In another email 10 hours later, Burton indicates that the body was in fact buried at sea:

Down & dirty done, He already sleeps with the fish….

** Fred’s Note: Although I don’t really give a rats ass, it seems to me
that by dropping the corpse in the ocean, the body will come back to haunt
us….gotta be violating some sort of obscure heathen religious rule that
will inflame islam? I was sleeping thru that class at Langley.

The US Govt needs to make body pics available like the MX’s do, with OBL’s
pants pulled down, to shout down the lunatics like Alex Jones and Glenn
Beck.

Did Fred Burton really know as much as he seemed to want his co-workers to believe?

The post Stratfor Emails: Bin Laden Brought to US Before Sea Burial appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

Needless to say, the villain mastermind who heads this network, Jalaluddin Haqqani, has, as the NYT put it, “allied himself over the years with the C.I.A.”  It quoted “one former American intelligence official” who “worked with the Haqqani family in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation in the 1980s”; that official “said he would not be surprised if the United States again found itself relying on the clan: ‘You always said about them, ‘best friend, worst enemy’.”  Earlier this year, Reuters added:

Former U.S. Congressman Charlie Wilson, whose relentless fund-raising for the Afghan resistance was depicted by Tom Hanks in the movie “Charlie Wilson’s War,” once called Jalaluddin “goodness personified.” [Jalaluddin] even visited the White House when Ronald Reagan was president.

Reuters also noted that, back then, the U.S. used Pakistan’s ISI to funnel money to the Haqqanis to enable them to buy weapons.  So the ISI’s funding of the Haqqanis has been going on since the early 1980s; the only difference is that it is now done without U.S. participation.

Can you believe that Pakistan would involve itself with Goodness Personified such a treacherous Terrorist clan?  How evil must Pakistan be to lend support to the Haqqanis — “the Sopranos of the Afghanistan war,” says the NYT — simply to advance its own interests?  What kind of country would do such a thing?  Worse, it seems Pakistan is now following in Iran’s footsteps: “interfering” in the American right to occupy its neighbor.  How dare Iran interfere in Iraq, and how dare Pakistan interfere in Afghanistan.

Of course, the reason a new Villain Mastermind is needed in that region is because the last one who played that role for so long, Osama bin Laden, was just killed.  In July, 2004, the BBC reported on the origins of Al Qaeda and wrote: “During the anti-Soviet jihad Bin Laden and his fighters received American and Saudi funding. Some analysts believe Bin Laden himself had security training from the CIA.” President Carter’s National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, traveled to Afghanistan in 1979, met with bin Laden, and praised his mujadheen. And earlier this year, The New York Times‘ John Burns wrote about his first meeting with bin Laden in 1989, and this is what he reported:

In light of what transpired at Abbottabad, several things stand out: First, the fact that access to the camp lay through a C.I.A. contact involved in America’s financing and arming of the mujahedeen; Bin Laden and his cohorts were then, at least notionally, America’s men . . . [and] the close liaison, then and later, between the jihadis and the ISI, Pakistan’s spy agency, which acted as a conduit for American and Saudi backing of the mujahedeen.”

Indeed, Newsweek reported in late September, 2001 that Pakistan continuously warned the U.S. about the effects of funding bin Laden and friends: 

[Before 9/11,] Terrorists were regarded by most people as criminals, wicked and frightening, but not as mortal enemies of the state. There was a kind of collective denial, an unwillingness to see how monstrous the threat of Islamic extremism could be.

In part, that may be because the government of the United States helped create it. . . . In the coming weeks, if and when American Special Forces helicopters try to land in the mountains of Afghanistan to flush out bin Laden, they risk being shot down by Stinger surface-to-air missiles provided to the Afghan rebels by the CIA. . . .

Half a world away, people who understood the ferocity of Islamic extremism could see the coming storm. In the late ’80s, Pakistan’s then head of state, Benazir Bhutto, told the first President George Bush, “You are creating a Frankenstein.”

The last war in which the U.S. involved itself — in Libya — was fought for the profoundly humanitarian goal of removing the Evil Dictator Moammar Gadaffi from power (and not due to the bonanza of oil and other economic opportunities for U.S. corporations which the American Ambassador is now excitedly touting: that’s just a purely coincidental by-product that has nothing whatsoever to do with Gadaffi’s removal).  That Evil Libyan Dictator was someone with whom the U.S. quite recently extensively cooperated to render Terrorist suspects to be questioned and tortured, including — rather awkwardly — one of the leading rebels whom NATO just empowered, who was turned over to Gadaffi by the CIA to be tortured.

The U.S. fought a war in Iraq for similar reasons: to liberate the Iraqi people from the Hitlerian grip of Saddam Hussein.  Saddam was very scary because he had a lot of potent weapons . . . illicitly provided to him by the U.S. throughout the 1980s; as The Washington Post reported: “The administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush authorized the sale to Iraq of numerous items that had both military and civilian applications, including poisonous chemicals and deadly biological viruses, such as anthrax and bubonic plague.”  That American support took place when Saddam was doing things like “gassing his own people,” which would then be cited a decade later as to why Saddam had to be removed.  Heavy America arming of Iraq took place immediately after Iraq was taken off the list of Terrorist states so that the U.S. could fund and arm them; Iraq war quickly put back on that list once the U.S wanted to go to war with them (who says “Terrorism” is a meaningless term that the U.S. manipulates for its own ends?).

The Current Supreme American Enemy is Iran (U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice told Wolf Blitzer on Thursday that she was proud of walking out on the Iranian President’s speech because what he “does and says when he comes to the United Nations is absolutely odious, hateful, anti-Semitic, unacceptable” and that “the United States is gravely concerned about Iran’s nuclear program and its ambitions to have what we believe is nuclear weapon”).  But any military action against Iran would be quite tricky because of all those anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles the U.S. secretly shipped to the regime (through Israel) during the Reagan years.

One reason Endless War is endless is because the U.S. is so adept at creating and strengthening the Enemies who then need to be dispatched (and that’s independent of how American actions are the principal cause of the anti-U.S. animosity which ensures the War continues).  Orwell famously highlighted the propaganda that “we’ve always been at war with Eastasia,” but does the U.S. ever have any enemies that it did not at some point in the recent past fund, arm and/or cooperate with extensively?  How many years until we hear a drumbeat of messaging about how necessary it is to wage war against that heinous, murderous, raping, racist Islamist regime in Tripoli — the one the U.S. is arming and funding and just installed in power?

* * * * *

A secret journal maintained by Osama bin Laden and seized by the U.S. after his death reveals his true motivation for launching Terrorist attacks against the U.S.

The post Question About American Enemies appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

Who Is Rich Blee? MP3
Who Is Rich Blee? Transcript

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Moreover, in what appears to be an attempt to cover up the military unit’s intelligence work on al-Qaeda and Bin Laden prior to 9/11, a September 2008 Defense Department (DoD) Inspector General’s (IG) report that probed complaints lodged by the former deputy chief of the military unit in question, the Asymmetrical Threats Division of Joint Forces Intelligence Command (JFIC), also known as DO5, about the crucial information withheld from Congress, claimed “the tracking of Usama Bin Ladin did not fall within JFIC’s mission.”

But the IG’s assertion is untrue, according to the documents obtained by Truthout, and the discrepancy undercuts the official narrative about who knew what and when in the months leading up to 9/11.

Much of JFIC’s work on al-Qaeda and Bin Laden remains shrouded in secrecy and has not been cited in media reports revolving around pre-9/11 intelligence, which focused heavily on CIA and FBI “intelligence failures.” Only a few details about the military intelligence unit have surfaced over the past decade, notably in two previous reports published recently by Truthout.

JFIC was the intelligence component of United States Joint Forces Command (JFCOM). In 2005, it was renamed the Joint Intelligence Command for Intelligence. Last month, JFCOM was shuttered, reportedly the victim of Pentagon budget cuts, and as a subcommand, JFIC was believed to have been disbanded along with it.

Click here to watch Jeffrey Kaye discuss this report on The Real News

Truthout had previously reported that the deputy chief of the Asymmetrical Threats Division, who is identified in government documents by the code name “Iron Man,” alleged his unit was told to stop tracking Bin Laden as well as suspected al-Qaeda terrorists and members of the Taliban some months prior to 9/11.

Iron Man, whose unit developed original intelligence on al-Qaeda targets, which included the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, documents show, further claimed that the orders his unit received, as well as the work it conducted, was knowingly withheld from investigators working for the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, who were tasked with probing the circumstances behind the 9/11 attacks.

When the DoD prepared its report based on Iron Man’s complaints, the IG concluded Iron Man’s most explosive allegations were unfounded. But a close look at the report reveals numerous flaws.

Although the IG did confirm that Asymmetrical Threats Division analysts were told to stop tracking Bin Laden, suspected al-Qaeda terrorists and members of the Taliban, the watchdog determined that the Asymmetrical Threat Division had “not completed original intelligence reporting” and that “JFIC did not” specifically have a “mission to track Usama bin Ladin or predict imminent US targets.” (Emphasis added.)

Furthermore, the appendices in the IG’s report shows significant changes were made to JFIC’s original responses to Congressional investigators about its pre-9/11 intelligence work on al-Qaeda, the Taliban and Bin Laden. The information regarding the military unit’s work turned over to Congress described a substantially attenuated picture of JFIC’s operations.

The report also determined “operational information in response to the 9/11 Commission” about Asymmetrical Threats Division had not been withheld. Yet, Iron Man had charged the information was withheld from Congressional investigators probing the 9/11 attacks, not the independent 9/11 commission. The IG’s report repeatedly confused the two investigative bodies.

A Pentagon spokesman and officials who helped prepare the report did not return calls for comment.

New Documents Challenge Watchdog’s Conclusions

Iron Man, who requested anonymity in order to protect his family’s privacy, filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in 2006 seeking a copy of the complaint he filed with the IG and other documents pertaining to JFIC’s duties. He received a copy of his complaint in April, just a few weeks prior to the death of Bin Laden. That document, as well as the IG’s findings, formed the basis of Truthout’s two previous reports on JFIC’s activities. But over the past month, Iron Man provided Truthout with documents he received in March 2010 in response to his FOIA request that shed additional light into JFIC’s work and called into question the veracity of the IG’s investigation into the charges he leveled.

Indeed, one batch of documents Truthout obtained from Iron Man consists of a slide presentation for a briefing to be held for the head of counterintelligence and counterterrorism at the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS). The date of the meeting could not be confirmed, but appears to have taken place sometime in 2000 or earlier.

The slides, “NCIS Support to Joint Forces Intelligence Command and NCIS Field Office, Norfolk,” describe the duties assigned to an NCIS transfer of one of its counterintelligence, counterterrorism (CT) agents, who was made deputy chief of JFIC’s Asymmetric Threat Division. This slide appears to be a description of Iron Man’s responsibilities.

Contradicting the IG’s conclusion on JFIC’s work, one of the slides explicitly states, “JFIC routinely supplements national agencies with original intelligence on UBL [Usama Bin Ladin] and Afghanistan.” (Emphasis added.)

The slide presentation further notes that the Asymmetrical Threats Division has “primary division focus” on both counterterrorism and military “force protection.” Moreover, the briefing slides state that JFIC’s “Primary CT/force protection concerns” as “UBL [Usama Bin Ladin] and associated terrorist groups,” adding that its goal was to determine when Bin Laden and other terrorists would strike, “How they will strike” and “Where they will strike.”

According to the documents, Asymmetrical Threats Division personnel monitored open-source intelligence, national imagery data and sensitive compartmented intelligence, as well as worldwide counterterrorism and counterintelligence communications, including communications and electronic intelligence databases from the National Security Agency (NSA).

The information from the briefing backs up what Iron Man previously told Truthout: that Asymmetrical Threats Division “worked closely” with the counterterrorism office at the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, which collects, analyzes and distributes geospatial intelligence related to national security, or that, “upon request,” it provided information on terrorist movements to the CIA.

According to the slide briefing, the Asymmetrical Threats Division had what is known as “gamma” security clearance, indicating analysts had access to extremely sensitive classified information, according to a description of the classification level by Matthew Aid in an unrelated New York Times report.

Another document Iron Man turned over to Truthout is a January 2001 confidential “Point Paper” that describes the Asymmetrical Threats Division as having “prepared numerous assessments of those cities most likely to be targeted by international and domestic terrorists,” confirming Iron Man’s claims that part of his unit’s work did consist of producing intelligence on domestic targets by terrorists.

Definition of “Hijackers”

In attempting to refute Iron Man’s claims about JFIC’s work, the IG’s report stated, “the 9/11 Commission questions were very specific and asked for information which involved the ‘imminent attack’ or ‘hijackers involved.’ Evidence indicated that the JFIC did not have knowledge regarding imminent domestic targets prior to 9/11 or specific 9/11 hijacker operations.”

Truthout has learned that the definition of “hijackers,” as perceived by the military intelligence unit, was overly restrictive. The definition of “hijackers” only referred to the hijackers in the planes and not the alleged planners, such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, or Bin Laden.

In his complaint to the IG, Iron Man wrote that the Asymmetrical Threats Division had produced “numerous original reports, with original imagery, measurements & signatures intelligence, or electronic intelligence, identifying probably [sic] and possible movements and locations of Usama bin Ladin and Mullah Omar.” The intelligence included “bin Ladin’s likely residence in Qandahar … evidently the house in which Khalid Shaykh Muhammed planned the 9/11 attacks.”

In summer 2000, the Asymmetrical Threats Division briefed “a DIA senior intelligence officer” on “The Search (for UBL Usama Bin Ladin]) – A CINC [Commander-in-chief] Level View.” According to the complaint letter to the IG, “The briefing provided numerous examples and suggestions of how UBL was being hunted by JFIC and could be hunted by the IC [intelligence community].”

Iron Man would not provide the names of the individuals that the Asymmetrical Threats Division briefed because that information is classified. But the personnel included intelligence officials from CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, NCIS, NSA and high-level command officials at JFIC. The most senior official briefed appeared to be Vice Adm. Martin J. Meyer, the deputy commander-in-chief of Joint Forces Command.

Vice Admiral Meyer, as Truthout previously reported,  told Maj. Gen. Larry Arnold, the commander of the Continental United States North American Aerospace Defense Command Region (CONR) and other high-level CONR staffers two weeks before the 9/11 attacks that “their concern about Osama bin Laden as a possible threat to America was unfounded and that, to repeat, ‘If everyone would just turn off CNN, there wouldn’t be a threat from Osama bin Laden.'”

Since Meyer was specifically briefed on al-Qaeda’s interest in attacking targets in the United States and in particular New York and the Pentagon, it is difficult to understand why he would call threats related to Bin Laden as “unfounded.”

Significant Changes Made to JFIC’s Official Response

Perhaps the most salient issue with the IG’s report is that it completely conceals the information that was withheld from Congressional investigators.

According to the report, on March 11, 2002, the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Vice Adm. Thomas R. Wilson tasked JFCOM to provide it with information concerning its activities “in support of the 9/11 Commission.” As the IG’s report points out, the public law creating the 9/11 Commission was not effective until November 2002, so Vice Admiral Wilson can only be responding to a request from the Congressional joint inquiry and not the 9/11 Commission.

The IG’s report indicates JFCOM sent a “tasker” to JFIC two days later, indicating it was an urgent matter and the 13 items “derived from the original DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency] tasker” were due by March 22.

A “JFIC senior naval officer,” the report states, gathered the information from the different departments within the military unit. The responses were then returned to JFCOM, where the Intelligence Director “reviewed the JFIC’s input prior to release” to the DIA Congressional Affairs Office on March 25, 2002.

The original JFIC response was scanned and printed as Appendix B of the IG report. According to the IG, the “original questions and answers to 13 questions that USJFCOM [United States Joint Forces Command] forwarded” to the Defense Intelligence Agency were also scanned and are printed as the report’s Appendix C. The scanned questions and answers that ultimately were sent to the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Congressional Affairs Office and presumably on to Congressional investigators, are preceded by ten pages of superfluous material relating to JFIC actions taken after 9/11.

But the original questions and answers JFIC officials produced prior to March 22 (Appendix B) are not the same as the edited version that was sent to the Defense Intelligence Agency and Congress (Appendix C). Four questions and answers from Appendix C were deleted and one subsection and some of the other responses were scrubbed.

The IG report failed to highlight the difference and, indeed, the report still maintains the JFCOM version has “13 questions,” though four questions were omitted after another “review.”

There is no indication the scanned documents were redacted, which would have helped explain the omission, since the original material that was deleted and/or rewritten shows up unredacted in Appendix B.

According to the executive summary of the IG’s report, JFIC’s replies “were accurate and substantiated by our extensive review of available documentation and our 14 personnel interviews at all levels of Joint Forces Intelligence Command. We concluded that the Joint Forces Intelligence Command provided a timely and accurate reply in response to the 9/11 Commission. The United States Joint Forces Command forwarded the response to the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Congressional Affairs Office.”

JFlC’s original responses “were forwarded to the USJFCOM [United States Joint Forces Command]. The USJFCOM Intelligence Director reviewed the JFIC’s input prior to release to the DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency].”

The report, however, fails to note that the JFCOM review removed substantial portions of JFIC’s replies to Congress.

What Was Missing

The missing portions largely relate to aspects of JFIC’s mission that had to do with the breadth and depth of its anti-terrorism work. For instance, in item one, JFCOM deleted the original JFIC reply that it conducted “in depth discussions about potential terrorist attacks since Dec. 00.”

The second item in the inquiry asked whether JFIC had information prior to 9/11 about “international terrorist cells operating in the United States.” While JFIC answered this question in the negative, in their original response JFIC indicated they maintained “global situational awareness for areas such as CONUS [Continental United States] outside of the USJFCOM [United States Joint Forces Command] AOR [area of responsibility.]” They briefed pertinent information” at morning briefings, “but we did not track it.” JFIC indicated the information “generally consisted of CIA and NSA reports.”

In the altered version of the response sent to Congress, the words “such as CONUS” are deleted, as is the reference to CIA and NSA reports. The edited version completely eliminates the fact that JFIC was keeping track of NSA and CIA reports of terrorist activity as it related to the United States. Indeed, later in the report, the fact that JFIC also maintained a “24-hour watch floor,” whose responsibility included monitoring of “worldwide events and terrorist issues,” was also deleted.

According to the original JFIC response, after 9/11, it officially did take on responsibility for tracking “potential threats to CONUS.” “As far as we know,” the JFIC original responses state, “JFIC is one of the few DoD entities attempting to track potential terrorist activities within CONUS.”

One of the missing items in the version of the JFIC answers sent to Congress concerned the names and positions of JFIC counterterror personnel. This was not redacted for classification purposes, as they appear in the IG report, Appendix B. Instead, back in 2002, the lack of any such names meant there was no one identifiable from JFIC to call as a witness.

At other points in the edited version of the JFIC responses, descriptions of the unit’s analytic work, in particular aspects that seem pertinent to Asymmetrical Threats Division’s work, are left out. It is noteworthy that even in the original JFIC response to the questionnaire, the mission Joint Forces Command was given was distorted.

According to the original inquiry response (and left out of the final version), “Prior to Sept. 11, JFIC did not have a robust counter-terrorism mission. We did do some analysis, but since it did not directly support Joint Forces Command’s AOR [area of responsibility], the analysts were directed to stop. As a result of this and normal military rotation, we did not have a large counter-terrorism analysis base to build on” after 9/11. (Emphasis added.)

Yet, in another portion of the original JFIC response and also deleted in the final version of the response, JFIC discusses its “process.” According to JFIC, while they do “not conduct unilateral collection” of intelligence in the United States, nor liaison with “foreign counterparts,” they do receive reports from “other agencies.” “JFIC’s process is to fuse all of the information that we have visibility on into one all-source threat picture,” the questionnaire stated, noting JFIC reviewed 2,275 messages daily from intelligence and military sources.

Subsequently, JFIC personnel decide what to do with this information, noting that sometimes they may “try to do further analysis (connect the dots, possibly produces a special analytic product), or … follow-up with the reporting agency.”

In a section erased from the JFIC response to Question 12 from Congressional investigators, JFIC describes their process as one of fusing “all of the information that we have visibility on into one all-source threat picture.” This is similar to Iron Man’s description of the Asymmetrical Threats Division in his complaint to the IG, when he described his former unit as “a forerunner of current all-source fusion centers…. able to develop and use all-source, original analysis in a manner probably then unprecedented within the intelligence community.”

If the report’s narrative sequence can be trusted, the JFCOM director either directly, or under his or her supervision, significantly altered the reply to Congressional Joint Inquiry investigators. Furthermore, due to the fact that items 7, 9, 11 and 13 are missing from the final document sent to the Defense Intelligence Agency it would have had to be apparent to the individual(s) reading that a chunk of information was missing.

While Congressional investigators were not provided with this intelligence on JFIC’s work, there were still other opportunities to pass the information along. In Spring 2002, a colleague informed Iron Man that none of the documents that could verify Asymmetrical Threats Division’s work was being sent to Congress.

The former deputy chief and later “Acting Chief” of Asymmetrical Threats Division contacted the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Congressional Affairs Office himself and offered to personally send the documentation, including the slides and “point paper.”

Those materials were instead sent to the Defense Intelligence Agency. Whether it made its way to Congress is unknown. The December 2002 unclassified Congressional Joint Inquiry report never mentions US Joint Forces Command, JFIC, or Asymmetrical Threats Division or their work, nor does the 9/11 Commission Report published several years later.

Current and former lawmakers who worked on the Congressional committees probing the 9/11 attacks, including former Senator Bob Graham (D-Florida), did not respond to phone calls and emails seeking comment about whether they received any briefings about the military intelligence unit’s counterterrorism work pertaining to al-Qaeda, Bin Laden, and the Taliban.

Iron Man told Truthout, however, that he and his colleagues would “damn sure comment” on JFIC’s work if given the opportunity to speak with lawmakers.

But, Iron Man said, “the only manner in which any former DO5 [another name for JFIC] personnel could probably comment would be if requested by Congress/Congressional staff and permitted by DoD.”

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Baldwin also tweeted “What is Amalgam Virgo?”

For those unfamiliar with the Amalgam Virgo wargame, here are two relevant entries from History Commons:

June 1-2, 2001: Military Conducts Exercises Based on Scenario in which Cruise Missiles Are Launched against US
Osama bin Laden is pictured on the cover of the Amalgam Virgo exercise.Osama bin Laden is pictured on the cover of the Amalgam Virgo exercise. [Source: NORAD]The US military conducts Amalgam Virgo 01, a multi-agency live-fly homeland security exercise sponsored by the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and involving the hypothetical scenario of a cruise missile being launched by “a rogue [government] or somebody” from a barge off the East Coast. Osama bin Laden is pictured on the cover of the proposal for the exercise. [American Forces Press Service, 6/4/2002; Arkin, 2005, pp. 253; GlobalSecurity (.org), 4/27/2005] The exercise takes place at Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida. Drones simulating cruise missiles are launched from Tyndall, head out to sea, circle a ship as if they are being launched from there, and then head back to land. Air Force F-16s, Navy gunners, and Army missile defense units attempt to find and track the drones. The Coast Guard attempts to catch the ship serving as the dummy launch site. [Tampa Tribune, 6/3/2001] Another scenario in the exercise involves a suicide mission in which a Haitian man with AIDS attempts to deliberately crash a small private plane into NORAD’s Southeast Air Defense Sector (SEADS) at Tyndall AFB. [US Air Force, 2001] The next Amalgam Virgo exercise, scheduled to take place in 2002, will involve two simultaneous commercial aircraft hijackings. Planning for that exercise will begin in July 2001 (see July 2001).

July 2001: NORAD Plans a Mock Simultaneous Hijacking Threat From Inside the US

NORAD is already planning for the Amalgam Virgo 02 exercise. This exercise, scheduled for June 2002, will involve the simulation of two simultaneous commercial aircraft hijackings. One plane, a Delta 757, flown by Delta pilots, will fly from Salt Lake City, Utah to Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage, Alaska. It will be “hijacked” by FBI agents posing as terrorists. The other plane will be a Navy C-9 bound from Oak Harbor, Washington to Vancouver, British Columbia, and will be “hijacked” by Royal Canadian Mounted Police. On both planes, military personnel will act as civilian passengers. US and Canadian fighters are to respond, and either force the planes to land or simulate shooting them down. Describing Amalgam Virgo 02 to the 9/11 Commission, NORAD’s Major General Craig McKinley later says, “Threats of killing hostages or crashing were left to the script writers to invoke creativity and broaden the required response for players.” About 1,500 people will participate in the exercise. USA Today will note that this is an exception to NORAD’s claim that, prior to 9/11, it focused only on external threats to the US and did not consider the possibility of threats arising from within the US. 9/11 Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste will similarly comment that this planned exercise shows that, despite frequent comments to the contrary, the military considered simultaneous hijackings before 9/11.

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The piece, trumpeted as the most detailed account to date of the May 1 raid in Abbottabad Pakistan, was an instant hit. “Got the chills half dozen times reading @NewYorker killing bin Laden tick tock…exquisite journalism,” tweeted the digital director of the PBS show Frontline.  The author, freelancer Nicholas Schmidle, was quickly featured on the Charlie Rose show, an influential determiner of “chattering class” opinion. Other news outlets rushed to praise the story as “exhaustive,” “utterly compelling,” and on and on.

To be sure, it is the kind of granular, heroic story that the public loves, that generates follow-up bestsellers and movie options. The takedown even has a Hollywood-esque code name: “Operation Neptune’s Spear”

Here’s the introduction to the mission commander, full of minute details that help give it a ring of authenticity and suggest the most intimate reportorial access:

James, a broad-chested man in his late thirties, does not have the lithe swimmer’s frame that one might expect of a SEAL—he is built more like a discus thrower. That night, he wore a shirt and trousers in Desert Digital Camouflage, and carried a silenced Sig Sauer P226 pistol, along with extra ammunition; a CamelBak, for hydration; and gel shots, for endurance. He held a short-barrel, silenced M4 rifle. (Others SEALs had chosen the Heckler & Koch MP7.) A “blowout kit,” for treating field trauma, was tucked into the small of James’s back. Stuffed into one of his pockets was a laminated gridded map of the compound. In another pocket was a booklet with photographs and physical descriptions of the people suspected of being inside. He wore a noise-cancelling headset, which blocked out nearly everything besides his heartbeat.

On and on went the “tick-tock.” Yet as Paul Farhi, a Washington Post reporter, noted, that narrative was misleading in the extreme, because the New Yorker reporter never actually spoke to James—nor to a single one of James’s fellow SEALs (who have never been identified or photographed–even from behind–to protect their identity.) Instead, every word of Schmidle’s narrative was provided to him by people who were not present at the raid. Complains Farhi:

…a casual reader of the article wouldn’t know that; neither the article nor an editor’s note describes the sourcing for parts of the story. Schmidle, in fact, piles up so many details about some of the men, such as their thoughts at various times, that the article leaves a strong impression that he spoke with them directly.

That didn’t trouble New Yorker editor David Remnick, according to Farhi:

Remnick says he’s satisfied with the accuracy of the account. “The sources spoke to our fact-checkers,” he said. “I know who they are.”

But we don’t.

On a story of this gravity, should we automatically join in with the huzzahs because it has the imprimatur of America’s most respected magazine? Or would we be wise to approach it with caution?

***

Most of us are not the trusting naïfs we once were. And with good reason.

The list of consequential events packaged for us by media and Hollywood in unsatisfactory ways continues to grow. It starts, certainly, with the official version of the JFK assassination, widely discredited yet still carried forward by most major media organizations. (For more on that, see this.) More and more people realize that the heroic Woodward & Bernstein story of Nixon’s demise is deeply problematical. (I’ve written extensively on both of these in my book Family of Secrets.)

And untold millions don’t think we’ve heard the real (or at least complete) story of the phenomenal, complex success of those 19 hijackers on Sept. 11, 2001. Skeptics now include former White House counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke, who recently speculated that the hijackers may have been able to enter the US and move freely precisely because American intelligence hoped to recruit them as double agents—and that an ongoing cover-up is designed to hide this. And then, of course, there are the Pentagon’s account of the heroic rescue of Jessica Lynch in Iraq, which turned out to be a hoax, and the Pentagon’s fabricated account of the heroic battle death of former NFL player Pat Tillman in Afghanistan, who turned out to be a victim of friendly fire. These are just a few from scores of examples of deceit perpetrated upon the American people. Hardly the kind of track record to inspire confidence in official explanations with the imprimatur of the military and the CIA.

Whatever one thinks of these other matters, we’re certainly now at a point where we ought to be prudent in embracing authorized accounts of the latest seismic event: the dramatic end to one of America’s most reviled and storied nemeses.

The bin Laden raid presents us with every reason to be cautious. The government’s initial claims about what transpired at that house in Abbottabad have changed, then changed again, with no proper explanation of the discrepancies. Even making allowances for human error in such shifting accounts, almost every aspect of what we were told requires a willing suspension of disbelief—from the manner of Osama’s death and burial to the purported pornography found at the site. (For more on these issues, see previous articles we wrote on the subject, here, here and here.)

Clarke’s theory will seem less outrageous later, as we explore Saudi intelligence’s crucial, and bizarre, role at the end of bin Laden’s life—working directly with the man who now holds Clarke’s job.

Add to all of this the discovery that the reporter providing this newest account wasn’t even allowed to talk to any raid participants—and the magazine’s lack of candor on this point—and you’ve got an almost unassailable case for treating the New Yorker story with extreme caution.

We might begin by asking the question: Who provided The New Yorker with its exclusive, and what was their agenda in doing so? To try and sort out Schmidle’s sources, I read through the piece carefully several times.

One person who spoke to the reporter, and who is identified by name is John O. Brennan, Obama’s counterterrorism adviser. Brennan is quoted directly, briefly, near the top, describing to Schmidle pre-raid debate over whether such an operation would be a success or failure:

John Brennan, Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, told me that the President’s advisers began an “interrogation of the data, to see if, by that interrogation, you’re going to disprove the theory that bin Laden was there.”

The mere fact of Schmidle’s reliance on Brennan at all should send up a flare for the cautious reader. After all, that’s the very same Brennan who was the principal source of incorrect details in the hours and days after the raid. These included the claim that the SEALs encountered substantial armed resistance, not least from bin Laden himself; that it took them an astounding 40 minutes to get to bin Laden, and that the White House got to hear the soldiers’ conversations in real time.

Here’s a Washington Post account from Brennan published on May 3, less than 48 hours after the raid:

Half an hour had passed on the ground, but the American commandos raiding Osama bin Laden’s Pakistani hideaway had yet to find their long-sought target.

…The commandos swept methodically through the compound’s main building, clearing one room and then another as they made their way to the upper floors where they expected to find bin Laden. As they did so, Obama administration officials in the White House Situation Room listened to the SEAL team’s conversations over secure lines.

“The minutes passed like days,” said John O. Brennan, the administration’s chief counterterrorism adviser. “It was probably one of the most anxiety-filled periods of time, I think, in the lives of the people who were assembled.”

Finally, shortly before 2 a.m. in Pakistan, the commandos burst into an upstairs room.Inside, an armed bin Laden took cover behind a woman, Brennan said. With a burst of gunfire, one of the longest and costliest manhunts in modern history was over.

.. The commandos moved inside, and finally reached bin Laden’s upstairs living quarters after nearly 40 minutes on the ground.

Almost all that turns out to be hogwash—according to the new account produced by The New Yorker three months later. An account that, again, it seems, comes courtesy of Brennan. The minutes did not pass like days. Bin Laden was not armed, and did not take cover behind a woman. And the commandoes most certainly were not on the ground for 40 minutes. Some of them were up the stairs to the higher floors almost in a flash, and it didn’t take long for them to run into and kill bin Laden.

For another take, consider this account from NBC News’ Pentagon correspondent—also reported the week after the raid— two days after Brennan told the Washington Post a completely different story. This one appears to be based on a briefing from military officials who would have been likely to have good knowledge of the operational details:

According to the officials’ account, as the first SEAL team moved into the compound, they took small-arms fire from the guest house in the compound. The SEALs returned fire, killing bin Laden’s courier and the courier’s wife, who died in the crossfire. It was the only time the SEALs were shot at.

The second SEAL team entered the first floor of the main residence and could see a man standing in the dark with one hand behind his back. Fearing he was hiding a weapon, the SEALs shot and killed the lone man, who turned out to be unarmed.

As the U.S. commandos moved through the house, they found several stashes of weapons and barricades, as if the residents were prepared for a violent and lengthy standoff — which never materialized.

The SEALs then made their way up a staircase, where they ran into one of bin Laden’s sons. The Americans immediately shot and killed the 19-year-old son, who was also unarmed, according to the officials.

Hearing the shots, bin Laden peered over the railing from the floor above. The SEALs fired but missed bin Laden, who ducked back into his bedroom. As the SEALs stormed up the stairs, two young girls ran from the room.

One SEAL scooped them up and carried them out of harm’s way. The other two commandos stormed into bin Laden’s bedroom. One of bin Laden’s wives rushed toward the Navy SEAL, who shot her in the leg.

Then, without hesitation, the same commando turned his gun on bin Laden, standing in what appeared to be pajamas, and fired two quick shots, one to the chest and one to the head. Although there were weapons in that bedroom, bin Laden was also unarmed when he was shot.

Instead of a chaotic firefight, the U.S. officials said, the American commando assault was a precision operation, with SEALs moving carefully through the compound, room to room, floor to floor.

In fact, most of the operation was spent in what the military calls “exploiting the site,” gathering up the computers, hard drives, cellphones and files that could provide valuable intelligence on al-Qaida operatives and potential operations worldwide.

The U.S. officials describing the operation said the SEALs carefully gathered up 22 women and children to ensure they were not harmed. Some of the women were put in “flexi-cuffs” the plastic straps used to bind someone’s hands at the wrists, and left them for Pakistani security forces to discover.

***

Given that Brennan’s initial version of the raid was strikingly erroneous, his later account to The New Yorker is suspect as well. So who else besides Brennan might have been Schmidle’s sources? At one point in his piece, he cites an unnamed counterterrorism official:

A senior counterterrorism official who visited the JSOC redoubt described it as an enclave of unusual secrecy and discretion. “Everything they were working on was closely held,” the official said.

Later, that same unnamed counterterrorism official is again cited, this time seeming to continue Brennan’s narrative of the meeting before the raid, in which participants disagreed on the likely success of such a mission:

That day in Washington, Panetta convened more than a dozen senior C.I.A. officials and analysts for a final preparatory meeting. Panetta asked the participants, one by one, to declare how confident they were that bin Laden was inside the Abbottabad compound. The counterterrorism official told me that the percentages “ranged from forty per cent to ninety or ninety-five per cent,” and added, “This was a circumstantial case.”

From the story’s construction, one could reasonably conclude that the unnamed counterterrorism official is indeed still just Brennan. If not, who could it be? How many different white House counterterrorism officials would have debriefed the SEALs, if indeed that is even their role? How many would have been privy to that planning meeting? And how many different officials would have gotten authorization to sum up the events of that important day for this New Yorker writer? Also, it’s an old journalistic trick to quote the same source, on and off the record— thereby giving the source extra cover when discussing particularly delicate matters.

So, we don’t know whether the article was based on anything more than Brennan, under marching orders to clean up the conflicting accounts he originally put out.

UNEXPLAINED DISPUTES

It’s curious that the source chooses to emphasize the fundamental disagreement over whether the raid was a good idea. Presumably, there was a purpose in emphasizing this, but the New Yorker’s “tick-tock”, which is very light on analysis or context, doesn’t tell us what it was. It may have been intended to show Obama as brave, inclined toward big risks (thereby running counter to his reputation)—we can only guess.

This internal discord will get the attention of anyone who remembers all the assertions from intelligence officials over the years that bin Laden was almost certainly already dead—either of natural causes or killed at some previous time.

Here’s a bit more from The New Yorker on officials’ doubts going into the raid:

Several analysts from the National Counterterrorism Center were invited to critique the C.I.A.’s analysis; their confidence in the intelligence ranged between forty and sixty per cent. The center’s director, Michael Leiter, said that it would be preferable to wait for stronger confirmation of bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad.

Those doubts are particularly interesting for several reasons: the CIA has had a long history of disputes between its covert action wing, which tends to advocate activity, and its analysis section, historically prone to caution. The action wing also has a history of publicizing its being right—when it could purport to be right—and covering up its failures. So when an insider chooses to make public these disagreements, we should be willing to consider motives.

This dispute can also be seen as an intriguing prologue to the rush to dump Bin Laden’s body and not provide proof to the public that it was indeed bin Laden. What if it wasn’t bin Laden that they killed? Would the government announce that after such a high-stakes operation? (“While we thought he’d be there, we accidentally killed someone else instead”? Seems unlikely.)

***

Now, let us go to the next antechamber of this warren of shadowy entities and unstated agendas.

Who exactly wanted bin Laden shot rather than taken alive and interrogated—and why? There’s been much discussion about the purported reasons for terminating him on sight, but the fact remains that he would have been a source of tremendous intelligence of real value to the safety of Americans and others.

Yet, early in the piece, Schmidle writes:

If all went according to plan, the SEALs would drop from the helicopters into the compound, overpower bin Laden’s guards, shoot and kill him at close range, and then take the corpse back to Afghanistan.

That was the plan? Whose plan? We’ve never been explicitly told by the White House that such a decision had been made. In fact, we’d previously been informed that  the president was glad to have the master plotter taken alive if he was unarmed and did not resist. So, that’s a huge and problematical discrepancy that is only heightened by Schmidle’s misleadingly matter-of-fact treatment of the matter.

GET ME RIYADH

If the justification for killing Osama presented in The New Yorker warrants concern, the account of how—and why—they disposed of his body ought to send alarm bells clanging.

At the time of the raid, the decision to hastily dump Osama’s body in the ocean rather than make it available for authoritative forensic examination was a highly controversial one—that only led to more speculation that the White House was hiding something. The justifications, including not wanting to bury him on land for fear of creating a shrine, were almost laughable.

So what do we learn about this from The New Yorker? It’s truly bizarre: the SEALS themselves made the decision. That’s strange enough. But then we learn that Brennan took it upon himself to verify that was the right decision. How did he do this? Not by speaking with the president or top military, diplomatic or legal brass. No, he called some foreigners—get ready–the Saudis, who told him that dumping at sea sounded like a good plan.

Here’s Schmidle’s account:

All along, the SEALs had planned to dump bin Laden’s corpse into the sea—a blunt way of ending the bin Laden myth. They had successfully pulled off a similar scheme before. During a DEVGRU helicopter raid inside Somalia in September, 2009, SEALs had killed Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, one of East Africa’s top Al Qaeda leaders; Nabhan’s corpse was then flown to a ship in the Indian Ocean, given proper Muslim rites, and thrown overboard. Before taking that step for bin Laden, however, John Brennan made a call. Brennan, who had been a C.I.A. station chief in Riyadh, phoned a former counterpart in Saudi intelligence. Brennan told the man what had occurred in Abbottabad and informed him of the plan to deposit bin Laden’s remains at sea. As Brennan knew, bin Laden’s relatives were still a prominent family in the Kingdom, and Osama had once been a Saudi citizen. Did the Saudi government have any interest in taking the body? “Your plan sounds like a good one,” the Saudi replied.

Let’s consider this. The most wanted man in the world; substantive professional doubts about whether the man in the Abbottabad house is him; tremendous public doubts about whether it could even be him; the most important operation of the Obama presidency; yet the decision about what to do with the body is left to low-level operatives. Keep in mind SEALs are trained to follow orders given by others. They’re expected to apply what they know to unexpected scenarios that come up, but the key strategic decisions— arrived at in advance—are not theirs to make.

Even more strange that Brennan would discuss this with a foreign power. And not just any foreign power, but the regime that is inextricably linked with the domestically-influential family of bin Laden—and home to many of the hijackers who worked for him.

Is it just me, or does this sound preposterous? Obama’s Homeland Security and Counterterrorism adviser is just winging it with key aspects of one of America’s most important, complex and risky operations? And the Saudi government is the one deciding to discard the remains of a man from one of Saudi Arabia’s most powerful families, before the public could receive proper proof of the identity of the body? A regime with a great deal at stake and perhaps plenty to hide.

Also please consider this important caveat: As we noted in a previous article, the claim that the body had already been positively identified via DNA has been disputed by a DNA expert who said that insufficient time had elapsed before the sea burial to complete such tests.

The line about Brennan himself having been a former CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia is just sort of dropped in there. No recognition of what it means that a person of that background was put into that position after 9/11, no recognition that a person of that background and those fraught personal connections is controlling this narrative. He’s not just a “counterterrorism expert”—he is a longtime member of an agency whose mandate includes the frequent use of disinformation. And one who has his own historic direct links to the Saudi regime, a key and problematical player in the larger chess game playing out.

It’s relevant to note that Brennan is not only a career CIA officer (they say no one ever really leaves the Agency, no matter their new title) but one with a lot of baggage. He was deputy director of the CIA at the time of the 9/11 attacks. He was an adviser to Obama’s presidential campaign, after which Obama initially planned to name him CIA director. That appointment was pulled, in part due to criticism from human rights advocates over statements he had made in support of sending terrorism suspects to countries where they might be tortured.

Of course, there could have been other sources besides Brennan. In addition to the unnamed “counterterrorism official” previously cited, the New Yorker mentions a “special operations officer,” as in:

…according to a special-operations officer who is deeply familiar with the bin Laden raid.

Subsequent quotes from him indicate that this had to be a supervisory special ops officer. His comments are surprising:

“This wasn’t a hard op,” the special-operations officer told me. “It would be like hitting a target in McLean”—the upscale Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C.

Whoops! Here’s a Special Ops guy saying the Special Ops raid was actually no big deal! Shouldn’t that, if a valid assessment, get more attention? Especially given the endless praise and frequent statements of how difficult the operation was. I mean, the toughness and diciness of the Abbottabad mission is the prime reason we want to read the New Yorker’s account in the first place!

To further underline the point, consider that this fellow is not alone in his assessment:

In the months after the raid, the media have frequently suggested that the Abbottabad operation was as challenging as Operation Eagle Claw and the “Black Hawk Down” incident, but the senior Defense Department official told me that “this was not one of three missions.”…. He likened the routine of evening raids to “mowing the lawn.”

Why would a person overseeing an operation like this deflate the bubble of adoration? It doesn’t seem helpful to the interests of Special Operations – and it doesn’t seem credible, either. So there’s presumably a reason that this person is—again speaking to The New Yorker after this important exclusive has been carefully considered and strategized. We just don’t know what it is, and the magazine doesn’t even bother to wonder.

***

Most of the other sources seem to play bit roles. One is “a senior adviser to the President” whose only comment is that Obama decided not to trust the Pakistanis with advance notice of the raid—which we already knew.  Another— named—source is Ben Rhodes, a deputy national-security adviser, who does not evince any intimate knowledge of the raid itself.

The New Yorker also includes a few other officials who brief Schmidle on general background, like a “senior defense department official” explaining the overall relationship between Special Operations and CIA personnel, and a named former CIA counsel explaining that the Abottabad raid amounted to “a complete incorporation of JSOC [Joint Special Operations Command] into a C.I.A. operation.”

That’s only slipped into the article, but it is perhaps one of the most important aspects of the piece, along with a brief mention of the way in which former Iraq/Afghan commander General David Petraeus has gone to CIA while CIA director Panetta has been made Defense Secretary. (For more on these important but confusing games of high-level musical chairs, which were not deeply scrutinized in the conventional media, see our WhoWhatWhy pieces here and here.)

This may sound too technical for your taste, but the takeaway point is that fundamental realignments are afoot in that vast, massively-funded, powerful and secretive part of the US government that is treated by the corporate press almost as if it does not exist. The tales of internal intrigue that we do not hear would begin to provide us with the real narratives that are not ours to have.

In the New Yorker piece, we do learn lots of things we did not know before—for example, that Special Ops considered tunneling in or coming in by foot rather than helicopter. We learn that CIA director Robert Gates wanted to drop massive bombs on the house. General James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, shared that view—Cartwright is one of the few who is directly identified as a source for Schmidle. That’s important stuff, and worth more than brief mention. And, once again, we need more effort to try and understand why we are being told these things.

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