All right, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest is Kurt Haskell.
He's a lawyer from Detroit, Michigan.
Welcome back to the show.
Are you there, Kurt?
Yeah, how's it going?
It's going great.
I appreciate you joining us this morning or this afternoon, barely.
Sure, no problem.
All right.
So today, Abdulmutallab, the underbomber, pled guilty and his trial was called off.
I guess he'll be sentenced soon.
And I thought that was very unfortunate because I'd read a headline that said that he was planning to call you as a defense witness.
Not that anything that I've read about you or heard you say had anything to do with really acquitting him.
But you do have part of the story that, best I can tell, was not to be part of the prosecution's case, that Abdulmutallab knew somebody, at least one other person, who was involved in helping him change planes in the Netherlands.
And so I really wanted to hear your testimony and especially your cross-examination, which seemed like it would probably be a lot of fun.
Are you as disappointed as I am?
Yes and no.
Yeah, I wanted to go testify and tell what I witnessed and what I know to everybody.
But at the same time, I've been starting to fear my safety a little bit the past few days since he made an announcement that I would not only be testifying, but I would be his only witness.
So I started to look behind me and check behind doors and that sort of thing.
Hey, that's understandable.
You got to look out for number one.
Yeah, exactly.
So yeah, yes and no, I guess would be the answer.
All right, now, so let's go back.
I went and reread the transcript of our last interview to make sure I remembered it right this morning.
You were there when a flight to Detroit departed from the Netherlands.
You were on it on Christmas 2009, the flight that Abdulmutallab attempted to to explode a bomb on board.
And you saw something in the Netherlands, part of your story, at least the part about what happened at the airport in Detroit and the second individual in question was corroborated by two different witnesses.
I forget two different other witnesses.
I forget whether the first part was also Brian Ross reported that the FBI, he didn't name you, but reported what was obviously the FBI taking your allegations quite seriously and continuing to investigate them.
And that's basically my setup for us.
Why don't you tell us what you saw in the Netherlands?
Yeah, well, what I saw, at least the important part was, you know, my wife and I were sitting by the boarding gate on the floor playing cards and I saw a black, it looked like an black, you know, African kid, teenager, wearing a white t-shirt and some jeans in the middle of winter.
And, you know, it looked like a poor kid to me, walking with a wealthy looking, it looked like it was an Indian man to me, around age 50, head on a tan suit.
And I just thought the two of them looked like a weird pair.
So I just kind of was people watching as they went up to the counter, talking to an airline worker at the counter, and the Indian man said, this man needs to get on the flight, but he doesn't have a passport.
And then she said back, well, if he doesn't have a passport, he can't get on the flight.
And then he said back to her, he's from Sudan, we do this all the time, kind of arguing with her.
And then she referred the two of them down the hallway to talk to her manager.
At the time, it didn't mean anything to me.
And then, you know, as our flight is coming into land in Detroit, seven or eight hours later, this African kid, who now is known as the underwear bomber, you know, lit and so-called explosive device, trying to put our plane down, blow it up.
So that's, you know, that's what I witnessed.
But the, you know, the implications from that, I've drawn a lot of conclusions since that day.
I've done thousands of hours of research into this since that time.
And I've come to the conclusion that the U.S. government gave Umar an intentionally defective bomb and put him on the plane to stage a fake terrorist attack.
And that's what really happened.
And that was going to be what I was going to testify about.
And I believe that's what led to the plea deal.
Soon as Umar announces that I'm going to be testifying for him, we have a plea deal.
So I don't think that's a coincidence.
The government did not want me to testify to these sort of things.
And so what indications do you have for your assertion there?
Well, a lot.
There's a lot.
If you're if your readers are really interested in it, they should.
I'm sorry, your listeners should take a look at my blog, Haskellfamily.blogspot.com.
Just I'll just say a few things offhand.
Have you gone ahead and identified this guy?
Do you know who he is?
I have an idea who he is, but the the video remains hidden to this day.
It's never been shown.
I believe, again, I went to most of the pre-trial hearing, so I got to see a lot of things talked about before the trial, too.
And I believe who this man is, is the in Amsterdam.
They have another level of security at the airport.
They have an interview where they interview each passenger.
And I think he was the person doing the interview of Umar.
Not positive of that, but I think so.
Well, and that would make perfect sense, right?
That the guy who is talking to the airline employee is part of airport security.
And that Mutalob has already come to him and said, I'm from Sudan.
I don't have my passport.
Will you help me get on the plane?
And the guy says, yeah, right.
And he's an undercover intelligence agent for the U.S. government.
OK, but based on what?
I mean, why couldn't he just be the airport, local airport security guy?
Because like I was saying, there's a whole lot to this.
If you give me about an hour, I'll explain it all.
There's that much to it.
Well, I'll give you another.
And a lot of it is things that I've witnessed, things I've seen, things other people have told me, goes on and on and on.
But if you look at the congressional testimony of Patrick Kennedy, and you can watch this on YouTube during the hearings in Congress, he says, we wanted Mutalob on the plane.
We're tracking him.
We wanted what he says, which is partially true.
We wanted him in the U.S. so we could catch accomplices.
So there you have it, that the U.S. wanted him in the country intentionally.
They don't admit the rest, giving him an intentionally defective bomb, which and I've discussed this matter with Anthony Chambers, UMAR's standby attorney, who completely agrees with me.
And that was going to be part of the defense.
You know, I've witnessed pretrial motions on this too, indicating that the government's own experts have indicated or would be testifying that there was enough explosives to even cause an explosion.
And the so-called bomb lacked the blasting cap.
Also yesterday, right before the trial started, Anthony Chambers filed a motion requesting that the explosive device not be called a bomb during the trial or not be called an explosive because it could not have caused an explosion.
So, you know, I can go on and on and on.
The CIA and our FBI have admitted five recent plots where they've given out fake bombs to terrorists.
So, you know, again, I can go on and on and on about this.
But that, you know, that's what really happened.
The government gave him a fake bomb, an undercover intelligence officer, and put him on the plane intentionally to cause fake terrorist attack.
Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, I'm I'm trying to I'm trying to provoke you and play devil's advocate here, because I think, you know, that's probably right.
Why not?
Of course, as you said, they do this all the time.
A guy was going to fly remote control drones into the Pentagon a couple of weeks ago.
But, you know, I'm trying to give you a chance to go on and on and state your case as best you can.
Let me pull up my blog because I can't remember everything off.
All right, well, that's fine, because we're about to have to go out and take this break and we'll have another 10 minutes when we get back.
It's Kurt Haskell.
He witnessed a well-dressed man help Abdulmutallab get on the plane in the Netherlands.
And then there was a whole other controversy about the man in orange back at the Detroit airport who was carted away by the FBI and their bomb sniffing dogs.
Maybe we can talk a little bit about that on the other side of this break and and figure out what else he knows in the case of Abdulmutallab, the underbomber who pled guilty today, who canceled his trial.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm on the line with Kurt Haskell.
He's an attorney from Michigan and a witness to the underbomber attack of Christmas 2009.
And so he described seeing a guy who he's concluded was probably a security officer at the airport in Amsterdam where they were changing planes getting on this flight to Detroit that day.
And I was going to give you a chance here to state your case or how it is that you figure that it must have been the Americans who gave him his fake bomb or couldn't possibly work explosives, basically, and put him on this plane, Kurt.
Sure.
He was an undercover intelligence officer.
Um, so if you're looking for a smoking gun, the government's hidden that the smoking gun is the airport security video that they won't release.
So what I used to conclude my theory is a thousand little pieces of evidence that you have to take.
It's like a puzzle.
You take each one and a few of them together.
They mean nothing.
But if you look at all them together, you can see a clear picture developed.
So I've stated a few of them already.
So you don't think that he had his bomb when he left Yemen?
I it's possible, but I doubt it.
The more likely scenarios that he got it at the airport or just outside the airport.
It doesn't make a lot of sense to have this bomb thrown in your underwear in Yemen.
And then you go to three different countries after that through all this security.
And it doesn't make a lot of sense.
But, you know, I don't know.
The story with the man in orange, maybe he had the blasting cap and he was supposed to pass it off to the kid and didn't or something.
Could be.
I could be.
I don't know.
I haven't really.
I've tried to focus more on the sharp-dressed man, because to me, that's the smoking gun.
And, you know, the evidence the government really can't deny and not so much the man in orange.
To me, he's a side character at this point.
The sharp-dressed man is really inexplainable at all.
It shows total government involvement, in my opinion.
You don't just put a guy on a flight without a passport.
You know, the Dutch military police have already indicated that Umar never went through passport check in Amsterdam.
And obviously, I know why.
He was escorted around it.
And it's no coincidence that he just happens to have a bomb or a fake bomb in his underwear.
It doesn't happen.
It's not a coincidence.
It was intentional.
So, but let me state, you know, some other evidence, because you still don't seem to be convinced that I'm right.
The House of Representatives in June or July 2009 passed a bill to restrict use of body scanning machines.
It was currently pending in the Senate in December 2009 when this attack happened.
Despite the fact that the House of Representatives already passed the bill, the TSA continued to order more body scanners and ordered 150 more in November 2009.
The Patriot Act was up for vote the second week of December 2009.
Hillary Clinton indicated that her constituents were very unhappy over the continuing war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, so she indicated that it would be best to delay the vote.
It was too controversial at that time, and it was delayed until February.
2010.
Obviously, the underwear bomber event on Christmas Day 2009 affected both of those bills.
The FBI visited me a few days after the attack, and I said to them in my office, you know, I think the most logical point to start this interview would be you showing me the picture of the man that escorted the bomber through security at the airport.
You know, isn't that logical?
And they both did like a half head turn to each other and did a little bit of a chuckle.
No response.
No pictures to me to identify him.
No video footage ever.
They've never ever asked me to identify the man.
The prosecutors have never ever talked to me about the man, who you think would be one of the most wanted men in the world, an accomplice to the underwear bomber.
Never once called me to ask me about it.
Never mentioned him anywhere.
Um, the, if you look at the statements by the guy that sat next to Umar, he's only done one interview ever because the FBI told him not to talk to anybody.
And if you look, his name's Jay Howard.
If you look at the transcript of his interview, he says a pretty curious statement.
Um, here's what he says.
I don't want to call him a terrorist because he hasn't been treated as a terrorist and it wasn't a national threat.
It wasn't a national threat.
So what was it then?
You can see by implication here, Mr. Howard, who has been told not to say anything by the FBI, knows that it was a fake bomb.
That's why the FBI, why the FBI is telling him not to talk to anyone.
Yeah, perhaps.
I gotta tell you, I, you know, honestly, I think, Kurt, you're much better served by sticking to what you saw and what they have left to explain to you about what it is that you saw rather than...
I think you remember, I remember you doing this to me last time, too.
Seems to me that you just buy the propaganda of the media and the government.
I've lived it.
Look, man, actually...
I've lived this for two years.
I've seen how the media reacts.
First of all, Kurt, anyone can go back and read the transcripts or listen to the previous interviews.
They're both at antiwar.com/radio.
Search my name and yours and they'll come up and I don't think that they will find that that's the case at all.
And in fact, I think that you're probably right.
I'm just saying when you say, well, Chertoff made money on it and they had these scanners and whatever.
The fact of the matter is these people are going to take advantage of any crisis, whether they were the ones who caused the crisis or not.
So that's hardly even circumstantial evidence.
You see it.
So I'm saying if you make your case about and stick to what it is that you know, instead of all this speculation, kind of, well, this one guy said this sort of indecipherable thing that he's never explained.
It's all evidence.
It's all little pieces of evidence that go to the final, the final story, the final result.
You know, if you take a few pieces of it, it's easy to throw them out.
If you take a hundred of them, it's not so easy.
Go watch the testimony of Patrick Kennedy in Congress.
I mean, that's what the FBI always says.
Look at our giant pile of documents.
It's all quantity and not quality.
I'm saying stick to the quality, even if there's just a few things that are absolutely indisputable, such as you saw this guy who still has not been held accountable in any way.
Help this guy on the plane.
Let's get him under hot lights and talking about what it is that he knows.
You make a lot better case than you have this quantity of these little tidbits of things that may or may not mean anything.
No, I disagree.
When you have a thousand pieces of evidence that all point to the same thing, there's your case.
Just like, just like the prosecution was going to do in this case.
They had a month, a month they were going to use to put on their case.
Every little piece of evidence.
That's how you put on your case.
Well, you know, whether if you want to believe it or not.
Personally, I don't care.
I'm convinced 100% that I'm right.
And it's not just that.
It's me talking to people, me talking to a standby attorney.
Some of the things I can't mention what we talked about, but I'll tell you this.
I said, Mr. Chambers, here's my theory on the case.
Dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.
Umar was given a fake bomb, put on the plane, this stage of false terrorist attack.
Obviously, I think I have a valid civil case.
Obviously, there's some things about the evidence you can't talk to me about.
If you were in my position, would would you sue the federal government over this?
And he looked at me and he said, sue the government.
You have the evidence to back you up.
Things like that, Scott.
Yeah, that I know that I told you that I know that I'm right.
I already think that you're probably right about this.
I just think that, you know, maybe I'm I was being a jerk or something.
I was sort of just trying to criticize the way that you go about making the case when you say, well, the guy said he wasn't a national threat.
Well, nobody even knows.
What does that mean anyway?
It doesn't mean anything that I don't think that helps you make your case.
Another little piece.
Oh, I do.
Every little piece does every little piece of the puzzle.
Because if you're looking for the smoking gun, you're not going to see it.
You have the federal government in control of all the evidence.
All you get are little bits here and there, little pieces.
You have to put them all together because you'll never get the big piece that will always be hidden.
The airport security video.
I'll probably never get that.
Never.
It will never be shown.
Well, I agree with you on that.
And I think that that lawyer that you talked to is absolutely right that you should sue him.
You certainly have standing to sue.
Your life was apparently quite at risk here or maybe not.
But whatever you were, you were damaged enough in the thing.
And and you then possibly could have the right to discovery and force these people, have the court force these people to tell you who that well-dressed man is.
Right, which is exactly what I'm going to do next.
I sure hope so.
Man, I really am disappointed that the trial has been called off.
I guess they must have given him a really sweet deal for him to go ahead and plead guilty.
Yeah, I don't believe it's a coincidence that just a few days after he announced that I would be testifying for him that there was a plea deal.
They've been working on a plea deal for 22 months with no success at all.
And I don't think it's a coincidence that sending has been put off till January either.
I think that's so that everyone forgets about this case and then he'll be given his lenient sentence and no one will report on it.
If you want, I can hold you over the break and give you one more 10 minute segment.
I don't want to cut you short here, Kurt.
It's up to you.
OK, great.
Well, hold on.
We won't be back till six after.
So go ahead and take a break.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
Right now we're talking with Kurt Haskell.
His website.
Adventures with Kurt and Laurie can be found at HaskellFamily.blogspot.com.
And as we were talking about before, he's a witness to the well-dressed man in Amsterdam helping Abdulmutallab get on the plane without a visa, apparently.
And then later, this guy tried to ignite or otherwise somehow detonate some explosives above Detroit, Christmas Day 2009.
And Kurt, I'm just going to turn this 10 minutes over to you and try to let you make your case best you can.
I'll ask follow up questions if I think I can help be productive.
But otherwise, go ahead and tell us why you're so convinced that the U.S. government behind this.
Said a few things already.
I was at a hearing earlier this year, too, where prosecutors argued they should not have to turn over any evidence to standby attorney chambers.
Now, Umar, Umar's the bomber, has been representing himself with the help of standby attorney chambers.
Standby meaning like an assistant.
Umar could tell him to do whatever parts of the case he wanted to.
Now, usually the attorney gets all the evidence.
And it's protected under the attorney client privilege, meaning it can't be shared with anyone without the defendant's agreement.
So in this case, since chambers was not the attorney, the fact of him getting the evidence could be found out by other people by subpoena, for instance, me.
And there was an argument whether the evidence should be turned over to Umar.
Or the chambers and what the prosecution said during this hearing, which I was sitting in on watching, they said, we don't want to turn it over to chambers because third parties may get ahold of it and use it in a civil case against us.
Against the government, against the government.
So now look back to what their theory on the cases.
We have some crazy Al Qaeda person, Umar, lighting a bomb, trying to blow up a plane.
So why would someone like me be able to sue the government over that?
Well, they have admitted, and I'm just playing adversarial process with you here, Kurt.
They have admitted that his father warned the CIA that, hey, listen, my son has gone completely off the rails.
He's palling around.
You can't sue the government for negligence.
You can't?
No, you can only sue them for an intentional act.
Hell, I'm not even sure you can sue them for anything these days with all their sovereign immunity.
But anyway, you're under the law.
You're point valid.
You can't sue them for an intentional act.
So again, there's more evidence backing up what I'm telling you.
What sort of intentional act did they do here that they want to hide evidence from me about?
You know, you can see how these pieces start stacking up and why I believe what I do.
So that, to me, was very telling.
Again, none of it reported in the media.
None of these things I tell you ever get reported.
I was, you know, I'd go down to a hearing.
I'd watch the hearing.
I'd look at the media report after and I'd shake my head.
I would be like, that's completely different than what I saw.
And, you know, they report on things that I think are totally irrelevant, leave out the important things.
And I just kept shaking my head, you know, at how the media was covering all this up.
It was astonishing.
So I go down to another pre-trial hearing on July 7th, just a few months ago.
And the reason for this hearing was because standby attorney chambers requested that the trial be delayed.
And he wanted the trial delayed.
It was set for to start October 4th last week, which it did.
Here's what he said.
The defense just dumped on me what I think is the most significant evidence of this case.
And then he went on to list what it was.
And remember what my theory on the case was, an undercover intelligence agent provided Umar with an intentionally defective bomb and put him on the plane, despite the fact that he didn't have a passport.
So keep that in mind.
This is the evidence that he got.
19 months later, they hid this evidence for 19 months, thereby denying chambers an adequate attempt to look at or hire experts to decipher it.
A copy of Umar's passport.
Okay.
A disc containing a chemical analysis of the composition of the bomb.
Airport security video and audio.
Four disc of DNA analysis.
I'm not sure how that plays in.
And the fifth one, a witness statement from a Dutch non-law enforcement citizen government profiler who talked to Umar during the time in question.
And if you put that together, I think this is where I come up with the sharp-dressed man being the person that did the interview and how I tie them together.
Because again, Chambers is saying this is the most significant evidence of the case.
So you can see that this evidence was hidden for 19 months and how it ties into what I was saying all along.
But then the hearing ended with Judge Edmund saying, no, I'm not going to delay it.
This case has been going on almost two years already.
And Chambers was irritated over this.
And what he said was, well, how do I know the government's not hiding anything else?
And I was expecting the government to say, the prosecutors for the government to say, we turn over everything.
That's not what they said.
They said, oh, yeah, we have more evidence, but we're not turning it over.
And Judge Edmund said, well, you're going to turn it over to me and then I'll decide what he can have.
So you could see, again, they're continuing to hide evidence here.
And again, if you look back in the theory what the government says, some crazy al-Qaeda nut, why do you need to hide evidence from the defense?
There should be an open and shut case here.
You know, you have 200 people on the plane.
Almost all of them can identify this guy as the bomber.
Why is there a need to hide evidence?
You should be able to just lay your case out.
Say, here's all the evidence defense.
There's no defense for it.
Here it is.
It's not what you're seeing, what I was seeing.
They're hiding evidence.
Why?
Yeah, risking their own case.
Risking their own case.
Again, Scott, so again, I'm not just creating this out of nothing.
All these things point in the same direction.
If you look at them all as a whole, you know, living in, you know, me watching all these things again and again, and again, you didn't see this in the media.
The media reported this hearing does not indicate any of this.
You know, it'll just say, oh, there was a hearing, you know, chambers requested trial be delayed.
He got evidence late.
You know, delay was denied.
Something like that.
And you don't get all these little details like I have because I was going on watching, you know, so I'm not some lunatic that pulls this, my final conclusion out of thin air.
Well, that's why I just want you to make a solid case.
So that they don't take you out of context here.
You know, I think I've more than done that.
And, you know, if anyone's still doubting me, just go back to my blog, go back to Christmas Day 09.
I've posted probably 30 posts on this.
Start reading forward.
It's really it's really a bizarre thing what I've gone through with this and, you know, how it's played out and, you know, just how the media is treating me, how they refuse to report on critical things or twist things around to point them in direction of the government's theory on the case and things like that.
Yeah, well, you know, we first spoke in the same direction.
We first spoke New Year's Eve 2009.
Yeah, very early on.
And even then it was pretty clear because, you know, what you said, you're a lawyer and you say these things where people can hear you and journalists jot it down.
They don't know if they're supposed to be on a gag order about it or not.
And it kind of made TV.
They interviewed you on NPR, a couple of TV interviews with some other witnesses, cooperated, that kind of thing.
But then it just dropped.
And as long as the FBI official spokesman is giving his version, independent, you know, witnesses, civilian witnesses are just no match for that when it comes to the TV narrative.
The one exception was Brian Ross, who pretty much gets everything wrong, at least in this case.
We do know he has a lot of sources inside the government at high levels.
And I'm Googling here madly trying to find it and I can't find it.
But I know for a fact that I read him right, that the FBI was looking into who may have helped him on the way in Amsterdam.
Yeah, I have it right in front of me.
Remember, the FBI.
What's the title on that?
What's that?
What's the title on that?
Here's the title.
Alert.
Female suicide bombers may be heading here from Yemen, January 22nd, 2010.
So this is about almost a month after it happened.
Remember, the FBI kept saying, no, there's nothing in the video, nothing in the video, nothing in the video.
We watch over 200 hours of security camera video.
There's no complex.
OK, then this then this comes out.
And here's the quote at the bottom, hidden at the bottom of this article, which doesn't seem even related to this.
Federal agents also tell ABC News dot com they're attempting to identify a man who passengers said helped Abdulmutallab change planes for Detroit when he landed in Amsterdam from Lagos, Nigeria.
Right.
Authorities had initially discount passenger accounts, but the agents say there's a growing belief the man may have played a role to make sure Abdulmutallab did not get cold feet.
All right.
That's Kurt Haskell, everybody.
Haskell family dot blogspot dot com.
Thanks, Kurt.
Appreciate it.
OK, no problem.
