Richard Clarke – 9/11 Truth News

9/11 Not an “Intelligence Failure”

Sat, 28 Mar 2015 16:47:17 +0000

New video on the Real News Network demonstrates that the official line that the 9/11 attack was in part due to intelligence failures was in fact entirely false as the Bush Administration had numerous warnings prior to the attack.

The post 9/11 Not an “Intelligence Failure” appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

Salon: Insiders Voice Doubts About CIA’s 9/11 Story

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 13:10:49 +0000

A growing number of former government insiders — all responsible officials who served in a number of federal posts — are now on record as doubting ex-CIA director George Tenet’s account of events leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. Among them are several special agents of the FBI, the former counterterrorism head in the Clinton and Bush administrations, and the chairman of the 9/11 Commission, who told us the CIA chief had been “obviously not forthcoming” in his testimony and had misled the commissioners.

These doubts about the CIA first emerged among a group of 9/11 victims’ families whose struggle to force the government to investigate the causes of the attacks, we chronicled in our 2006 documentary film “Press for Truth.” At that time, we thought we were done with the subject. But tantalizing information unearthed by the 9/11 Commission’s final report and spotted by the families (Chapter 6, footnote 44) raised a question too important to be put aside:

Did Tenet fail to share intelligence with the White House and the FBI in 2000 and 2001 that could have prevented the attacks? Specifically, did a group in the CIA’s al-Qaida office engage in a domestic covert action operation involving two of the 9/11 hijackers, that — however legitimate the agency’s goals may have been — hindered the type of intelligence-sharing that could have prevented the attacks? And if not, then what would explain seemingly inexplicable actions by CIA employees?

As we sought to clarify how the CIA had handled information about the hijackers before 9/11, we found a half dozen former government insiders who came away from the Sept. 11 tragedy feeling burned by the CIA, particularly by a small group of employees within the agency’s bin Laden unit in 2000 and 2001, then known as Alec Station.

This is not a conspiracy theory or the speculation of uninformed people. Gov. Thomas Kean, co-chairman of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, which was responsible for investigating 9/11, agreed to an on-camera interview for our documentary in 2008. He surprised us by voicing many doubts and questions about the CIA’s actions preceding Sept. 11 — and especially about former CIA director George Tenet.

Four years after Tenet testified to the commission, Kean said the CIA director had been “obviously not forthcoming” in some of his testimony. Tenet said under oath that he had not met with President Bush in the month of August 2001, Kean recalled. It was later learned he had done so twice.

Did Tenet misspeak? we asked the New Jersey Republican.

“No, I don’t think he misspoke,” Kean responded. “I think he misled.”

A tale of two hijackers

The story buried in footnote 44 of Chapter 6 of the 9/11 Commission report was this:

The commission became aware in early 2004 of a warning written by Doug Miller, an FBI agent working inside the CIA’s Alec Station. In January 2000, Miller tried to inform his bosses about a man named Khalid Al Mihdhar, who had previously been identified as a member of an al-Qaida operational cadre. By the spring of 2000, the CIA had learned that Mihdhar and another suspected al-Qaida operative, Nawaf Al Hazmi, had likely arrived in Southern California. But the CIA did not pass along the information to the FBI.

The draft cable — blocked by Miller’s CIA superiors — was not turned over to the commissioners or to the earlier congressional investigation. It was discovered in CIA records by an investigator working for a concurrent inquiry conducted by the Justice Department’s inspector general. Apparently it had been missed by Tenet’s DCI Review Group, convened immediately after the attacks to examine CIA records in order to prepare the director for the coming government investigations.

Kean was disturbed by the revelation.

“The idea that that information was left out of something that was so essential for the FBI, whose job it is to work within the United States and track these people … you know, it’s one of the most troubling aspects of our entire report, that particular thing,” Kean said.

We pushed Kean. Could it be this was a simple mistake, a failure to recognize the significance of Mihdhar and Hazmi, as the CIA had initially characterized it?

“Oh, it wasn’t careless oversight,” Kean replied. “It was purposeful. No question about that in my mind … In the DNA of these organizations was secrecy.”

Mihdhar and Hazmi boarded American Flight 77 at Washington Dulles airport on the morning of Sept. 11. After the plane took off, they joined three other men in commandeering the aircraft and flying it into the Pentagon, killing a total of 184 people.

So how then had George Tenet and those responsible at the CIA managed to get away with misrepresenting the incident as a mistake for so long?

“Tenet was a likable guy,” Kean concluded. “He got away with some stuff because people liked him.”

“Malfeasance and misfeasance”

In 2009, former White House counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke took the scenario further. In an on-camera interview he suggested that Tenet, once a close friend and colleague, had ordered the withholding of the information about the two al-Qaida operatives from the FBI and from the White House.

Clarke explained why he had come to that remarkable conclusion. Tenet, he said, followed all information about al-Qaida “in microscopic detail” and would call Clarke at the White House several times a day to share “the most trivial of information.” In addition, there were terrorism threat meetings held in person every other day.

We must have had dozens, scores of threat committee meetings over the time when they knew these guys had entered the country … They told us everything except this … So now the question is, why?

The only explanation Clarke could offer was admittedly speculative: that the CIA may have been running an operation to recruit the two al-Qaida operatives while they were living under their own names in Southern California. This might appear to have been a reasonable thing for the CIA to do. After all, Bill Clinton’s White House had long complained to the agency about the lack of penetration agents in al-Qaida.

But if the CIA was following or recruiting or monitoring Mihdhar and Hazmi in the United States, that might well have qualified as operating on U.S. soil, a violation of the agency’s charter. Once the two men were identified as hijackers on Flight 77, CIA officials may have begun a coverup of their earlier “malfeasance and misfeasance,” as Clarke charges.

His language is blunt, especially for a national security policymaker.

“I am outraged and have been ever since I first learned that the CIA knew these guys were in the country,” explained Clarke. “But I believed for the longest time that this was probably one or two low-level CIA people who made the decision not to disseminate the information. Now that I know that 50 CIA officers knew this, and they included all kinds of people who were regularly talking to me, saying I’m pissed doesn’t begin to describe it.”

Clarke said he assumed that “there was a high-level decision in the CIA ordering people not to share that information.” When asked who might have issued such an order, he replied, “I would think
it would have been made by the director,” referring to Tenet — although he added that Tenet and others would never admit to the truth today “even if you waterboarded them.”

The view from the FBI

We found the same suspicion was also prevalent among FBI counterterrorism agents from the time, particularly those who had worked under a legendary FBI agent named John O’Neill in New York. O’Neill, movingly portrayed in Lawrence Wright’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Looming Tower,” was one of the special agents in charge of counterterrorism in the FBI’s New York office. He retired to serve as chief of security at the World Trade Center and was killed in the Sept. 11 attacks, only three weeks after leaving the bureau.

O’Neill’s deputy for counterterrorism was Pasquale D’Amuro, who was appointed inspector in charge of the FBI’s investigation into the attacks.

“I am cautious about saying it, because you have to deal with the facts,” D’Amuro told us. He said that he was told that Richard Blee, the chief of Alec Station, and his deputy, Tom Wilshere, had blocked the sharing of intelligence on Mihdhar and Hazmi with the FBI.

“I had heard that Blee stopped it from coming over, that Blee and Wilshere had had the conversation and stopped it,” D’Amuro said. “There’s no doubt in my mind that that went up further in the agency than just those two guys. And why they didn’t send it over — to this day, I don’t know why.”

Jack Cloonan, former manager at the FBI’s al-Qaida-busting I-49 Squad, is another insider pained by the CIA’s actions.

“If you start to look into everything that’s Khalid Al Mihdhar and Nawaf Al Hazmi, you can’t help but conclude to most people’s minds that this is it,” Cloonan, said during an emotional interview in his New Jersey living room. “9/11 occurred not because the systems failed. The systems actually worked. Somebody made a critical decision not to share this information … If you look at this, it’s really just a handful of people. I don’t know how they sleep at night, I really don’t.”

The CIA’s failure to inform the FBI meant that a last chance to stop the hijackers was missed, says Clarke.

“And if they had….” Clarke told us, his voice trailing off. “Even as late as Sept. 4,” he went on, “we would have conducted a massive sweep. We would have conducted it publicly. We would have found those assholes. There’s no doubt in my mind — even with only a week left — we would have found them…”

Clarke is not an infallible or even a disinterested witness. As a top counterterrorism adviser at the time of the attack, he cannot help but take the tragedy personally. That said, the fact that at least three FBI agents share his views certainly enhances his credibility.

A spokesman for the CIA rejects the notion, telling Salon, “any suggestion that the CIA purposely refused to share critical lead information on the 9/11 plots with the FBI is simply wrong.” The spokesman cited the 9/11 Commission report and a report of the CIA’s independent inspector general. (The latter study, completed in 2004, has never been made public.)

The story of the alleged CIA intelligence failure attracted little other media interest until this August. That’s when Tenet, Richard Blee and another CIA official criticized by Clarke, Counterterrorism Center director J. Cofer Black, replied to our request for an interview. We had asked them to respond to Clarke’s speculation.

Although they declined to be interviewed, Tenet, Black and Blee sent us a joint written statement that charged Clarke was “reckless and profoundly wrong” and that he had “suddenly invented baseless allegations which are belied by the record and unworthy of serious consideration.”

The statement, which we shared with the Daily Beast, was newsworthy because the three men had never before felt the need to explain their actions directly to the American public.

“We testified under oath about what we did, and what we didn’t know,” they stated. “We stand by that testimony.”

The relevance of their testimony to Clarke’s theory is hard to assess. Tenet and Black were never asked about the surveillance of Mihdhar and Hazmi, at least in their public testimony. Blee’s testimony has never been made public.

“You’re not going to say anything”

The CIA’s explanation is not convincing to Mark Rossini, an FBI agent who was assigned to Alec Station in 2000 and 2001. The assignment of tracking Khalid Al Mihdhar, he told us, had been given to a young staff operations officer who shared responsibility for watching events in Yemen along with Alec Station deputy chief Tom Wilshere.

Rossini, who resigned from the FBI in the wake of legal troubles, recalled in a phone interview that the staff officer’s direct supervisor was a redheaded analyst working directly for Wilshere. He says that this supervisor, not referred to by even so much as an alias in any of the government reports on 9/11, is the same woman who told congressional investigators that she had hand-delivered Mihdhar’s visa information to FBI headquarters. This was later proven false when the investigators checked the log books at the FBI headquarters, discovering that she had never set foot in the building. Eleanor Hill, staff director of the congressional inquiry, also told us that her investigators found no evidence that the FBI had ever received the information.

Rossini remembered that the staff operations officer working under that redhead had ordered him and his fellow FBI agent Doug Miller not to tell their colleagues at the bureau, including John O’Neill’s New York office, that Mihdhar was likely on his way to the United States in early 2000.

“She got a little heated,” Rossini recalled. “She just put her hand on her hip and just said to me, ‘Listen, it’s not an FBI case. It’s not an FBI matter. When we want the FBI to know, we’ll let them know. And you’re not going to say anything.’”

Only two days before, this same officer had sent a message internally throughout the CIA misleading her fellow agents into believing that the information had been passed on to the FBI. Her later conversation with Rossini makes it appear that this was a deliberate misstatement. According to the Justice Department inspector general, she sent the misleading message only hours after posting an electronic note on Doug Miller’s draft warning to the FBI: “pls hold off … for now per [the CIA deputy chief of bin Laden unit],” a reference to Tom Wilshere.

We now know the staff officer is a woman named Michael Anne Casey. Her red-haired supervisor was a woman named Alfreda Frances Bikowsky.

Google penetrates the CIA

How we learned the names of those two CIA personnel can be summarized in one word: Google. In the case of the redhead, an Associated Press article from February 2011 seemed to refer to her. She had also been referenced in Jane Mayer’s book “The Dark Side,” by her middle name, Frances. The AP article stated that she had an unusual first name. After searching State Department nominations from the past decade — often cover positions for CIA personnel but still entered into the Congressional Record -– a contemporary historian named Kevin Fenton with whom we work closely found a name that seemed to fit.

For the staff officer, we knew three important facts. She had a “man’s name” — most likely Michael, the name used in the Commission Report. She was in her late 20s at the time of the incident, and was a “CIA brat,” meaning she had at least one parent or another family member inside the agency. We wondered if she might be related to a prominent CIA figure, as her boss Richard Blee had turned out to be. One of the first names that came to mind, given her probable birth year, was William J. Casey, Ronald Reagan’s CIA director.

Pairing the first name “Michael” with the last name “Casey,” we found a number of people with that name working in State Department or military positions. Again looking in the Congressional Record, we found the name Michael Anne Casey — a woman with a man’s name — and another website listing Casey as 27 years old in 1999 and living in the D.C. area, which seemed to make her very likely the person in question. (Incidentally, we were later informed that she is no relation to William J. Casey.)

A CIA threat

When we informed the agency’s Public Affairs office that we planned to release an investigative podcast on iTunes on Sunday, Sept. 11, that named Bikowsky and Casey, the agency replied immediately.

“We strongly believe it is irresponsible and a potential violation of criminal law [emphasis added] to print the names of two reported undercover CIA officers who you claim have been involved in the hunt against al-Qaida,” said spokesman Preston Golson.

Erring on the side of caution, we took the names out of our podcast. On the day we released the revised podcast on our website, we heard from Sibel Edmonds. A former FBI analyst and prominent whistleblower, Edmonds posted a story on her blog Sept. 21 stating that she had three credible sources and a document confirming that the redhead in our revised story was Bikowsky. She also stated that the staff officer involved was Michael Anne Casey and cited our website, Secrecy Kills. It was only then that we discovered our webmaster had briefly and inadvertently placed our entire email to the CIA on our site. Edmonds saw the information and published it.

Within minutes the information had spread widely through social media on the Internet. Before long Gawker breathlessly announced the latest of the CIA’s problems: that Bikowsky, who had risen to become the head of the CIA’s global jihad unit, had been outed. The rather more significant story — that a CIA intelligence failure had contributed to the 9/11 attacks — got short shrift from the popular gossip site.

In an effort to clarify the story, we asked the CIA two factual questions. We asked if Bikowsky’s statement to the congressional 9/11 inquiry — that she had delivered Mihdhar’s visa information to the FBI prior to the attacks — was accurate.

We also asked if former FBI agent Mark Rossini’s recollection that Michael Anne Casey had told him not to report information about Mihdhar and Hazmi was accurate.

The agency did not address the specifics of either question.

“We do not, as a rule, publicly confirm or deny the identities of currently serving agency officers,” a spokesman replied. “That includes those dedicated to the disruption of terrorist plots. The officers involved in those critical efforts have, thanks to their skill and focus, saved countless American lives.”

The story of Mihdhar and Hazmi could easily be clarified, says Robert Baer, a retired CIA officer in the Middle East who worked directly with some of the people involved.

“A lot of these people who withheld this information were not covert operatives,” he explained. “There was no reason to hide their names. They are out there in the public. You can find them in data and credit checks and the rest of it … They certainly could have been brought before the House or the Senate in closed session and an explanation and a report put out there.”

Langley on the defensive

The CIA prefers not to disclose but to protect the handful of people at the heart of this story.

Tenet remained George W. Bush’s CIA director for another two and a half years, where he was famously involved in passing along faulty intellig
ence about weapons of mass destruction that justified the disastrous invasion of Iraq. On Dec. 14, 2004, George Tenet was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Bush.

Richard Blee, chief of Alec Station in 2001, reportedly took over the CIA operation during the invasion of Afghanistan to capture or kill Osama bin Laden when bin Laden was surrounded in the mountains of Tora Bora three months after 9/11. According to 23-year career CIA officer Gary Berntsen, as reported in his book, “Jawbreaker,” Blee was in charge at the time bin Laden managed to slip away to Pakistan to live comfortably for nearly a decade. Harper’s Ken Silverstein reported that Blee was active in the controversial renditions and detainee-abuse programs. He is now retired and living in Los Angeles.

We do not know exactly what became of Tom Wilshere, a mysterious figure who has managed to maintain an even lower profile than the rest. Dale Watson, former head of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, told us that us that Wilshere became a White House briefer during the Bush era.

Casey and Bikowsky have risen in the CIA’s ranks, despite the fact that Bikowsky has been associated with at least one major blunder. The AP reported that Bikowsky was at the center of “the el-Masri incident,” in which an innocent German citizen was renditioned (a euphemism for kidnapped) by the CIA in 2003 and held under terrible conditions (a euphemism for tortured) in a secret Afghan prison. The AP characterized it as “one of the biggest diplomatic embarrassments of the U.S. war on terrorism.” It was no doubt something more to Khaled el-Masri. Despite that episode Bikowsky was promoted.

As chief of the counterterrorism center, Cofer Black was the boss of Casey, Bikowsky and Blee. He too was associated with the abuses of the extraordinary rendition program. He resigned shortly after George Bush was elected to a second term. Black then served as vice chairman of Blackwater USA, the controversial U.S.-based private security firm, from 2005 to 2008. Earlier this month Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney announced that Black would join his campaign as a foreign policy adviser.

Rory O’Connor is an award-winning journalist, author and filmmaker, and co-founder and president of the international media firm Globalvision. Producer-writer Ray Nowosielski made his documentary debut directing “Press for Truth” in 2006. Co-founder of the media production company Banded Artists, he also was a senior producer for Globalvision.

The post Salon: Insiders Voice Doubts About CIA’s 9/11 Story appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

Gawker: Chief of CIA’s Global Jihad Unit Revealed Online

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 01:32:41 +0000

The CIA is having trouble keeping its secret agents off the internet. First, it allowed the White House to publish a photograph of the man behind the operation to kill Osama bin Laden. And now the identity of the woman who runs its “Global Jihad Unit”—and who has a long (if pseudonymous) history of being associated with some of the agency’s most disastrous boondoggles—has been published online by two documentary filmmakers who sussed it out with the help of some “savvy internet research.”

Her name is Alfreda Frances Bikowsky and, according to independent reporters Ray Nowosielski and John Duffy, she is a CIA analyst who is partially responsible for intelligence lapses that led to 9/11. The two reporters recently released a “documentary podcast” called “Who Is Richard Blee?” about the chief of the agency’s bin Laden unit in the immediate run-up to the 9/11 attacks and featuring interviews with former counterterrorism official Richard Clarke, former CIA agent Bob Baer, Looming Tower author Lawrence Wright, 9/11 Commission co-chairman Tom Keane, and others. In it, Nowosielski and Duffy make the case that Bikowsky and another CIA agent named Michael Anne Casey deliberately declined to tell the White House and the FBI that Khalid al-Mihdhar, an Al Qaida affiliate they were tracking, had obtained a visa to enter the U.S. in the summer of 2001. Al-Mihdhar was one of the hijackers on American Airlines Flight 77. The CIA lost track of him after he entered the U.S.

Bikowsky was also, according to Nowosielski and Duffy, instrumentally involved in one of the CIA’s most notorious fuck-ups—the kidnapping, drugging, sodomizing, and torture of Khalid El-Masri in 2003 (El-Masri turned out to be the wrong guy, and had nothing to do with terrorism). As the Associated Press’ Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo reported earlier this year, an analyst they described only by her middle name—”Frances”—pressed for El-Masri to be abducted even though some in the agency weren’t convinced he was the terrorist that Frances suspected he was. Instead of being punished or fired for the error, “Frances” was eventually promoted to running the Global Jihad Unit by then-CIA director Michael Hayden. According to Goldman and Apuzzo’s story, “Hayden told colleagues that he gave Frances a pass because he didn’t want to deter initiative within the counterterrorism ranks.”

Nowosielski and Duffy also contend that Bikowsky is the unnamed “particularly overzealous female officer” described in Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side who traveled to personally view Khalid Sheikh Muhammed’s interrogation despite having “no legitimate reason” to be there. Mayer reported that she attended the sessions because “she thought it would be cool”; her supervisors later reprimanded her with the admonition, “It’s not supposed to be entertainment.”

Michael Anne Casey, according Nowosielski and Duffy, is the name of the CIA analyst who sat on information about Al-Mihdhar obtaining a visa in 2001, at one point telling an FBI agent detailed to the agency, “Listen, it’s not an FBI case. It’s not an FBI matter. When we want the FBI to know, we’ll let them know. And you’re not going to say anything.”

The disclosures appear to have been inadvertent. In the “Who Is Rich Blee?” podcast, as well as a transcript of it available online, both Bikowsky and Casey are referred to exclusively as “[Frances]” and “[Michael].” But at some point this week, Nowosielski and Duffy posted on their web site a cache of email correspondence with the CIA’s public affairs office generated while pursuing the story. Among them was an email Nowosielski wrote to an unnamed CIA official last month laying out their argument for revealing Bikowsky and Casey’s names—and revealing that they were able to identify them not through a whistleblower or anonymous leak but “through internet research.” Here it is in full:

From: FF4 Films

Date: Thu, Aug 8, 2011 at 10:00 AM

Subject: CIA Public Affairs

To: (CIA Email Form)

To CIA Public Affairs Media Relations:

We wish to make you aware that we plan to release an investigative podcast on iTunes on Sunday, September 11, and a written piece in Truthout shortly thereafter which will name two of your employees, Alfreda Frances Bikowsky and Michael Anne Casey. Please take appropriate steps to ensure their safety, though our sources tell us both are currently working from CIA headquarters in Langley.

Evidence we have uncovered demonstrates that each failed to follow standard operating procedure on multiple instances with regard to an operation that surveilled two future 9/11 hijackers, one that many we interviewed feel was the single best opportunity to stop those attacks. Some of those failures appear to have been deliberate choices. Both women then failed to tell the full story to and/or ensure the full story was known by subsequent investigations.

Both were analysts, not operatives, before Sept 11th, so the CIA could have chosen to allow them to be named and held to account by subsequent government investigations. Instead, the Agency put them in the cover status, retroactively protecting their identities and allowing them to continue in important terror-related assignments in the field. We understand that Ms. Casey has multiple family members also working in the Agency.

Regarding Ms. Bikowsky specifically, we have learned that she may have misinformed the Congressional investigation on certain details. We have also confirmed that she is the CIA employee described in Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side as having been reprimanded for making herself involved in the waterboarding of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed without officially being assigned to do so. And another source who has read the CIA OIG Report into the Camp Chapman attack says she was named for accountability in that incident as well.

We wish to make clear that no source provided us with these names. We were given descriptions and various background details by multiple sources about two officers inside Alec Station in 1999-2001, one a red-headed thirtysomething supervisor later promoted to Deputy Chief and the other a young staff operations officer. We were then able through internet research to identify likely candidates for the names of these people. During interviews with those who might know, we would describe what Ms. Bikowsky did in this instance or Ms. Casey did in that and ask a question about it. The failure to correct us provided confirmation.

We are officially requesting to interview Ms. Bikowsky and Ms. Casey so that they might set the record straight in detail if we have been given bad information or misinterpreted the often murky facts surrounding these incidents. We are willing to move back our release date in order to include their interviews, though we would need to know that within twenty-four hours.

When you reply, we will send you a transcript of the podcast so that CIA may choose to respond. This response will be included on our web site, mentioned at the end of the podcast, and referenced in the Truthout piece. If you provide new details or explanations that are significant enough, we will re-work the podcast and Truthout write-up to reflect these revelations before release. We can be reached by reply email or at 317-698-xxxx.

Thank you,

Ray Nowosielski

FF4 Films

The reporters also posted the CIA’s reply, which seemed to confirm the identities: “We strongly believe it is irresponsible and a potential violation of criminal law to print the names of two reported undercover CIA officers whom you claim have been involved in the hunt against al Qa’ida.” Nowosielski and Duffy interpreted this as a threat and an attempt to censor their reporting, writing: “The federal law in question was later stated: the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. The law has never before been applied to journalists who find information in open-source materials. This possible expansion of precedent fits an ongoing pattern of intimidation and redefining precedent regarding leaks and whistleblowers from the White House.”

Last night the former FBI linguist and whistleblower Sibel Edmonds caught wind of the correspondence and posted Bikowsky’s name on her blog: “Boiling Frogs Post has now confirmed the identity of the CIA analyst at the heart of a notorious failure in the run-up to the September 11th tragedy.” Cryptome’s John Young also published Nowosielski’s letter in full. At this point, Bikowsky and Casey’s identities as CIA analysts are fully disseminated across the internet. A Google search for either name immediately turns up web sites reporting their CIA affiliations. Likewise, a search for “Who is the director of the CIA’s Global Jihad Unit?” returns Bikowsky’s name in the first result.

(Their digital trails are, as one might expect, scant. A “Michael Anne Casey” turns up on LinkedIn as an “Independent Think Tanks Professional” in the Washington, D.C. area. In 2003, someone by that name was nominated as a foreign service officer for the State Department. In 2004, she was listed as a consular officer in Rome by the U.N.’s Committee on World Food Security, of which she was a member. Bikowsky was nominated to the foreign service in 2008.)

Unfortunately for Nowosielski and Duffy, they never intended to post the email containing Bikowsky and Casey’s names. Though they had hoped to publish the identities, the CIA’s threats had successfully intimidated them. Nowosielski wrote to Cryptome’s John Young at some point last night or this morning explaining that the email was posted in error and asking that he remove his copy; Young complied.

Nowosielski told Gawker via email, “We chose to censor the name at the request of CIA. Sibel chose to run the name for her story. We’ve asked that she remove any reference to our web site, where we did in fact censor the names for both the podcast and transcript. The post of the correspondence was an accident, a miscommunication with our webmaster that was quickly corrected. We frankly were scared of the CIA repercussions (regardless of the ethical issues involved here) and decided to censor. Simple as that.”

We contacted the CIA seeking comment about the disclosures, Nowosielki and Duffy’s reporting, and to ask if the agency did in fact threaten them with criminal prosecution if they published the names. Spokesman Preston Golson responded in a statement:

The CIA does not as a rule comment on the names of reported undercover officers.

The Central Intelligence Agency has a very different assessment, as you might expect, on these events, as did the 9/11 Commission. The CIA’s counterterrorism efforts have significantly degraded al Qaeda and produced valuable and timely intelligence, which has allowed the United States and others to take action countless times to save lives and disrupt plots.

Any suggestion that the CIA purposely refused to share critical lead information on the 9/11 plots with FBI is baseless.

Speculation and allegations such as these diminish the hard work and dedication of countless CIA officers who have worked tirelessly against al Qaeda both before and after 9/11-hard work that culminated in the operation that found Bin Ladin.

Golson did not ask us not to publish Bikowsky and Casey’s names.

The Associated Press’ Goldman, when asked if the “Frances” he referred to in his February story with Matt Apuzzo was indeed Bikowsky, referred us to AP spokesman Paul Colford. Colford declined to comment. It’s notable that Goldman, who presumably knows Frances’ identity, posted on Twitter a link to the correspondence while it was up on Nowosielski and Duffy’s site: “Web site reveals names CIA officers involved in 9/11 intelligence failure.” UPDATE: After we published this story, Goldman wrote on Twitter that “Retweeting is not a confirmation of anything.”

We asked Jane Mayer if Bikowsky was the woman she described as having crashed Khalid Sheikh Muhammed’s interrogation. She replied, “I identified everyone I felt was appropriate in my book, and am sorry not to be of more help but need to leave it at that.”

The post Gawker: Chief of CIA’s Global Jihad Unit Revealed Online appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

Who Is Rich Blee?

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 20:52:30 +0000

Despite threats of prosecution from the CIA, the makers of 9/11: Press For Truth have released their new documentary podcast Who Is Rich Blee?

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

The post Who Is Rich Blee? appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

September 11th Advocates Statement on CIA and Clarke

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 14:41:47 +0000

In Boiling Frogs Post’s recent interview with Ray Nowosielski and John Duffy, Sibel Edmonds questioned the timing of former Counter-Terrorism Czar, Richard Clarke’s willingness to speak out about alleged 9/11 hijackers, Nawaf al Hazmi and Khalid al Mihdhar, and the CIA’s knowledge of their whereabouts after the January 2000 Malaysia “terrorist summit.” Sibel asked Ray and John, “why now?” We would like to note that the interview with Clarke was actually recorded two years ago, in October 2009. As such, the “why now” question should actually be posed to Ray and John. The real questions for Clarke should be, “why then?” Why then and not during his testimony before the 9/11 Commission, when it would have been meaningful to the Commission’s investigation? In addition, in his October 2009 interview, Clarke revealed pertinent insight into information sharing at high levels, which would clearly counter the misleading findings of the 9/11 Commission regarding the “failures” of communications between the FBI and CIA.

It is extremely troubling to us that the former Counter-Terrorism Czar, for both the Clinton and Bush Junior Administrations, as well as chair of the Counter-Terrorism Security Group for Bush Senior (essentially working in an anti-terrorism related capacity since about 1992), took so long to speak out about why the CIA would intentionally fail to share such critically important information with the FBI. If nothing else, he should have mentioned in his testimony before the 9/11 Commission in 2004 that information sharing was not a problem between intelligence agencies themselves or with the Executive Branch. Clarke was clearly well aware of how he, and the FBI, received raw data from CIA sources and had to be keenly aware that the Commission was basing many of their recommendations on this misinformation. Clarke did not bother to clear that up during his testimony or immediately afterwards.

This is just another glaring example of how the 9/11 Commission failed. How could the Commission have been unaware of how information sharing was actually accomplished within the agencies and with the White House? Did they fail to ask any appropriate questions to the key witnesses? Why did they purposely choose to relegate the extremely important fact that the CIA intentionally withheld information from the FBI to a tiny footnote (Chapter 6, Footnote 44) in their final report? Worse yet, according to the 9/11 Commission, they allegedly have never found out who in the CIA gave the order to keep the FBI out of the loop. They had to know that this deliberate failure to share information could only be fixed by removing the individuals responsible and not be cured by a reorganization recommendation. Despite logic, that is what they recommended.

Furthermore, we find it truly disturbing that Ray and John are potentially being legally challenged by the CIA for attempting to bring to light information that they reportedly were able to glean from open source material for their current project. Instead of going after a minority of journalists who are doing their job of informing the public, we would prefer to see the unnamed agents held responsible for their past actions, which according to the official story, would have led to two American Airlines Flight 77 hijackers. If the agents had merely used the information they had to stop, search and ultimately arrest al Hazmi and al Mihdhar, the 9/11 plot may have been foiled and almost 3,000 lives may have been saved. We find it incredulous that these agents are still employed by the CIA.

To our dismay, punitive actions are once again being taken against the wrong people.

# # # #

September 11^th Advocates:

Patty Casazza

Monica Gabrielle

Mindy Kleinberg

Lorie Van Aucken

The post September 11th Advocates Statement on CIA and Clarke appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

CIA Threats Delay 9/11 Documentary

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 14:18:56 +0000

On Thursday, the CIA threatened the journalists behind Who Is Rich Blee? with possible federal prosecution if their investigative podcast reveals the names of two CIA analysts at the center of a pattern of obstruction and mishandling of intelligence that many feel would have stopped the 9/11 attacks.

Like FBI agent Ali Soufan and Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer before them, the podcast team, including John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski, are being subjected to intimidation and censorship by government officials over blowing the whistle on the true story surrounding two alleged 9/11 hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar.

The podcast originally scheduled for September 11th release presents a narrative of how three CIA analysts working under Richard Blee, the long unknown former head of CIA’s Bin Laden Station, deliberately misled their colleagues and withheld key intelligence from FBI and the White House regarding the presence of two known Al-Qaeda operatives in the U.S.

Four government investigations into CIA handling of pre-911 intelligence included personal details of the two CIA analysts and their actions. Nowosielski and Duffy deduced the identities of the two as yet unnamed CIA employees from internet research based on details provided from these and other open sources. When the producers used their full names in interviews, interviewees offered no correction. The CIA response provided the final confirmation.

In project updates posted at SecrecyKills.com the producers announced the delay of the podcast and posted background of a complicated case that involves dozens of violations of protocol, intimidation, and incidents of obstruction by the CIA, with the two yet named CIA analysts at the center of many of them.

Author and expert on the subject, Kevin Fenton, documents 35 such incidents between January 2000 and September 11th in his book, Disconnecting the Dots: How 9/11 Was Allowed to Happen.

Pulitzer-prize winner Lawrence Wright, interviewed for the podcast, told producers the actions of one of the unnamed CIA analysts still employed at CIA amounts to obstruction of justice in the FBI’s criminal investigation of the deaths of 17 seaman aboard the USS Cole.

The producers are not the first subject to government censorship over this case. Last month The New York Times reported on CIA efforts to censor an autobiography by Ali Soufan, a front-line FBI counter-terrorism special agent. Prior to 9/11, Soufan was interested in Mihdhar and Hazmi because of links to the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. The CIA censored references to a passport photo of Mihdhar the CIA had withheld from Soufan, despite three written requests.

Scott Shane of the New York Times reports today that, “Mr. Soufan accuses C.I.A. officials of deliberately withholding crucial documents and photographs of Qaeda operatives from the F.B.I. before Sept. 11, 2001, despite three written requests, and then later lying about it to the 9/11 Commission.”

Lt. Colonel Anthony Shaffer, interviewed for the podcast, was himself intimidated, demoted and smeared by the Pentagon after he came forward to the 9/11 Commission with details of how, on three occasions, unnamed DoD officials prevented his Able Danger operation from meeting with the FBI prior the attacks.

In 2000 the Able Danger data-mining program placed Mohammed Atta in a Brooklyn terrorist cell but had also placed Hazmi and Mihdhar in a San Diego cell, the epicenter of intrigue around Alec Station’s Rich Blee, Tom Wilshere and the two as yet unnamed subordinates who themselves repeatedly withheld intelligence from the FBI. Though Shaffer was interviewed by 9/11 Commission’s Director Philip Zelikow and staffer Dieter Snell, the Commission left any mention of Able Danger from its final report.

In the planned podcast, 9/11 Commission Chair Tom Kean is asked about a scant footnote to Chapter 6 of the 9/11 Report referring to an intelligence cable, seen by 50 at the CIA, but prevented from reaching the FBI. For Kean the incident was not a case of bungling or intel ‘stovepiping’: “Oh, it wasn’t careless oversight. It was purposeful. No question about that in mind. It was purposeful.”

Whereas Kean explains it as a penchant for secrecy, Richard Clarke, the former head of counter-terrorism at the Bush White House, goes farther suggesting malfeasance and the possibility of illegal CIA-led domestic spying activity. Comments by Clarke released in a video in August led to a formal statement from George Tenet, Cofer Black and Richard Blee, and a response from the producers.

“This was perhaps the closest U.S. intelligence got to foiling the 9/11 plot,” explains Nowosielski, “but instead of stopping the attack, the CIA stopped intel on two high-value targets from getting to the right people, repeatedly. And still the CIA protects the individuals responsible by intimidating those who simply want to know the truth behind a shocking and possibly criminal pattern of obstruction”

In an email Thursday the CIA warned Nowosielski he could be subject to prosecution under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, a law intended to apply to government employees who violate their security clearance and never used to convict journalists.

The producer’s online response: “The Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics states that ‘journalists should be free of obligation to any interest other than the public’s right to know’ and should ‘be vigilant and courageous about holding those with power accountable.’ The day that journalists’ exposés of wrongdoing within government agencies require the approval of those government agencies before release, that is the day that transparency and accountability are lost.”

John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski, both graduates of Chicago’s Columbia College Film School, produced the critically acclaimed 2006 documentary “9/11: Press for Truth.”

The post CIA Threats Delay 9/11 Documentary appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

Sibel Edmonds Interviews Ray Nowosielski and John Duffy

Sun, 11 Sep 2011 00:46:53 +0000

Filmmakers Ray Nowosielski and John Duffy join us to discuss their extensive research, interviews and findings which have resulted in the unmasking of three former top CIA officials – George Tenet, Cofer Black and Richard Blee – and their role in withholding intelligence on two key 9/11 hijackers and subsequent cover-ups. Duffy and Nowosielski provide us with a detailed account of their new interview with former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke and his allegations against the CIA officials – Tenet, Black and Blee – accusing them of knowingly withholding intelligence from the White House, the FBI, Immigration and the State and Defense Departments. They discuss two key CIA analysts who were instrumental in this cover up, a joint statement issued by the three accused CIA officials in response to Clarke’s allegations, and more!

Ray Nowosielski and John Duffy produced the film “Press for Truth,” which documented the journey of four 9/11 widows as they lobbied the Bush White House to convene an independent commission to probe the attacks. They recently launched a new transparency web site SecrecyKills.com.

MP3 [1:08:53]

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Cutting Off Your Nose to Spite Your Face

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 14:10:53 +0000

This may fall on deaf ears. In fact, I’m quite sure it will.

I’ve written so many of these kinds of articles over the years, it pains me to have to do so again.

When 9/11: Press For Truth was released, there were some in the 9/11 Truth Movement who thought it was “soft and misleading.” Who said that it didn’t go far enough. That it was “disinformation.” Personally, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the film. In fact, I think it’s the most dangerous 9/11 documentary in existence. However, because the naysayers had some “influence,” and because someone asked me for my opinion on the film, I wrote this. Just like I’m writing this article today. Just like I recently wrote this, and this. Let’s just say that I am tired of the games people play.

You may or may not have heard, but Ray Nowosielski and John Duffy recently released a video of an interview taken in 2009 of former Counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke. They first debuted this interview at the Treason In America conference in March 2010.

How has this video helped those advocating for 9/11 Justice?

It brought attention to this cause at sites like thedailybeast.com, truthout.org, consortiumnews.com, washingtonpost.com, cbsnews.com, russiatoday.com, philly.com, theatlanticwire.com, sandiegoreader.com, wsws.org, boilingfrogspost.com, pubrecord.org, securitydebrief.com, and many other sites.

It brings attention to 9/11: Press For Truth. Phil Shenon from thedailybeast.com writes:

“The producers, John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski, had previously made a well-reviewed film documentary, Press for Truth (www.911pressfortruth.com), on the struggle of a group of 9/11 victims’ families to force the government to investigate the attacks.

Jason Leopold from truthout.org writes:

Duffy and Nowosielski, whose previous film, “Press For Truth,” followed four 9/11 widows as they lobbied the Bush White House to convene an independent commission to probe the attacks, have also launched a new transparency web site, SecrecyKills.com, set to go live this evening with a campaign aimed at further unmasking Blee.

It brings attention to the 2 hijackers in San Diego. Those same 2 hijackers that apparently received money that was connected to Prince Bandar’s wife. It brings attention to the 28 redacted pages of the Joint Congressional Inquiry, which the Jersey Girls have been trying to get released for years.

Because of who Richard Clarke is, it got the attention of people who wouldn’t ordinarily write about 9/11 like David Swanson, to write about 9/11. It made Ray McGovern, who hasn’t written about 9/11 in years, to write about it again.

There are some who claim to be advocates for 9/11 Justice who are suggesting that this is a ploy to try and hide the “real story” about 9/11. I don’t know what the real story about 9/11 is. I know that there are a multitude of cover-ups, that there needs to be justice and accountability for what happened that day, that the families and the people of the world both require and deserve it, and that the “Post-9/11 World” needs to end. So far, this story about Richard Clarke seems to be helping us to do this.

However, to humor those individuals, let’s take a look at that theory. That would mean that Ray Nowosielski and John Duffy, two people responsible for a documentary that is the most dangerous in existence to those attempting to cover-up what happened that day, were “in on it.” Not only is that absurd, it is laughable.

That would mean that the CIA Inspector General’s report that suggests that people “failed to meet an acceptable standard of performance, and recommends that an internal review board review their conduct for possible disciplinary action” is a figment of our imagination. That would mean that Porter Goss refused to release the report, and “asked Helgerson to modify the report to avoid drawing conclusions about whether individual CIA officers should be held accountable” in an effort to make it seem even MORE credible so it would fool even MORE people.

Sounds reasonable, right? Yeah, not so much.

Do I entirely trust Richard Clarke? No. However, as my friend Cosmos said, “there is no reason or need to trust Richard Clarke. For whatever reason, Clarke has presented to the world a major, high level contradiction within the government’s story that should be exploited for all it is worth towards the goal of legitimate inquiry into 9/11. There is no need to lionize Clarke or obscure his shady connections in order to do this.”

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Richard Clarke Is Being Too Nice to George Tenet

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 11:15:14 +0000

Former National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counter-Terrorism Richard Clarke suggests that former CIA Director George Tenet blocked the sharing of information within the government on two members of al Qaeda in the United States, information that Clarke believes could have prevented 911. The CIA admits it knew about the two future hijackers but claims the Director was not informed.

“In early 2000, a number of more junior personnel (including FBI agents on detail to CIA) did see travel information on individuals who later became hijackers but the significance of the data was not adequately recognized at the time.”

Clark claims to have been very close to Tenet and to find this impossible to believe. Clarke maintains that the Director must have been informed and must have made the decision not to share the information with Clarke and others. Clarke speculates that the presence of these two al Qaeda members was kept secret because the CIA had tried to recruit, or “flip,” those al Qaeda members and failed. Yet he has no evidence of such attempts.

But why not report that you tried to recruit someone and failed? What is the reason not to report that?

It seems more likely to me that Clarke is going easy on Tenet. “The September 11th attacks could have been prevented” has an “Obama could have fought for progressive principles” ring to it; it builds in the assumption that those involved WANTED the attacks to be prevented. Whatever this other new report ends up meaning, the history of Able Danger, and of White House inaction, and of Clarke’s earlier revelations begins to suggest a pattern.

I hate to underestimate incompetence and petty infighting as explanations for things, but I also hate to accept as the only possible explanation Clarke’s theory — of which he himself does not seem at all convinced — as to why Tenet apparently withheld information. I asked FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds what she thought, and her reply suggested a level of contempt for both Clarke and Tenet: “I think sometimes it takes one evil fighting another evil to get to the truth. In this case, the clash of two guilty egos has helped unearth some truth on 9/11. Hope to have more clashes.”

I turned to Pentagon whistleblower Karen Kwiatkowski. She ought to have a sense of how accurate Clarke’s description is of standard practice versus inexplicable deviation from it. She seemed to think this new angle fit an existing pattern:

“[This] is just one more unanswered question regarding our own government’s involvement and possible complicity in the events. There are more gaping questions that lend credence to the theory that the U.S. government or parts of it were supportive and facilitated the 9/11 events (and the subsequent Amerithrax case). One, why was there no investigation of and no discussion of WTC 7 in the 9/11 commission report? And why has the case of the Israeli ‘art students’ (actually agents) who were tracking and had detailed operational intelligence on a significant number of the purported hijackers in this country in the months leading up to 9/11 never dealt with in a big way by any commission or any government agency? The after-the-fact lack of interest in these events kind of confirms the before-the-fact activities of those who were in a position to stop the attacks.”

Note that Karen does not here suggest, and neither do I have much use for theories to explain away what we know, theories that suggest there were no airplanes, no hijackers, etc., etc., some of which theories are extremely valuable but purely as entertainment. Rather, Karen is asking questions about things we don’t know, and things our government has gone to considerable lengths to avoid making known. When it comes to such matters, it’s hard to do better than turning to retired CIA officer Ray McGovern. I’ve just done so, and he hasn’t disappointed. Here’s a comment of McGovernian length and perception that he’s sent me:

“Withholding critical intelligence from the makers and implementers of security policy can be worse than lying. Of lying, we have plenty of evidence that former CIA director George Tenet is a serial offender — as is his long-time spokesman, Bill Harlow.

“But withholding intelligence on two of the 9/11 hijackers would have been unconscionable — the epitome of malfeasance, not just misfeasance. That’s why Richard Clarke’s conclusion that he should have received information from CIA about al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar, ‘unless somebody intervened to stop the normal automatic distribution’ is a most serious charge, given the role of the two in hijacking of American Airlines Flight 77 on 9/11.

“Tenet has denied that the information on the two hijackers was ‘intentionally withheld’ from Clarke, and has enlisted former CIA operatives Cofer Black (more recently a senior official of Blackwater) and Richard Blee (a more shadowy figure) to concur in saying, Not us; we didn’t withhold.

“Whom to believe? It is a no-brainer. One would have to have been born yesterday to regard the ‘George is right’ testimony from Black and Blee as collaborative.

“Tenet is the same fellow who provided the ‘slam dunk’ on the existence of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in Iraq, as well as the ‘artist renderings’ of equally non-existent mobile laboratories for developing biological warfare agents, based on unconfirmed information from the imposter code-named (appropriately) ‘Curveball.’ Tenet is the fellow who, under orders from Bush and Cheney, ordered up and disseminated a fraudulent National Intelligence Estimate on WMD in Iraq to deceive our elected representatives out of their Constitutional prerogative to authorize a war of aggression. Not small infractions.

“After a five-year investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee, Chairman Jay Rockefeller described the intelligence adduced under Tenet to ‘justify’ attacking Iraq as ‘uncorroborated, contradicted, and non-existent.’ Good enough to win Tenet the Presidential Medal of Freedom, though. It worked just fine for the purposes of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, thank you very much.

“It is a matter of record that Tenet lies a lot — on occasion, demonstrating a sort of chutzpah on steroids. Recall, for example, Tenet telling Scott Pelley on ’60 Minutes,’ five times, in five consecutive sentences, ‘We do not torture people.’

“Tenet has lied about 9/11 too. The joint statement from Tenet, Black, and Blee, provided by Bill Harlow, concludes: ‘We testified under oath about what we did, what we knew and what we didn’t know. We stand by that testimony.’ Almost made me laugh….almost.

“In his sworn testimony to the 9/11 Commission on April 14, 2004, Tenet told the Commission under the prime-time klieg lights that he had not spoken to Bush — even on the telephone — during the entire month of August 2001.

“But Tenet did visit fly to see the President in Crawford — not once, but twice during August 2001, and briefed Bush again in Washington on the 31st. After the TV cameras at the 9/11 Commission hearing were shut off, Bill Harlow phoned the commission staff to say, Oops, sorry, Tenet misspoke. Even then, Harlow admitted to only Tenet’s August 17 visit to Crawford (and to the briefing on the 31st).

“How do we know Tenet was again in Crawford on August 24? From a White House press release quoting President George W. Bush to that effect — information somehow completely missed by our vigilant Fawning Corporate Media (FCM).

“Funny how Tenet could have forgotten his first visit to Crawford. In his memoir, At the Center of the Storm, Tenet waxes eloquent about the ‘president graciously driving me around the spread in his pickup and me trying to make small talk about the flora and the fauna.’ But the visit was not limited to small talk.

“In his book Tenet writes: ‘A few weeks after the August 6 PDB was delivered, I followed it to Crawford to make sure the president stayed current on events.’ The Aug. 6, 2001 President’s Daily Brief contained the article ‘Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the US.’ According to Ron Suskind’s ‘The One-Percent Doctrine’, the president reacted by telling the CIA briefer, ‘All right, you’ve covered your ass now.’

“If, as Tenet says in his memoir, it was the Aug. 6, 2001, PDB that prompted his visit on Aug. 17, what might have brought him back on Aug. 24? I believe the answer can be found in court documents released at the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the fledgling pilot in Minnesota interested in learning to steer a plane but indifferent as to how to land it.

“Those documents show that on Aug. 23, 2001, Tenet was given an alarming briefing, focusing on Moussaoui, titled ‘Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly.’ Tenet was told that Moussaoui was training to fly a 747 and, among other suspicion-arousing data, had paid for the training in cash.

“It is an open question — if a key one — whether Tenet told Bush about the two hijackers, al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar, while keeping that key information from the person who most needed it — White House counter-terrorist czar Richard Clarke. Clarke finds the only plausible explanation in his conclusion that Tenet was personally responsible. Clarke says:

“‘For me to this day, it is inexplicable, when I had every other detail about everything related to terrorism, that the director didn’t tell me, that the director of the counterterrorism center didn’t tell me, that the other 48 people inside CIA that knew about it never mentioned it to me or anyone in my staff in a period of over 12 months.’

“But Tenet’s aide-de-camp Bill Harlow has branded Clarke’s statements ‘absurd and patently false.’ The statement Harlow shepherded for Tenet, Black, and Blee adds ‘reckless and profoundly wrong…baseless…belied by the record…unworthy of serious consideration.’

“And Harlow never lies. Right. I’m reminded of Harlow’s reaction to Newsweek’s publication on February 24, 2003 of the remarks of Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, who had been in charge of Iraq’s nuclear, chemical, biological and missile programs for almost a decade before he defected to Jordan in 1995. Kamel did provide some information on residual, closed-down sites relating to WMD, and that information proved correct.

“Kamel ALSO said that after the first Gulf War in 1991:

“‘I ordered the destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons — biological, chemical, missile, nuclear were destroyed.’

“This was not at all what Bush, Cheney, and — by extension — Tenet wanted Newsweek readers, or the rest of us, to learn just three weeks before the U.S./U.K. attack on Iraq, ostensibly to find and destroy those threatening, non-existent weapons.

“So Bill Harlow rose to the occasion, telling the FCM that the Newsweek story was, ‘incorrect, bogus, wrong, untrue.’ And the FCM said, Gosh, thanks for telling us.

“By all indications, Harlow is still able to work his fraudulent magic on the FCM, which has virtually ignored this major story since it broke several days ago. If Harlow says it’s not true…and throws in still more pejorative adjectives to dismiss what Clarke says, it is surely Richard Clarke who is not telling the truth. No matter Clarke’s well deserved reputation for honesty and professionalism.

“And so it goes.”

Yes, it is as likely as that the sky is blue that Tenet knew and that Tenet is lying about what he knew. But I’m interested in why. Did he try to convert two members of al Qaeda to his team and fail, and then choose to keep quiet about it, despite his established habit of trying to “cover his ass”? Wouldn’t his ass have been better covered by sharing the information? And wouldn’t we all then be better off, in particular the million Iraqis and thousands of Americans and Afghans who’ve paid for this malfeasance with their lives?

But what if, just as Obama’s actions make sense when we stop fantasizing about him being a liberal, Tenet’s actions make sense when we stop assuming his top priority was protecting the people of this country?

UPDATE:

Comment from Coleen Rowley:

“Richard Clarke is among the few high level counter-terrorism officials in the lead-up to 9-11 with the experience, insights and credibility to know what he’s talking about and to make logical deductions from the known facts. His comments pertain to the still murky area as the CIA has never allowed any of its personnel to be fully debriefed about what transpired in the aftermath of the Kuala Lumpur meeting nor about the two known Al Qaeda members on the CIA’s terrorist list and who the CIA learned had come into California. No one seems to have been forthcoming about why that important information was not shared in a timely manner with the FBI. So Clarke’s educated hypothesis makes sense from what’s known. And certainly CIA officials like Tenet and Cofer Black had every incentive and predisposition to not come clean afterwards. Their reluctance to admit this and other mistakes and failures, given the ever-pervasive secrecy, was probably also used as a point of leverage to get them to go along with Bush’s plan to launch war on Iraq even though they all knew Iraq was not connected to 9-11.”

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Tin-Foil Hat Time: The Richard Clarke Edition

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 10:40:00 +0000

Another 9/11 conspiracy nut is outed:

With the 10^th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks only a month away, former CIA Director George Tenet and two former top aides are fighting back hard against allegations that they engaged in a massive cover-up in 2000 and 2001 to hide intelligence from the White House and the FBI that might have prevented the attacks.

The source of the explosive, unproved allegations is a man who once considered Tenet a close friend: former White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, who makes the charges against Tenet and the CIA in an interview for a radio documentary timed to the 10^th anniversary next month. Portions of the Clarke interview were made available to The Daily Beast by the producers of the documentary.

In the interview for the documentary, Clarke offers an incendiary theory that, if true, would rewrite the history of the 9/11 attacks, suggesting that the CIA intentionally withheld information from the White House and FBI in 2000 and 2001 that two Saudi-born terrorists were on U.S. soil—terrorists who went on to become suicide hijackers on 9/11.

This story appears on the T-minus-one-month date of the big 9/11 anniversary; there will soon be a flood of articles from all angles about the event that was so remarkably horrific that it’s hard to believe it was 10 fairly long years ago. As I’ve noted in this space in the past (although not recently), there seems to be only two prevailing views about what happened that day and how it happened: The official, immutable and unquestionable government version — or beyond the “Twilight Zone” totally whacked- out conspiracy theories.

I have always believed in what you could call “the third way” — that the evidence is overwhelming that the basic story line of 9/11 is pretty much what we think it is, that the attacks were planned and carried out by known members of al-Qaeda and masterminded by Osama bin Laden, to boost bin Laden’s stature in the Muslim world (which lasted just a brief time, thank Allah) and to sow chaos in America (which worked, sadly.) There were no holograms or whatever, and real hijacked jetliners were what crashed into the Pentagon and into that field in Shanksville. George W. Bush did not know of the attacks in advance — if he did, do you really think he would have had that dazed look on his face when he was told the second plane struck the World Trade Center?

But I also believe in what the great muckraker I.F. Stone said, that all governments have one thing in common: They lie. I think within the broad contours of what we know about 9/11, there’s a lot that we don’t know, and a lot of baloney that’s been put out there. Even the chief counsel of the the 9/11 Commission believes there was a cover-up related to the failed air-defense response that morning. There are still valid questions about whether it was Cheney or Bush calling the shots in the initial moments. We don’t know everything we should about what our government knew about what Pakistan or Saudi Arabia knew before 9/11. In that context, Richard Clarke’s “conspiracy theory” seems highly plausible.

I think that will be one positive aspect to the upcoming 10th anniversary overload — the passage of time will make it less taboo to talk about some of those issues. Hopefully by the 15th anniversary, we’ll have a better understanding of 9/11 than we do today, on the eve of the 10th.

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