Abramoff was released Tuesday [9 June 2010] from a minimum-security federal prison in western Maryland to a halfway house ... before his scheduled release date of Dec. 4 ...

Less than a week before the 9-11 attack on 5 September, the so-called lead hijacker Mohamed Atta and several other hijackers made a still-unexplained visit onboard one of Pro Israeli lobbyist, Jack Abramoff’s casino boats.

SunCruz Casinos turns over documents in terrorist probe
TAMPA, Fla. – SunCruz Casinos has turned over photographs and other documents to FBI investigators after employees said they recognized some of the men suspected in the terrorist attacks as customers.

Michael Hlavsa, chairman of the gambling cruise company, said Wednesday two or three men linked to the Sept. 11 hijackings may have been customers on a ship that sailed from Madeira Beach on Florida’s gulf coast.
9/26/01 By Vickie Chachere, Associated Press writer, Florida Times-Union.

What no one seems able to answer is this:

What possible thrill could gambling offer men getting ready to die in less than a week? To this date, their Sept 5 visit to a gambling vessel overrun with retirees remains unexplained.

The gambling motif in the terrorist’s timeline doesn’t end there. The hijackers had no apparent reason to visit Las Vegas ... so why did they?

On June 28 at Boston’s Logan Airport, Mohamed Atta boarded a United Airlines flight and flew first class nonstop to San Francisco. He bypassed the bohemian North Beach district, and didn’t take the cruise to Alcatraz ...

Atta headed for Vegas.

On Aug. 10, Hani Hanjour and Nawaf Alhazmi used first-class tickets for a United flight from Dulles Airport near Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles International Airport, then on to Las Vegas. The story of the terrorists Las Vegas connection may never be known, admitted the Las Vegas FBI.

Within a month of the 9.11 attack — British Prime Minister Tony Blair had presented the case against Bin Laden. He sketched out the Cliff Notes version of the evidence. It wasn’t much, but it was the only explanation we ever received.

“Al Qaeda is a terrorist organization with ties to a global network,” Blair said.

In truth, the idea that Mohamed Atta and his henchmen needed help from an outside organization while they were in the U.S. was easy to understand ... Logistical support is difficult to arrange from caves.

Still, the FBI stepped in and quickly put a kibosh on that kind of talk ... “Government sources now say that the investigation so far suggests the 19 had ‘no major help’ in the United States,” said a story in the Washington Post which came out soon after Blair’s alarming faux pas.

“The 19 hijackers who carried out the worst act of terror ever to occur on U.S. soil worked with little outside help as a single, integrated group,” the Post reported.

PBS’s Frontline documentary on 9.11 supported this lone cadre theory. Correspondent Hedrick Smith, to his everlasting discredit, opened the show with this lie: “19 hijackers slipped through Europe and America unnoticed.”

Like lone gunmen, lone cadres are easier to explain. [more]

... super-lobbyist and Republican fundraiser Jack Abramoff has pleaded guilty to bribery, fraud, and other charges that could embroil Capitol Hill in the biggest corruption scandal in recent memory. As many as 60 members of Congress may be implicated in the massive network of payoffs, phony nonprofit foundations, and other criminal activities up to and including murder. None of this is especially surprising, and certainly libertarians, such as myself, are hardly shocked at the sight of public officials and private deal-makers enmeshed in a Dionysian orgy of brazen greed. There is one aspect of all this, however, that is especially interesting to foreign policy aficionados, and that is Abramoff’s connections to the far right wing of Israel’s Likud Party, the “settler” movement, and, here in America, Israel’s amen corner in the conservative movement.

According to a report by Michael Isikoff in Newsweek, Abramoff was soliciting funds on behalf of a shady organization known as the Capital Athletic Foundation (CAF), which was supposed to be funding sports programs and imparting “leadership skills” to inner-city youth. Instead, CAF funneled millions scarfed up from Indian tribes not only into Abramoff’s own pockets and the pockets of his cronies, but also to ultra-right-wing Israeli “settlers.” Isikoff reports:

“More than $140,000 of foundation funds were actually sent to the Israeli West Bank where they were used by a Jewish settler to mobilize against the Palestinian uprising. Among the expenditures: purchases of camouflage suits, sniper scopes, night-vision binoculars, a thermal imager, and other material described in foundation records as ‘security’ equipment. The FBI, sources tell Newsweek, is now examining these payments as part of a larger investigation to determine if Abramoff defrauded his Indian tribe clients.”

The fraudulently obtained money funded a paramilitary outfit based in the ultra-Orthodox settlement of Beitar Illit, a large community annexed after the ’67 war and the site of renewed building in open violation of the American-sponsored “road map.” The conduit for the money was one Schmuel Ben-Zvi, an old buddy of Abramoff’s who ... was recruited into the rabidly expansionist Israeli “settler” movement.

In any case, the Israeli connection to the Abramoff scandal is potentially much more extensive than related here. By way of deception thou shalt make war – the slogan of Israel’s Mossad is worth recalling, in this context, as key to understanding the neocons’ modus operandi.  [more]