people are familiar with, so everything we do involves a process. Now, if E-bay had one huge, gigantic computer, these processes would take place on one computer. However, interoperability comes into play when you jump computer systems, or organizations. So, for instance, what if E-bay had to pass on some information to Pay Pal. Pay Pal is a separate operation, they have their own computers, so they have to come up with a way to handshake, to agree on when this happens on E-bay, so and so will happen on Pay Pal. That’s all interoperability, so it happens on a business process level, and it also happens on a system transaction level. Hey, you know, Pay Pal says, well you send me this in this format and I’ll expect it and then do this with it. That’s how interoperability operates on a technical level, on an information level, and on a business process level. Now, with the FAA, in particular, if something goes wrong and there is an emergency with a particular flight and the Department of Defense needs to be notified, well that’s a really major interoperability thing, a signal has to be sent in some way, shape or form, either mediated by a human in most cases, or automatically, or even if it’s mediated by a human something has to be initiated on a super-computer to start a whole other sequence of events, interventions, scrambling a jet, notification up and down stream with many other organizations, such as NORAD, such as other terminal radar areas, such as local law enforcement, such as, you name it. So, this all has to be blueprinted, mapped out, and that’s where enterprise architecture comes in. You need some kind of blueprint to keep all of this together. And that’s what Ptech was so good at.

B.F.: Now, was there a reference to Ptech having operated in the basement, out of the FAA?

I.S.: Yes. Now, typically, because the scope of such projects are so over-arching and wide-ranging, when you are doing an enterprise architecture project you pretty much have access to how anything in the organization is being done, where it’s being done, on what systems, what the information is, and you pretty much have carte blanche. And if it’s a major project that spans several years, the team that comes in has literally access to almost anything that they want, because you’re operating on a blueprint level, on a massive scale. So, yes, they were everywhere and I was told that they were in places that required clearances. I was told that they had log-on access to FAA flight control computers. I was told that they had passwords to many computers that you may not think that on the surface has anything to do with finding out holes in the system, but let’s say you’ve said, ‘okay, you’ve isolated a part of a process’, say a notification process, that was needed by a computer and you wanted to investigate it further, then you would typically get log-on access to that computer. And from that, back upstream, or downstream, so, who knows? You know, from my own experience, I could have access to almost anything I wanted to in JP Morgan Chase. I didn’t, for the reason, I, if anything went wrong, I didn’t want to have the access. But, if you were up to no good, as an enterprise architect, with such a mandate, you typically could have anything you wanted. Access to anything.

B.F.: What do you think of the claim, by the so-called 9-11 Independent Commission and the testimony before it, and the report that the intelligence agencies did not talk to each other, what did you think of their so-called report?

I.S.: Umm. Completely flawed. Governor Kane was the second choice for the head of the commission, I believe. Henry Kissinger was the first. Governor Kane had, oh by the way, done business deals with BMI, Solomon Bahiri, Ptech – none of which came out, which he should have volunteered and either recused himself as being head or have it out there in the open. There were three other members of the commission, who had similar kinds of relationships in the past. And, umm, they were all on the team, but, their findings were so flawed. They’re using an excuse, yes there are interoperability, communication issues in any organization, yes, there are, but in a case of an emergency it doesn’t get that boloxed up. Unless, of course, Ruppert is right and Cheney was running interference somewhere, or someone was running interference, or whoever. You know, we don’t know. But, umm, there were four war games, four simulations, going on the morning of 9-11. And I just want people to remember that the whole nature of what Miter, which also they develop software for intelligence, which includes the CIA, Miter and Ptech, would have, if they were going to test whether they had fixed these holes, would have probably run a simulation. I don’t know that they did, but it, that’s how we do things. But, there were four of them going on, so was there room for confusion? I don’t think these people were stupid, I think they were deliberately confused, if anything.

B.F.: Well, we know very well that there was a simulation of the very event taking place during the event. Right?

I.S.: Yes. Yes, there was. And I believe there’s proof that there was more than one. Just in case the first one didn’t confuse people enough. So, what does this say? I can be very objective about this and say, well the terrorists knew that there were war games scheduled for this day and they took advantage of it and called 9-11 a particular day. However, we do know that 9-11 had been selected prior. Okay, so then maybe the war games were set many weeks prior, before 9-11. And you can play this game over and over. Yes, it was the perfect day. And, yes you needed inside knowledge and yes, Ptech, in all its myriad associations would have had the inside knowledge, and yes Ptech was a CIA front, and yes Ptech was protected. So, was it an inside job? You don’t have to look at this indirectly, this direct, this requires direct investigation.

B.F.: Well, that is what I was going to ask you, about your investigation of Ptech. You have pretty much come up with evidence that of course Ptech was a CIA cut-out, or front, or whatever.

I.S.: That’s correct. I had this validated to me by ex…high level people, within, within…and in fact, during my investigation, when I was reaching out to the people that I had worked with, because remember I did do work for a small company called the Interoperability Clearing House, or the ICH, and they were DARPA funded, and they weren’t a DARPA company, they were DARPA funded. They got funding from many, many organizations, including Boeing and whatever, because they were providing a wonderful service - software, and we were seeking funding from Incutel, which was the IT-seeking arm of the CIA. Now, when, interestingly enough, when the funding decision was supposed to come through on September 12th, I am not saying that it would have come through, but after 9-11 there was no funding coming through on 9-12. So, subsequent to that I was picking up the pieces and still remaining in contact with that group and trying to form another group and company, while I was working at JP Morgan, after 9-11, while we were going through the environmental nightmares that we were going through, I was still trying to pick up the pieces of that life, to create a really good risk blueprint, to prevent the kinds of things like 9-11 from happening to us. And I was pretty ignorant about a lot of this kind of clandestine betrayals. What happened, I kept in touch with a lot of these people, and when Ptech fell into my lap I did reach out to them, I said, can you tell me if what I’m looking at is true, is real, how could it be real, and one of the people I reached out to did work for the CIA and he said he could not discuss front office operations. I never knew what he meant by that, but anyway, subsequent to that there were two or three points down the road that I had higher and higher level confirmation, that it was being utilized. Eventually, I came across a report, actually the FBI Twin Towers Investigative Report, that the FBI had commissioned a private investigator to do, on certain people and in there it was so clear. That, I mean even the presence of CARE International, whose roots were in Maktab al-qeedah-mad, that was glaring. And that they were all over every place in the US infrastructure, you do not get that without very high level help, and that’s what the vendors, the competitors of Ptech had said, every one knew. They were given carte blanch, open –

B.F.: And this was a separate company, in Washington, DC that you were doing some work with, prior to September 11th.

I.S.: Right.

B.F.: And it got some funding from DARPA.

I.S.: Right. Interestingly enough, I did not let people know that it was Ptech until maybe August 2002, this ICH, the DARPA funded group know. We had pretty much moved on and I, umm, I accidentally let slip in August 2002 to one of my colleagues there that the company, the name of the company that was being investigated was Ptech, and, umm, she was horrified because she said they’re everywhere, and I said, ‘yeah, fancy that. Wonder who put them there?’ They didn’t get there by accident. Ptech came about in 1993, actually, they were reformed in 1993, that’s when Yassam Khadi invested in them.

B.F.: What happened with the raid that the FBI staged on Ptech?

I.S.: Well, what happened was, when I took all of this information back to JP Morgan, after Agent Wright had appeared on the steps of the Capitol, then I went down to Virginia I got all the information together, I had the Ptech people actually write it out, so it wouldn’t be Indira says, it would be this is what they put together, and I had emails, documentation, photographs, photographs that flew around the world, was plastered all over network TV, that’s what I got from these people, and I had interviewed a bunch of very scared people: what is going on? The FBI knows about it and they’re doing nothing. What is going on? What do you think this tells you? And I didn’t want to go there without proof, I wasn’t going to go there. Really what I did, and a most powerful thing, I think anyone can do, is not just make an accusation, or get a little bit of proof, which can be hushed up and denied, but I took what I had to everyone. Before Ptech was ever raided, before it became public, I took it all the way up to the top of the FBI. I took it everywhere. And the reality of the situation is proven by the response I got there, more telling than the actual deed itself, there response to that is really what indicts them all.

B.F.: What was there response?

I.S.: Umm, shut up and go away or you will be killed. Basically.

B.F.: Now, you got that response from all different levels in government.

I.S.: I got that response from JP Morgan. I got that response from Ptech. I got that warning from people within the FBI. Mostly the FBI. See, when the boss in the FBI sent me that tape that Joe Bergantino had run the story on and I looked at the tape and it was all Ptech people, you know, basically, or all affiliated with Ptech, what they were looking for, I was really scared. And I contacted Joe Bergantio to tell him I’ve been threatened, people had been in my house, I’m a 9-11 survivor, I can’t back down on this, and that if anything happens to me, this story that you did, back in December, November 2001, did you know these people worked at Ptech? He said, we had some suspicion, we didn’t know. And I said, well let me tell you what Ptech does. When I went down there and I spoke to them in June 2002 they thought I had a flower pot growing out of my head. They didn’t believe me at all, I said, you’ve done the original story, you just don’t realize they’re connected to corporate America and the government in this way. So what they did, they initiated their own investigation. And their own investigation, they came back to me and said, we’re sorry for having doubted you. It’s not only as bad as you said, it’s much, much worse. And, umm, they said…

B.F.: This is the investigative reporter?

I.S.: Right. Their, their whole team. This is CBS, oh by the way, and a CBS affiliate. So, they had interviewed me and taped me, and umm, this is now August 2002, they had said, that umm, we’re going to run this story on the one year anniversary of 9-11 and I begged them, I was horrified, please do not. Do not delay, get it out now. And they said no, it’s not gonna play well in August, because everyone’s on vacation and I was, I was banging my head against the wall. I was in tears. And I said, they’re gonna shut this down. People are gonna talk, they’re gonna find out about it and they’re gonna shut you down. And sure enough they did. There were seven networks that had, that caught wind of this story and they shut down the investigation. Their excuse was that, hey, you know, yeah, Ptech is everywhere, we don’t want them to be all of a sudden. They said, you know what, we have to find out that if we do anything to them, what will they do with our infrastructure? Which was complete baloney, because they had known all along, and they were, even as I spoke out at that time, they were being evaluated for use in Homeland Security.

B.F.: You’re talking about Ptech?

I.S.: Ptech. Yes. So, so much for their, their trite little excuse about “oh, yeah, gosh, we let this one slip through for almost a year, you know, but now that we’re aware of it – See and that’s why, in my making other people aware of it, they were aware of it at the highest levels all along so, you can’t suddenly pull that and say, oh, well, they could impact national security if we suddenly raid them. They were being evaluated for use in Homeland Security. So, we knew it was a cover-up at that time, and umm, I was very concerned that they weren’t ever gonna raid Ptech. That no one would ever know, that this would never be made public. If I had spoken out about it, I could be sued, where is your proof? You’ve told the government, they’ve done nothing, you’ve told the FBI they’ve done nothing. I then embarked on my own campaign. I had written a report and I had a pretty good email list, people in DC, and I said you know what, I’m going to send this report exposing Ptech and their connections to terrorism to ten Chief Information Officers, Chief Technology Officers, a week, until Ptech is raided. And I began calling people. And I began sending things out. I began scheduling appointments and showing up, and instead of talking about enterprise architecture, talking about ‘what software do you use?’. And I watched more people’s face turn absolutely white, I watched people almost get physically ill. And I watched them circle the wagons and, and I’m talking about major chemical companies, major energy companies, and the CIO, one of the CIOs of the Department of Defense, whose Pentagon meeting I interrupted, to talk about Ptech. Yeah, the line went dead. But, within a week after that Ptech was raided. And Ari Fleischer said there’s nothing wrong with the company. And I watched my life go down the drain. But…

B.F.: So, what about Ptech now, I mean..

I.S.: They renamed, yeah they, I apologize, they’re still in use.

B.F.: Still going?

I.S.: Absolutely. But they’ve renamed themselves. They’re called GoAgile and they’re still going. Nothing, when we try to find out what the status of the investigation is we’ve been told alternatively that they’ve been cleared or that it, it’s still in limbo. Nothing definitive has been done. Solomon Bahari had been arrested. A minor slap on the wrist.

B.F.: And what kind of a response did you get from JP Morgan Chase, your employers at the time, when you went to them with what you had found out about Ptech?

I.S.: Well, they had told me that I should be killed for getting all this evidence. I was, I was intimidated. I wrote a letter to my boss saying that I had been intimidated. And the person who intimidated me, the third highest ranking person in the bank, a general auditor, had said this has gone all the way up to the top and they were very aware of it, and that they were going to explicitly deny Ptech being used at JP Morgan Chase. In fact, they would even explicitly deny the URL to the website, so that no one could even look into them, course, now, the name has changed, so we wonder what’s going on there. But, when he asked me where did you get this from and that from, I was basically thoroughly intimidated, they treated me as though I was the bad guy. That’s what happened. They treated me as though I was the bad guy for having dug up all of this stuff.

B.F.: And you were told by the Chief Auditor at JP Morgan Chase that the different individuals that you had gotten this information from should have been killed?

I.S.: Yeah. Yeah. And, umm…you have to remember that I, I pointed to down the street, I said, I lost people there. And he said, I lost people there too. I, look, look, this is about 9-11. I put it in a folder labeled 9-11. And, it got pretty ugly from that point on. Basically, he said that if he, he needed to be sure that I would never mention Ptech again. And, I said, umm, here’s, here’s a problem. I’m a senior consultant, I consult with a lot of people. You may deny Ptech business here, what happens to CitiBank, what happens to Goldman Sachs, what happens to the rest… he said, that’s not my problem. And I said, that’s why we have that hole in the ground up the street. It is everyone’s problem, and in fact, Director Mueller of the FBI said that preventing terrorism was everyone’s problem, so, you know, I’m just going along with an FBI directive to the general population. And, umm, and so, I had written a letter to Wilson Lowrey, who at that time was his right hand administrative person, who was an ex-CEO of IBM. Wilson Lowrey, Wilson Lowrey turned out to be the one who came down hard on Colleen Rowley for being a whistleblower. (laughs) So, guess what his politics were upon, on Ptech.

B.F.: As a senior consultant with JP Morgan Chase were you on a consulting contract

I.S.: Yes.

B.F.: or were you an employee…

I.S.: No. I was on a consulting contract. However, I had a ten year relationship with them. I was given tasks there that were not given to employees, to even trusted employees. I was given responsibilities way above and beyond a lot of other employees. I was given pretty much carte blanch to think out of the box and to do things, I was funded out of a strategic fund called A Lab Morgan, where they experimented with new ideas, so I had a lot of latitude and the people I reported to were on the board of directors and were very senior level. They trusted me, keeping their best interests at heart. And as, I think exactly, my behavior around Ptech was entirely predictable and in line with someone who a light for risk and integrity in business dealings. In fact, one of the colleagues said, ‘of all the people whose lap this would fall into, you’re about the only one with enough latitude to not look the other way.

B.F.: And so then what happened? Was your contract…

I.S.: I was fired.

B.F.: was your contract cancelled?
I.S. summarily terminated.

B.F.: You were? And when did that happen?

I.S.: June 28, 2002

B.F.: And you stayed on in New York City then through 2004?

I.S.: Right. I stayed on in the same apartment. I reached out to friends of mine in the FBI who I asked them what was going on they, I got pretty close with one of them, who understood who was on the counterterrorism team - the northeast, and was part of the A-team, so to speak, and he looked at what I was looking at, I passed a lot of my information through him, and I said, ‘am I crazy? Please tell me that I’m crazy. I’d rather be crazy, than this be true.’ And he said, nope, and it is worse than you think. So, he validated a lot of things. He could not break any rules, and I wouldn’t let him, because he was my friend, but he helped me see and interpret things. So, one of the most powerful things I could have done was to push this through the system and see how the system responded. And it’s the system’s response that indicts them, in the end. Just as the system’s response to the EPA, and the environmental disaster in lower Manhattan indicts them If this were a true terrorist attack, you would have been seeing pictures of our lungs all over national TV for years to come. Metaphorically, that sort of thing. You never saw what it was really like. So, basically, after I got thrown out of JP Morgan, my attitude was as soon as everyone knows, what Ptech really is and they understand that it was for real, all will be forgiven and I will be back in business. And, umm, that sure didn’t happen. And I’m not sure, even, at this stage whether I want to be involved with anything to do with corporate America or the government, because, look at what’s happening. I’m looking at the people that are being put in place, like Negroponte, Director of Intel, and I’m hearing the inside response to that. I know where he comes from and what his pedigree is politically, and one by one, we’re seeing the handwriting on the wall. And most people are looking for exit strategies, you might say leave the country, go to France, go to Canada, but there are no exit strategies for this. All of this stuff took money to fund. And it was funded through major financial crimes, money laundering and looting. Call it looting, looting of the S&Ls, looting of the banking system, and what, what we’re in the middle of now, which is the looting of Social Security. And this is all being done sys…the looting of HUD, it’s all being done systematically to keep the slush funds up for the game at play.

B.F.: Where do you think this is headed?

I.S.: Not any place good for people. And, it isn’t just going to be America, it’s going to be global.

B.F.: Well, Indira Singh, thank you very much.

I..S.: Thank you, Bonnie.