In December 1998, Michael Riconosciuto was serving out a 26-year prison sentence at Allenwood Penitentiary in Pennsylvania on drug charges when he was given information by a rabbi close to his family about an al-Qaeda plot to hijack airplanes and crash them into the World Trade Center, Pentagon and U.S. military bases around the Washington, D.C., area.
Riconosciuto had been a scientist working for U.S. intelligence agencies and CIA consultant whose family had close ties with people working in Israeli intelligence and in high levels of the Israeli government.[1] Riconosciuto himself mowed CIA Director William Casey’s lawn as a child.
There is strong evidence that Riconosciuto had been set up on the drug charges because he knew too much about secret CIA operations, including the theft of computer software known as PROMIS (Prosecutor’s Management Information System) from entrepreneur Bill Hamilton that was used by the CIA to facilitate illegal surveillance and money laundering.
Riconosciuto had helped modify the PROMIS software for the CIA and knew about all kinds of CIA criminal activity, including the CIA’s paying off drug lords with a vast secret cash supply.[2]
According to Daniel Sheehan, an investigator and attorney who interviewed Riconosciuto at length, the rabbi provided Riconosciuto with the information on the al-Qaeda terrorist plot drawn from Israeli intelligence with the hope that Riconosciuto could negotiate a reduction of his prison sentence after alerting federal authorities about it.
The plan did not work because when Riconosciuto reported his tip to agents from the CIA and a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) agent, nothing was done. A presidential briefing from CIA Director George Tenet to Bill Clinton on December 4, 1998, did note Riconosciuto’s warnings about bin Laden preparing to hijack U.S. aircraft, though Clinton and the White House did not act on it.
In early 2001, Riconosciuto’s lawyer, Louis Buffardi, reached out to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell and Attorney General John Ashcroft, as well as attorney Scott Lassar and Keith Cutri, an FBI Special Agent from the Williamsport, Pennsylvania, office, about the planned attacks involving hijacked planes but was ignored.
Sheehan spoke about all this on February 26 on the “Uncontrolled Opposition” radio program airing on WBAI and the Progressive Radio Network with Peter Osborne, a researcher close to Riconosciuto, whose software company was stolen by the CIA in the late 1990s and whose life was threatened by CIA agent Robert Booth Nichols.
Both Sheehan and Osborne are speaking out now because they want the public to be alerted to the failure of government authorities to act on Riconosciuto’s information and to investigate what happened. They want the public to demand a proper investigation, a real 9/11 commission, unlike the fraudulent official one that failed to investigate so many things.
Hellbound and Down 