The Small World of 9/11 Players: LS2, Vidient, and AMEC

Posted on January 1, 2012 by Kevin Ryan

Detailed investigation reveals unexpected connections among people who played critical roles related to the attacks of September 11, 2001.  Earlier articles have covered some of those connections with respect to the World Trade Center (WTC) and the official reports which were produced to explain the WTC events.[1,2]  This article will begin to outline a wider set of connections that encompasses more aspects of 9/11.  Readers may find that, with respect to the 9/11 attacks and those who were responsible for protecting us from terrorism, it is a small world after all.
Barry McDaniel came to the WTC security company Stratesec, in 1996, to become its Chief Operating Officer.  In the next few years, Stratesec had contracts to provide security services not only for the WTC, but also for United Airlines, which owned two of the planes hijacked on 9/11, and Dulles Airport, where American Airlines Flight 77 took off that day.
At the WTC, McDaniel was in charge of the security operation in terms of what he called a “completion contract,” to provide services “up to the day the buildings fell down.”[3]  McDaniel came to Stratesec directly from BDM International, where he had been Vice President for nine years. BDM was a major subsidiary of The Carlyle Group for most of that time. When Barry McDaniel started at BDM, the company began getting a large amount of government business “in an area the Navy called Black Projects,” or budgets that were kept secret.[4]

The company that McDaniel now leads is called Lancaster Systems & Solutions (LS2).  As CEO at LS2, McDaniel has a board of directors which is led by Bruce Bradley.[5] This is an astounding connection due to the fact that Bradley is the founder of Bradley Woods, where Dick Cheney got his start. Cheney worked for Bradley Woods as Vice President during intermittent periods between the times he and Donald Rumsfeld were working for Nixon and running the Ford White House.
It seems an incredible coincidence that the “number two” man for Barry McDaniel today was formerly the closest colleague of Dick Cheney forty years ago.  Of course, people who have studied the attacks in detail no longer believe in coincidences related to 9/11.
It is also odd that LS2 is a company that is so focused on the “response” to 9/11.  In fact, few companies are more focused on the 9/11 aftermath than LS2, whose mission is to “deliver a diversified suite of responsive defense solutions to government organizations and multinational corporations who provide military, law enforcement, security, peacekeeping, and emergency response operations across the globe.”[6]  The company’s subsidiary, Global Service and Trade, provides equipment for police state operations around the world.
Between the years that he worked with Cheney and McDaniel, Bradley was a director for UBS (mentioned in the review of WTC connections) and Legg Mason, where he was a colleague of Cheryl Krongard, the wife of CIA Executive Director, Buzzy Krongard.
The board of directors which Bradley leads for McDaniel at LS2 includes another former VP of BDM, Ronald Riggin, and several other very interesting people.  One such person is Larry Johnson, a former CIA employee and State Department official.  Johnson was a paramilitary CIA officer from 1985 to 1989, but he also directed crisis management for hijackings and helped investigate the Lockerbie Bombing (Pan Am 103).
In 1994, Johnson started scripting Special Operations exercises for the State Department.  From 1996 to 2006, as Deputy Director of Counterterrorism within the State Department, he led terrorism training for senior-level government officials and served as an expert witness in cases against al Qaeda suspects.[7]

Another director working with Bradley and McDaniel at LS2 is David Pillor, the former director and Executive VP of InVision Technologies (InVision).  As the leading provider of bomb detecting equipment for airports, InVision had an interesting history which included installation of its equipment at most major airports prior to 9/11, including those from which the hijacked planes took off.
Sergio Magistri was the CEO of InVision from 1992 through 2004.  In a court case related to this period, InVision was charged “with authorizing improper payments to foreign government officials in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA).”[8]  The case represented the first, and perhaps only, time that the U.S. Department of Justice decided to not prosecute a company which had violated the FCPA.
Magistri and LS2’s Pillor are now both board members at Vidient Systems, Inc (Vidient), a video surveillance company that serves the “homeland security” industry.  Vidient is in strategic partnership with Autonomy Corp, where we find the “Prince of Darkness,” Richard Perle.  Fellow directors at Vidient include several people who played critical roles related to the events of September 11.
One director at Vidient is Richard Clarke, the former “Counterterrorism Czar,” whose job for nine years prior to 9/11 was to protect the United States from a terrorist attack.  There are many important questions that need to be answered regarding Clarke and his associations and actions leading up to 9/11.[9] Clarke’s role in the international failure to respond to the Rwandan genocide of 1994 is another matter that needs further investigation.[10]

At Vidient we also find The Lord Paul Condon.  In September 2000, Condon became a director at the British security company, Securicor (now G4S).  Three months later, in December 2000, Securicor bought a company called Argenbright which ran security on 9/11 at Dulles and Newark airports where Flight 77 and Flight 93, respectively, took off that day.  Argenbright also managed some, perhaps unrelated, security checkpoints at Logan Airport in Boston, where the two other 9/11 planes took off.
The year before 9/11, Securicor was allowing criminals to operate security, and three of its executives pled guilty to conspiracy.[11] And prior to 9/11, Argenbright pled guilty to falsifying employee records so that it could hire those convicted of drug possession and assault.[12] These facts are startling considering that just weeks after 9/11, officials were evaluating the possibility that the hijackings might have been “inside jobs” in that “the hijackers may have had accomplices deep within the ‘secure’ areas of airports.”[13]

Securicor faced about 30 lawsuits from victim’s families after 9/11.  Another director that Condon supervised at Securicor, Trevor Dighton, said of the company’s liability – “I’m not worried about it (the litigation) one little bit.  The two planes involved weren’t those that crashed into the towers – that’s the first thing.”  Dighton’s confidence might have had something to do with his opinion of Condon, whom Dighton said was “brilliant and knows what he’s doing.”[14]

Vidient director Condon came to Securicor directly from having served as the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in London for seven years. Corruption was rampant in Condon’s police force during the time he led it.[15] Condon himself was accused of being a racist and of withholding evidence related to the death of Princess Diana.  Although the official report on the racism accusations (The MacPherson Report) found that the police force that Condon led for years was “institutionally racist,” British Home Secretary Jack Straw refused to fire Condon.
Another Vidient director working with Pillor, Clarke and Condon is Michael Sheehan, the former U.S. State Department Ambassador at Large for Counterterrorism.  Sheehan was a long time member of the U.S. Army Special Forces.  He also served on the National Security Council for two presidents, George H.W. Bush from 1989 to 1992, and Clinton from 1995 to 1997.  After 9/11, Sheehan became the Deputy Commissioner of Counter Terrorism for the New York City police department.
Today, Sheehan is primarily associated with Torch Hill Investments.  Recently, Stephen Kappes, the “unusually powerful deputy CIA director” who was also the CIA’s Associate Deputy Director of Operations for Counterintelligence from 2000 to 2002, joined Torch Hill.  When signing on with Sheehan, Kappes claimed that — “Many of the al-Qaeda seniors still maintain that another crippling blow to New York City will cripple the United States. They think that this is the key.”[16]

Hopefully, Kappes is not as good at predicting these things as Sheehan has been.  After the bombing of the USS Cole, Sheehan asked Richard Clarke –“What’s it going to take to get them to hit al-Qaeda in Afghanistan?  Does al-Qaeda have to hit the Pentagon?”[17]  That certainly seems like a prescient statement considering that, less than one year later, that was exactly what happened.
Speaking of the Pentagon, the little discussed British company called AMEC had some interesting personnel.  It was AMEC’s subsidiary AMEC Construction NA that was responsible for reconstructing Wedge 1 of the Pentagon just before (and after) Flight 77 hit that exact spot in the building.  AMEC Construction NA was also immediately hired to clean-up the WTC site at Ground Zero, within hours of the destruction there.[18]

The British parent company, AMEC, provides “engineering and project management services to the world’s energy, power and process industries.”[19] It is a major international player in the oil and gas industry, as well as in other natural resource industries.  AMEC had a significant presence in Saudi Arabia dating back to the late 1970s, providing support to the national oil company Saudi Aramco, which is by far the richest company in the world.[20]  Executives and board members at AMEC included former directors of NM Rothschild, Kellogg Brown and Root (now Halliburton), and SG Warburg.
AMEC Construction NA was run out of Toronto, Ontario by a man named Peter Janson.  The company had offices in New York, Fort Lauderdale, and Phoenix.
From 1990 to 2001, Janson was a fellow director of Donald Rumsfeld at the Swiss-Swedish engineering company, ABB.   For the 11 years prior to 9/11, Rumsfeld was the only American director at ABB.  In an alarming turnabout, Rumsfeld helped ABB sell nuclear technology to North Korea in 2000 and, two years later, declared the same country a terrorist state and part of the “axis of evil.”[21]

Janson had been the president and CEO of an ABB predecessor, the Swedish company ASEA.  Interestingly, ASEA had used the swastika as its company logo until the 1930s.  Today, Janson is enjoying the fruits of the “War on Terror” as a director of Teekay Corporation, an oil and gas transport company that operates throughout the world.  Additionally, he “reports to the Prime Minister of Canada in his role as a member of the National Advisory Board on Science and Technology.”[22]

There will be more about AMEC and the Pentagon renovation project in future articles, but it is sufficient to say that much has been left uncovered in the official investigations into 9/11.  A simple review of the people whose roles were critical to the success of the attacks, and their associations before and after 9/11, brings to light surprising connections between companies that were responsible for security and construction, and the people most responsible for protecting the nation.

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[1] Kevin R. Ryan, Demolition Access to the World Trade Center (four parts with introduction by Don Paul), 911Review.com, http://911review.com/articles/ryan/demolition_access_DonPaul.html

[2] Kevin R. Ryan, The Top Ten Connection Between NIST and Nanothermite, Journal of 9/11 Studies, July 2008, http://www.journalof911studies.com/volume/2008/Ryan_NIST_and_Nano-1.pdf

[3] History Commons page for Stratesec, http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=stratesec

[4] Dan Briody, The Iron Triangle: Inside the Secret World of The Carlyle Group, Wiley publishers, 2003, p35
[5] Website for LS2, http://www.ls2global.com/team.html

[6] Website for LS2, http://www.ls2global.com/about.html

[7] Website for Berg Associates, profile for Larry C. Johnson, http://www.berg-associates.com/

[8] U.S. SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION, Litigation Release No. 19078, February 14, 2005, http://www.sec.gov/litigation/litreleases/lr19078.htm

[9] Kevin R. Ryan, Questions for Richard Clarke on COG, the UAE, and BCCI, DigWithin.net, http://digwithin.net/2011/08/20/clarke/

[10] Shoestring 9/11, 9/11 Counterterrorism Chief Richard Clarke and the Rwandan Genocide, 23 February 2010, http://shoestring911.blogspot.com/2010/02/911-counterterrorism-chief-richard.html

[11] Audrey Gillan and Stuart Millar, Securicor could face legal claims over hijack airports, The Guardian, 13 September 2001, http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2001/sep/13/september112001.usnews2

[12] Michele Orlecklin, Airlines: Why Argenbright Sets Off Alarms, Time Magazine, November 19, 2001, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0%2c9171%2c1001252%2c00.html

[13] Sally Donnelly, TIME Exclusive: An Inside Job?, Time Magazine, September 22, 2001, http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,175953,00.html

[14] Tom Berry, The Financial Director interview – Making crime pay, Financial Director, 08 December 2003, http://www.financialdirector.co.uk/financial-director/feature/1742931/the-financial-director-interview-making-crime-pay

[15] Brian Cathcart, Nasty furrow, New Statesman, 22 November 2004, http://www.newstatesman.com/200411220043

[16] Jeff Stein, CIA’s Stephen Kappes Emerges from Shadow of Retirement, SpyTalk, June 8, 2011, http://spytalkblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/cias-stephen-kappes-emerges-from-shadow.html

[17] Richard Miniter, Losing Bin Laden: How Bill Clinton’s Failures Unleashed Global Terror, Regnery Publishers, 2003

[18] David S. Chartock, Industry Rallies To Cleanup WTC Aftermath, SPECIAL REPORT! (9/12/01 — noon), New York Construction News, http://newyork.construction.com/news/WTC/0109_rallies.asp

[19] Website for AMEC, http://www.amec.com/

[20] Nicholas A. Vardy, The World’s Most Valuable Companies, The Global Guru, December 2009, http://www.theglobalguru.com/article.php?id=83&offer=GURU001

[21] Randeep Ramesh, The two faces of Rumsfeld, The Guardian, May 9,2003, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/may/09/nuclear.northkorea

[22] Businessweek profile for Peter Janson, http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/people/person.asp?personId=1190481&ticker=TK:US&previousCapId=329438&previousTitle=TEEKAY%20CORP