The Sacramento Connection To 9/11

by Chaim Kupferberg Wednesday, Oct. 22, 2003 at 9:51 AM
editor@globalresearch.ca

In this excerpt taken from Kupferberg's article "Truth, Lies, and The Legend of 9/11", Kupferberg looks at two copy-cat mass murder episodes in Sacramento which occurred just days before September 11.

In the immediate aftermath of September 11, the mainstream newspapers were replete with items implicating Argenbright security (which was charged with overall security at Logan Airport) with lax procedures, thereby largely giving a "free pass" to the two companies that actually handled passenger screening for the hijacked planes out of Logan.

Besides Huntleigh, the other security company at Logan screening passengers was Burns Security, through its subsidiary, Globe Security. Burns Security, the former employer of Timothy McVeigh and suspected al-Qaida member Mohamed Abdi (connected by authorities to attempted "millennial" bomber Ahmed Ressam), also happened to make the news in the most high profile incident preceding September 11. Just a few days before the Twin Towers came down, a disgruntled Burns security guard by the name of Joseph Ferguson went on a murderous rampage, killing, among several others, his supervisor at Burns - a Ukrainian immigrant by the name of Nikolay Popovich, in the Sacramento suburb of Rancho Cordova. Before Ferguson turned his gun on himself, he claimed that he was inspired to follow in the footsteps of Timothy McVeigh and Nikolay Soltys, a Ukrainian immigrant who, only a couple weeks before Ferguson, had went on his own mass murder rampage in the suburb of Rancho Cordova. In Ferguson's home, authorities found right wing militia literature, particularly that of the World Church of the Creator. The Ferguson episode also caused a temporary disruption in Burns' West Coast operations, forcing many of its employees to steer clear of work, out of harm's way, until Ferguson could be apprehended.

A post-script on Nikolay Soltys, the Sacramento mass murderer who inspired Ferguson's rampage: on February 12, 2002, Soltys' lawyer, Tommy Clinkenbeard, revealed in an Associated Press article that a Sacramento County social services agency was tracking Soltys before the slayings, and that Clinkenbeard was barred by court order from seeing all of Soltys' social services records, which were sealed. Clinkenbeard said that he intended to subpoena those records, but Soltys was found hanging in his jail cell the very next day. His cell had been under 24-hour surveillance.

What, if any, was the connection here to September 11? Were these copy-cat mass murder episodes just a random occurrence - or perhaps indicative of a far more murky, complex drama playing out just below the surface? Yet none of this would have merited any notice in chronicling the Legend of 9/11, had there not been a crucial Burns/Al-Qaida/Right Wing Militia/Sacramento nexus in the millennial lead-up to 9/11.

In the weeks leading up to January 1, 2000, the news media were swamped with speculations of impending catastrophe. We had already experienced the domestic terror wrought by Timothy McVeigh (representing the right wing militia set) and Ted Kaczynski alias the "Unabomber" (representing the lone wacko set). Now we were told to expect an apocalyptic meltdown of our technological infrastructure by way of the Y2K "bug", or, alternatively, an attack by America's self-declared Number One Enemy - Osama bin Laden. The expected catastrophe came 21 months later than expected, with the blow struck in New York City.

Yet according to the Official 9/11 Legend, the expected millennial catastrophe was actually averted two weeks before the new year, with the arrest in Seattle of al-Qaida operative Ahmed Ressam. Ressam, as was later discovered, was on his way to mastermind a massive terror attack on the West Coast - at Los Angeles International Airport, a facility secured through the services of Burns Security. After September 11, authorities arrested a former Burns security guard named Mohamed Abdi in Washington, D.C., on the pretext that he was connected to Ressam.

Ten days before Ressam was arrested - on December 4, 1999 - two right wing "militiamen" were arrested on charges of plotting to blow up, on the new year, a Suburban Propane facility at Elk Grove near Sacramento. It was thought that had they succeeded, hundreds of casualties might have resulted. It is thus on the West Coast, in the lead-up to the millennial new year, that we have the convergence of a pre-existing domestic threat (i.e. the militias stoked through the legends of Waco and Ruby Ridge) and a pre-existing foreign threat (i.e. the bin Laden minions stoked through the legends of Gulf War '91 and World Trade Center '93). As we shall see later in this article, these two threats had actually converged for the first time back in April 1995, with Timothy McVeigh's destruction of the FBI Murrah building in Oklahoma.

Sacramento, though by no means the only West Coast city with an alleged al-Qaida connection, did seem to have a magnetic pull for this type of convergence. An al-Qaida graduate of Cal State, Sacramento, Raed Hijazi, was charged with plotting to blow up a Jordanian hotel on the millennial new year, while another al-Qaida operative, Ali A. Mohamed - a former Sacramento resident who was also a U.S. Army sergeant in Fort Bragg, N.C. - had pleaded guilty to the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Africa (the bombings that had garnered bin Laden his most widespread notice up until the U.S.S. Cole attack in October 2000). On the domestic terror front, Sacramento was also the scene of the notorious racist attacks on local synagogues by the Williams brothers.

End of excerpt.

Original: The Sacramento Connection To 9/11