What Congress Does Not Know about Enron and 9/11
May 31, 2002 For Immediate Release
By Atty. John J. Loftus*
A captured Al Qaida document reveals that US energy companies were secretly negotiating with the Taliban to build a
pipeline. The document was obtained by the FBI but was not allowed to be shared with other agencies in order to protect
Enron. Multiple sources confirm that American law enforcement agencies were deliberately kept in the dark and
systematically prevented from connecting the dots before 9/11 in order to aid Enron’s secret and immoral Taliban
negotiations.
The suppressed Al Qaida document tends to support recent claims of a cover-up made by several mid-level intelligence and
law enforcement figures. Their ongoing terrorist investigations appear to have been hindered during the same sensitive
time period while the Enron Corporation was still negotiating with the Taliban. An inadvertent result of the Taliban
pipeline cover-up was that the Taliban’s friends in Al Qaida were able to complete their last eight months of
preparations for 9/11 while the Enron secrecy block was still in force.
Although the latest order to block investigations allegedly resulted from Enron’s January 2002 appeal to Vice President
Dick Cheney, it appears that there were at least three previous block orders, each building upon the other, stretching
back for decades and involving both Republican and Democratic administrations.
The first block came in the 1970’s, as a result of Congressional reaction to domestic espionage against the anti-Vietnam
war movement. In a case of blatant over-reaction, the FBI placed all houses of worship and religious charities
off-limits for any surveillance whatsoever unless there was independent probable cause. This meant that all Mosques and
other Muslim meeting places for terrorist groups were effectively off limits until after a crime had been committed. The
block order was not lifted until last week by Atty. General Ashcroft.
The second block order, in force since the 1980’s, was against any investigation that would embarrass the Saudi Royal
family. Originally, it was designed to conceal Saudi support for Muslim extremists fighting against the Soviets in
Afghanistan and Chechnya, but it went too far. Oliver North noted in his autobiography, that every time he tried to do
something about terrorism links in the Middle East, he was told to stop because it might embarrass the Saudis. This
block remains in place.
As the combined result of these two blocks, the Saudis were able to fund middle eastern terrorists in complete secrecy
during the 1990’s through a network of Muslim charities in Virginia, Tampa and Florida. The Saudi funding network was
targeted at the destruction of the State of Israel and the obstruction of the Palestinian peace process.
The Saudi funding conduit has now been exposed and shut down by means of a private lawsuit, Loftus vs. Sami Al Arian,
which is currently pending in Hillsborough County, Florida. The lawsuit, filed on March 20, 2002, influenced the
government into raiding the Saudi charities in Herndon, Virginia, a few hours later.
After filing the Al-Arian lawsuit, Attorney Loftus began to receive very detailed documents and information about a
third block: a prohibition on investigations concerning the Taliban. In the early 1990’s, a consortium of American oil
companies (lead by Unocal) had hired Enron to determine the profitability of building an oil and gas pipeline across
Afghanistan so that America could have access to the Caspian Sea Basin, holding 1/8th of the worlds energy supplies.
There is no doubt that these secret negotiations existed, and that they were known to Al Qaida. Loftus recently received
an FBI translation of a highly classified and encrypted Al Qaida document, circa 1997-1998, which was retrieved and
decrypted from a computer laptop following the Embassy bombing in Africa. The document was written by Osama Bin Laden’s
military commander, Mohammed Atef, under his nom de guerre, Abu Haf, and reveals extensive knowledge of the supposedly
secret pipeline negotiations, and their potential economic worth to the Taliban, Pakistan and the U.S.
Former Afghanistan CIA agent Robert Baer has recently published a book charging that the cover-up of the 1990’s pipeline
negotiations revealed extensive financial corruption inside the Clinton administration, and contributed to the lack of
intelligence before 9/11. The Taliban negotiations temporarily collapsed in 1999 after Clinton reversed his NSC
advisor’s policy, and ordered a missile strike against terrorists in Afghanistan.
However, in January 2001, Vice President Cheney allegedly reinstated the intelligence block and expanded it to
effectively preclude any investigations whatsoever of Saudi-Taliban-Afghan oil connections. Former FBI counter-terrorism
chief John O’Neil resigned from the FBI in disgust, stating that he was ordered not to investigate Saudi-Al Qaida
connections because of the Enron pipeline deal. Loftus has confirmed that it was O’Neill who originally discovered the
AL Qaida pipeline memo after the Embassy bombings in Africa.
O’Neill gave an overview of the Enron block to two French authors who will soon be publishing in the United States. The
FBI is currently investigating Loftus’ links to John O’Neill, and is also refusing FBI agent Robert Wright permission to
publish his own findings about the Enron block.
Loftus asserts that the Enron block, which remained in force from January 2001 until August 2001 when the pipeline deal
collapsed, is the reason that none of FBI agent Rowley’s requests for investigations were ever approved. As numerous
British and French authors have concluded, the information provided by European intelligence sources prior to 9/11 was
so extensive, that it is no longer possible for either CIA or the FBI to assert a defense of incompetence.
It is time for Congress to face the truth: In order to give Enron one last desperate chance to complete the Taliban
pipeline and save itself from bankruptcy, senior levels of US intelligence were ordered to keep their eyes shut and
their subordinates ignorant.
The Enron cover-up confirms that 9/11 was not an intelligence failure or a law enforcement failure (at least not
entirely). Instead, it was a foreign policy failure of the highest order. If Congress ever combines its Enron
investigation with 9/11, Cheney’s whole house of cards will collapse.
- * About the author: As a former federal prosecutor, John Loftus had an insider’s knowledge of high level intelligence
operations, including obstruction of Congressional investigations. Loftus resigned from the Justice Department in 1981
to expose how the intelligence community had recruited Nazi war criminals and then concealed the files from
Congressional subpoena. After appearing on an Emmy Award winning segment of 60 Minutes, Loftus has spent the next two
decades writing histories of intelligence cover-ups, and serving as an unpaid lawyer helping other whistleblowers inside
US intelligence.