Richard Clarke: CIA covered up ties to 9/11 hijackers

[JackRiddler]

.

The Kafkaesque censorship attempts on Soufan's book may be due to a heightened concern in the wake of Fenton's findings and now Clarke's quasi endorsement:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/26/us/26 ... nted=print

August 25, 2011

C.I.A. Demands Cuts in Book About 9/11 and Terror Fight

By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — In what amounts to a fight over who gets to write the history of the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath, the Central Intelligence Agency is demanding extensive cuts from the memoir of a former F.B.I. agent who spent years near the center of the battle against Al Qaeda.

The agent, Ali H. Soufan, argues in the book that the C.I.A. missed a chance to derail the 2001 plot by withholding from the F.B.I. information about two future 9/11 hijackers living in San Diego, according to several people who have read the manuscript. And he gives a detailed, firsthand account of the C.I.A.’s move toward brutal treatment in its interrogations, saying the harsh methods used on the agency’s first important captive, Abu Zubaydah, were unnecessary and counterproductive.

Neither critique of the C.I.A. is new. In fact, some of the information that the agency argues is classified, according to two people who have seen the correspondence between the F.B.I. and C.I.A., has previously been disclosed in open Congressional hearings, the report of the national commission on 9/11 and even the 2007 memoir of George J. Tenet, the former C.I.A. director.

Mr. Soufan, an Arabic-speaking counterterrorism agent who played a central role in most major terrorism investigations between 1997 and 2005, has told colleagues he believes the cuts are intended not to protect national security but to prevent him from recounting episodes that in his view reflect badly on the C.I.A.

Some of the scores of cuts demanded by the C.I.A. from Mr. Soufan’s book, “The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against Al Qaeda,” seem hard to explain on security grounds.

Among them, according to the people who have seen the correspondence, is a phrase from Mr. Soufan’s 2009 testimony at a Senate hearing, freely available both as video and transcript on the Web. Also chopped are references to the word “station” to describe the C.I.A.’s overseas offices, common parlance for decades.

The agency removed the pronouns “I” and “me” from a chapter in which Mr. Soufan describes his widely reported role in the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, an important terrorist facilitator and training camp boss. And agency officials took out references to the fact that a passport photo of one of the 9/11 hijackers who later lived in San Diego, Khalid al-Midhar, had been sent to the C.I.A. in January 2000 — an episode described both in the 9/11 commission report and Mr. Tenet’s book.

In a letter sent Aug. 19 to the F.B.I.’s general counsel, Valerie E. Caproni, a lawyer for Mr. Soufan, David N. Kelley, wrote that “credible sources have told Mr. Soufan that the agency has made a decision that this book should not be published because it will prove embarrassing to the agency.”

In a statement, Mr. Soufan called the C.I.A’s redactions to his book “ridiculous” but said he thought he would prevail in getting them restored for a later edition.

He said he believed that counterterrorism officers have an obligation to face squarely “where we made mistakes and let the American people down.” He added: “It saddens me that some are refusing to address past mistakes.”

A spokeswoman for the C.I.A., Jennifer Youngblood, said, “The suggestion that the Central Intelligence Agency has requested redactions on this publication because it doesn’t like the content is ridiculous. The C.I.A.’s pre-publication review process looks solely at the issue of whether information is classified.”

She noted that under the law, “Just because something is in the public domain doesn’t mean it’s been officially released or declassified by the U.S. government.”

A spokesman for the F.B.I., Michael P. Kortan, declined to comment.

The book, written with the assistance of Daniel Freedman, a colleague at Mr. Soufan’s New York security company, is scheduled to go on sale Sept. 12. Facing a deadline this week, the publisher, W. W. Norton and Company, decided to proceed with a first printing incorporating all the C.I.A.’s cuts.

If Mr. Soufan ultimately prevails in negotiations or a legal fight to get the excised material restored, Norton will print the unredacted version, said Drake McFeely, Norton’s president. “The C.I.A.’s redactions seem outrageous to me,” Mr. McFeely said. But he noted that they are concentrated in certain chapters and said “the book’s argument comes across clearly despite them.”

The regular appearance of memoirs by Bush administration officials has continued a debate over the facts surrounding the failure to prevent 9/11 and the tactics against terrorism that followed. In former Vice President Dick Cheney’s memoir, set for publication next week, he writes of the harsh interrogations that “the techniques worked.”

A book scheduled for publication next May by José A. Rodriguez Jr., a former senior C.I.A. official, is expected to give a far more laudatory account of the agency’s harsh interrogations than that of Mr. Soufan, as is evident from its tentative title: “Hard Measures: How Aggressive C.I.A. Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives.”

Government employees who hold security clearances are required to have their books vetted for classified information before publication. But because decisions on what should be classified can be highly subjective, the prepublication review process often becomes a battle. Several former spies have gone to court to fight redactions to their books, and the Defense Department spent nearly $50,000 last year to buy and destroy the entire first printing of an intelligence officer’s book, which it said contained secrets.

The C.I.A. interrogation program sharply divided the C.I.A. and the F.B.I., whose director, Robert S. Mueller III, ordered agents to stop participating in the program after Mr. Soufan and other agents objected to the use of physical coercion. But some C.I.A. officers, too, opposed the brutal methods, including waterboarding, and it was their complaint to the C.I.A.’s inspector general that eventually led to the suspension of the program.

“The Black Banners” traces the origins and growth of Al Qaeda and describes the role of Mr. Soufan, 40, a Lebanese-American, in the investigations of the East African embassy bombings of 1998, the attack on the American destroyer Cole in 2000, 9/11 and the continuing campaign against terrorism.

Starting in May, F.B.I. officials reviewed Mr. Soufan’s 600-page manuscript, asking the author for evidence that dozens of names and facts were not classified. Mr. Soufan and Mr. Freedman agreed to change wording or substitute aliases for some names, and on July 12 the bureau told Mr. Soufan its review was complete.

In the meantime, however, the bureau had given the book to the C.I.A. Its reviewers responded this month with 78-page and 103-page faxes listing their cuts.


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[hanshan]

...

interesting review of Fenton's book (links in the original):

http://911reports.wordpress.com/2011/08/21/deconstructing-the-911-dot-disconnection-a-book-review-by-erik-larson/#more-1099

« FOIA Responses: FBI File 203A-WF-210023 and Tom Lantos


Deconstructing the 9/11 Dot Disconnection: a book review by Erik Larson

Disconnecting the Dots: How CIA and FBI officials enabled 9/11 and evaded government investigations, by Kevin Fenton. Waltersville, OR: Trine Day, 2011. 416 pages.

“Enabling 9/11 was a job done at the office, with memos” (15).

It is a non-controversial fact that the NSA, CIA and FBI missed a number of opportunities to disrupt the 9/11 plot. Many, but not all, of these failures were documented by the four main investigations that dealt with pre-9/11 intelligence failures: those by the Congressional Joint Inquiry, the 9/11 Commission, the Department of Justice Inspector General and the CIA Inspector General. The best-known investigation, the 9/11 Commission, ultimately concluded that 9/11 was preceded by “four kinds of failures: in imagination, policy, capabilities, and management” (339). This is the narrative largely held to by mainstream politicians and media, but these explanations do not credibly account for what happened at the NSA, CIA and FBI in the years, months and weeks leading up to 9/11. This has been demonstrated by a number of researchers, but Kevin Fenton’s* book, Disconnecting the Dots, has the most comprehensive documentation and in-depth analysis to date. Primarily using the official reports, the available source records and some reporting by mainstream media and journalists, Fenton documents how specific CIA and FBI officials engaged in deliberate efforts to protect the 9/11 plot from discovery and disruption by FBI investigators, and that the most probable explanation is that this was done in order to enable the 9/11 attacks.

One of Fenton’s major strengths is that he limits himself to his area of expertise; Disconnecting the Dots is narrowly focused on the pre-9/11 intelligence failures and the official investigations of these failures. The book is a complex and dense compilation of interrelated names, dates, bits of information and sequences of events, a situation that is unavoidable due to the complex nature of the subject. Fortunately for the reader, Fenton’s style and presentation are simple and lucid, which helps make the complicated and often unclear nature of the subject more easily understood. Whenever possible, he names those responsible for the decisions and actions being examined, though this is sometimes impossible due to the limited amount of information that has been made public. Whenever a particularly complex set of issues or series of events have been examined in a chapter, Fenton provides a summary at the end of that chapter, and at a number of points in the book he summarizes what can be understood from the pattern of facts presented up to that point. His analysis considers the full range of available evidence, assesses the quality of individual pieces and does not go beyond the evidence. When he does draw conclusions they are generally conservative and understated, and he is careful to address other possible explanations for the evidence.

The way the book is structured is useful. It is composed of 50 short chapters plus a prologue and epilogue, two appendixes, a section with copies of supporting documents, a selected bibliography and an index. The book proceeds largely in chronological order, with each chapter focused on a particular development in the chain of events leading to 9/11, or on the way subsequent investigations dealt with these things. The chapter titles are derived from revealing and significant statements, mostly from official sources, that convey the subject or main idea of that chapter. Footnotes are used instead of endnotes; for every statement of fact, the reader can simply look to the bottom of that page to see what the source is.

Fenton begins his book in 1996, which is when the NSA began surveillance of Osama bin Laden associate Ahmed al-Hada’s Al Qaeda safe house and communications hub in Yemen. The NSA did not willingly share this intelligence with the CIA or the FBI at first. The CIA discovered the NSA surveillance by accident, and bin Laden unit (Alec Station) chief Michael Scheuer fought hard to get transcripts from NSA, but was only briefly successful. The CIA began independently monitoring the Yemen hub, but was apparently only able to intercept the incoming side of communications. According to one report, however, at some point it managed to bug the house. After Scheuer was replaced by Richard Blee, the NSA agreed to allow the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center (of which Alec Station was a part) to detail officers to NSA to review transcripts, but the CTC only detailed one officer, and only for a brief period of time in 2000. The plots for the 1998 US embassy bombings in Africa (over 200 dead, 4000 injured), the 2000 attack on the USS Cole (17 US sailors killed) and the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon (nearly 3000 dead) all involved communications to this hub and persons associated with it, yet intelligence from NSA or CIA monitoring was not used to thwart any of these plots.

The NSA monitored calls made by alleged 9/11 hijackers Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi to the Yemen hub during their time in the US. It has been reported that NSA was technologically incapable of tracing the US end of calls and was simultaneously reluctant to do so because of FISA restrictions on monitoring calls that have one end in the US. Besides the internal contradiction, these claims are dubious because the FBI was able to create a map of Al Qaeda’s global network based on Yemen hub intercepts, and because NSA could have easily obtained authorization under FISA law at the time. Fenton also devotes a chapter to the NSA’s pre-9/11 warrantless monitoring which was done in conjunction with the major telecommunications providers, a clearly illegal program which apparently has never been investigated. Another chapter examines DOD SOCOM’s Able Danger data-mining program, which reportedly identified Mohammed Atta and other alleged operatives in the US prior to 9/11.

The bulk of Fenton’s book is devoted to CIA and FBI failures, and principally concerning the presence in the US of Almihdhar and Alhazmi. This is partly because investigations of NSA activities by the Joint Inquiry and 9/11 Commission were superficial, and very little information about what they did learn has been made public. It is also because the CIA and FBI’s failures are so significant. The ‘failures’ were not a small number of isolated mistakes spread among many people in a large bureaucracy, and concerning people unknown to the CIA. Rather, a small number of people at the CIA, principally in Alec Station, repeatedly performed in ways that facilitated the activities of a small number of Al Qaeda operatives who had already been linked to Yemen hub and the 1998 US embassy bombings; a high profile, mass-casualty attack on US interests.

According to Fenton’s research, two figures clearly bear great responsibility for obstructing the FBI and national security principals regarding Almihdhar and Alhazmi; these are former Alec Station chief Richard Blee and one of his deputy chiefs, Tom Wilshere (aka Tom Wilshire). Obstructive actions by their subordinates and personnel at other CIA stations are also documented. On multiple separate occasions in 2000 and 2001 when it was brought to his attention, Wilshere failed to watchlist Almihdhar and Alhazmi, and failed to notify the FBI that they possessed US visas and had traveled to the US. On at least one occasion, January 5, 2000, Wilshere explicitly instructed, through his subordinate “Michelle,” that an FBI detailee to the CIA, Doug Miller, was not to notify the FBI about Almihdhar’s US visa. This demonstrates that both Miller and Wilshere recognized the significance of this information at the time. Additional evidence that this was recognized as significant is the fact that Michelle then sent a cable to several CIA stations informing them that the US visa information had been passed to the FBI, though it had not. In May 2001, Wilshere was detailed to the FBI’s International Terrorist Operations Section (ITOS) where he worked directly with section head Michael Rolince. While there, he continued to withhold information from the FBI, and also undermined FBI agents attempting to open criminal investigations into Zacharias Moussaoui and Almihdhar, which would almost certainly have led to the disruption of the 9/11 plot.

The clearest documentary evidence implicates Wilshere and certain CIA subordinates and colleagues (FBI analyst Dina Corsi is involved in a number of significant incidents of obstruction, including the provision of false information to FBI agents, and so are other FBI officials), but much of the evidence implicating Wilshere indirectly implicates Blee. For instance, Blee was almost certainly one of the Counterterrorist Center (CTC) officials that received three July 2001 emails from Wilshere that demonstrated his awareness and understanding of the links between Alhmidar and Khallad bin Attash, and between them and an impending massive attack on US interests.

Direct evidence of wrongdoing on Blee’s part includes his falsely informing Black and Tenet on two occasions that surveillance of Al Qaeda operatives at the Kuala Lumpur meeting was ongoing, when officially it had stopped. Also, there is no record of Blee informing his superiors, CTC Director Cofer Black and DCI George Tenet, about Almihdhar and Alhazmi’s travel to the US, or about Almidhar’s return to the US, which Wilshere officially learned of on August 22, and may have learned of in early July, and would have informed Blee about. Fenton considers that Blee may have been hiding this information from them and they may have been ignorant of it, or that they may have indicated to Blee that they did not want an official record of their awareness of certain information, which could later implicate them in wrongdoing.

It is difficult to believe Tenet and Black were unaware of Almihdhar and Alhazmi’s US travel, but there’s no documentary evidence or witness testimony that they were. The CIA IG executive summary states that in early 2000 some 50-60 personnel at CIA, from managers to junior employees, at HQ and foreign stations, read one or more of six cables pertaining to the US travel. After 9/11, both Tenet and Black made false statements under oath that had the effect of shielding Blee and others from accountability. Fenton observes that while they may have been involved in facilitating 9/11, these lies may have stemmed from a calculus that covering up served larger interests, such as protecting the CIA from being disrupted during the ‘war on terror’, and preserving their own status and reputations.

In attempting to explain the facts (I’ve provide an incomplete summary of a small number of those included in Fenton’s book), some observers have maintained that incompetence, negligence, interagency mistrust and rivalries, and personality conflicts played a role in the pre-9/11 obstruction. Others, including former Bush administration counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke, have suggested that the CIA’s failure to pass on information to the FBI and high level national security principals was an effort to prevent interference with a CIA operation to penetrate Al Qaeda operations in the US, perhaps to develop intelligence on their network or to recruit operatives as double agents. Some have alleged that alleged 9/11 hijackers Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi were Saudi agents before or after joining Al Qaeda, and ultimately double or triple-crossed their handlers. Still others have proposed that some in the Saudi royal family and GID desired an attack on the US, and provided financial and other assistance. According to these views, the failure of official investigations to get at the ‘whole truth,’ can be explained as stemming from the Establishment’s desire to protect important foreign relations, and to prevent embarrassment, distraction and/or the exposure of an illegal but well-intentioned CIA operation during a time when the full resources of these agencies, plus Saudi oil, were needed to defend the US and fight the ‘war on terror.’

Fenton convincingly demonstrates that these explanations also cannot credibly account for the full range of facts on the public record, and that the most probable scenario is that Blee and/or Wilshere and possibly others intentionally facilitated the 9/11 attacks, with the cooperation of subordinates who may have been unaware of the true purpose of their actions. If the goal was simply to develop intelligence on al Qaeda’s US network or recruit operatives as double agents, then the 9/11 plot could have been disrupted prior to the attacks. Almihdhar and Alhazmi’s activities in the US would have been monitored, and logistical elements of the plot plus most or all of the other members of the network would have become apparent, given the relatively poor security procedures followed by the alleged hijackers.

Some have suggested that the CIA’s sharing of some information with the FBI, State and INS after August 22 is evidence the CIA had stopped protecting Almihdhar and Alhazmi. However, this idea is undermined by the fact that Wilshere and Corsi, in particular, withheld other information, and worked to prevent the opening of a criminal investigation, which was both permissible and justified, despite false information to the contrary provided by Corsi. Again, there is nothing in the public record to indicate Blee passed on the information about the presence of Almihdhar and Alhazmi in the US to his superiors. These are not the actions of officials who are trying to prevent an attack on the US.

Many in the US government national security structure, including Blee and Wilshere, were aware in July and August 2001 that a large-scale spectacular attack against US interests was in the works; the infamous July 10 Rice-Tenet-Black-Blee meeting makes this clear, and the August 6 PDB indicates the plot could be targeting US cities and involve hijacked planes. Those shielding Almihdhar and Alhazmi would have known they were playing with fire, and that they could get burnt should their illegal operation be uncovered by the investigations that could be expected to follow such a massive and destructive intelligence failure.

Instead, many of those involved in obstructing FBI investigations were promoted after 9/11, including Blee, who replaced Gary Berntsen as the CIA station chief in Kabul, Afghanistan (a premier front in the so-called ‘war on terror’) shortly before the failure to capture Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora. Blee also played a role in the development and management of rendition, interrogation and torture programs under the Bush administration. Fenton notes that while some of those involved in these programs may have believed they were important for US national security, others would certainly have understood that torture often produces false confessions and could be used to extract confessions useful for making a case for linking Iraq to 9/11. Indeed, false confessions were used in exactly this way. CIA control of access to prisoners would also prevent the FBI from asking questions and possibly receiving information regarding the CIA’s pre-9/11 failures.

How the four investigations dealt with the intelligence failures is also a major focus of Fenton’s book. His strongest criticism is of the DOJ IG and the 9/11 Commission reports, though he notes problems with all four official investigations. A critique of the full CIA IG report is not possible as only an executive summary has been released, but as Fenton observes, the report was rewritten under pressure from then DCI Porter Goss. Problems include conflicts of interest, failure to pursue lines of inquiry pointing to malfeasance, apparent acceptance at face value of witness inability to recall key events, allowing agency ‘minders’ to be present during interviews, and omissions and distortions of key evidence.

In some cases the public reports name certain people (usually with an alias) in connection with specific mistakes made, but in other cases they do not. In some cases errors are implicitly documented but not acknowledged as such, while in other cases they are overtly acknowledged but explained away, noted superficially in passing, or relegated to an endnote. In some cases, important evidence is entirely omitted. For instance, there is no mention, let alone discussion, in the redacted Joint Inquiry report, the unclassified DOJ IG report, or the 9/11 Commission Report, of Wilshere’s July 23 email, which clearly demonstrated that, during a time in which he had been obstructing FBI investigations and would continue to do so, Wilshere understood that bin Attash and Almihdhar would be involved in the next attack, which was widely believed would be massive. The official reports did not conclude that any of the ‘failures’ were intentional, but it is not apparent from the reports whether this line of investigation was even pursued. No one at NSA, CIA or FBI has been held accountable as a result of these investigations, even for negligence or incompetence.

Fenton gives special attention to the work of Barbara Grewe, a principal investigator of CIA-FBI issues for both the DOJ and 9/11 Commission. The presence of minders is an obvious conflict of interest, and some 9/11 Commission staffers formally objected to this, concluding that witnesses were being intimidated and that minders were otherwise interfering with interviews, but Grewe asserted to the Commissioners that minders were not causing problems. Grewe conducted or was involved interviews of many key witnesses, such as Richard Blee, Tom Wilshere and Dina Corsi, and drafted the related sections of the reports, which contain a number of significant omissions, distortions, discrepancies and contradictions.

Fenton also notes the influence of Philip Zelikow regarding certain aspects of the 9/11 Commission investigation and its final report. Zelikow was the Commission’s executive director, though he had extensive conflicts of interest, including a personal friendship with George W. Bush’s National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice. Zelikow reportedly exercised great control over the choice of staff, the direction of the investigation and the drafting of the final report. It is difficult to see how certain omissions and distortions in the official reports can be anything other than deliberate efforts to manipulate official and public perception of the 9/11 events.

Fenton concludes the documentary record raises serious questions about the conduct of personnel at NSA and FBI, but what can be clearly established is that Blee and Wilshere were working to protect Almihdhar and Alhazmi from discovery and arrest by the FBI. In doing so, they were assisted by the actions of CIA and FBI colleagues and subordinates, some or all whom may have been misled about the purpose of their actions. Tenet and Black may have been involved, but there is no hard evidence they were aware, prior to 9/11, of efforts to protect Almihdhar and Alhazmi. Following 9/11, they protected those whose ‘failures’ contributed to 9/11, including by making false statements under oath. The official investigations were inadequate, and the public reports are misleading in many respects. These may be evidence of a cover up.

Fenton does not assert that the motives of either Blee or Wilshere can be determined by the evidence made public so far. The question as to why they did what they did remains, with the purpose of facilitating the 9/11 attacks being the most probable explanation that, in Fenton’s opinion, is supported by the public evidence. He notes that a great deal of documentary evidence remains suppressed, and states the public will have a clearer understanding of 9/11 when certain records are made public. He believes, however, that a truly independent inquiry would be needed to get to the whole truth about the intelligence failures surrounding 9/11.

I agree with Fenton that a new investigation into 9/11 is needed. It seems unlikely, though, that Blee was the highest-level person involved in a plot to protect the 9/11 hijackers in order to enable 9/11. In my view, it is more probable that Blee himself would have been installed, recruited or manipulated by, or working in conjunction with, a covert and powerful insider network that sought a 9/11 event as a catalyst for wars to control regions with geo-strategic resources in declining supply as global demand rises; establish a US national security state; secure massive long-term public spending on the military-corporate complex; and renew and extend the global power of the US as their empire. In his prologue and epilogue, Fenton acknowledges this possibility, but it is not something he believes can be concluded is a fact, based on the public evidence. It is noteworthy that this was the pre-9/11 agenda of the Project for the New American Century, many of whose members became principals in the George W. Bush administration, and that this ‘coincidence’ was not examined by the 9/11 Commission or the mainstream media. There is other indirect and circumstantial evidence for a plot larger than Blee and Wilshere surrounding the intelligence failures, as well as evidence concerning other aspects of the 9/11 events, as well as the big picture. As this evidence is either below Fenton’s standards or outside his area of expertise, he’s unwilling to base conclusions on it.

I don’t have any particular expertise, but I do think this evidence is considerable. For instance, someone might have been able to predict that the Bush administration would wage a war on Al Qaeda following a mass-casualty attack on US soil. They might also have known that a pretext for such a war was desired. It does not seem likely, however, that a CIA station chief – an important but not high-level position – could be confident that they would not simultaneously be made a scapegoat if their unit was directly responsible for failing to prevent a successful Al Qaeda attack on US soil, let alone not held accountable for willfully obstructing the FBI from doing so, as the documentary record indicates happened. Rather, it seems likely that Blee would have required assurance that he would be protected from any fallout over CIA’s failure to prevent the attacks; on his own authority he did not have the power to derail official inquiries and turn them into the whitewashes they ultimately turned out to be.

CIA personnel not under Blee’s command – at stations in Yemen, Bangkok and Pakistan – acted in ways that are difficult to explain as anything other than deliberate attempts to conceal information about Almihdhar and Alhazmi from the FBI, and from personnel at other CIA stations, such as the one in Kuala Lumpur. And, as Fenton documents, FBI HQ personnel Dave Frasca, Michael Maltbie and Rita Flack, along with Tom Wilshere, consistently undermined the attempts of Minneapolis FBI agents to investigate Moussaoui. Fenton notes that it isn’t clear whose idea it was to do so. However, as he also observes, it was obvious at the time to other FBI and CIA personnel that Moussaoui was a threat, and that HQ’s stated reasons for blocking a criminal or FISA investigation were bogus. It seems likely this would have been obvious to Frasca, Maltbie and Flack. They had reason to understand what they were doing was wrong, potentially criminal, and that a terrorist attack might be the result. It seems unlikely they would simply trust the judgment of Wilshere, a recently-transferred CIA manager. The CIA was an agency with which the FBI had a long history of inconsistent cooperation and some level of rivalry. As Wilshere and Blee would be personally unable to protect them from any fallout, it defies my imagination how they could have been convinced to go along with these efforts, unless they knew they would be rewarded in some way, and protected from any fallout.

Other examples, noted by Fenton, include surveillance of Al Qaeda operatives in the US by Saudi and Israeli intelligence; the shut down of Able Danger; the NSA’s pre-9/11 warrantless monitoring of US persons; and the failure of four separate official investigations to conclude there was wrongdoing, despite documenting evidence of it. All of these things individually are difficult to explain if Blee is the highest-level person with full knowledge of a goal to enable 9/11. When considered together, it is difficult to believe these are a coincidence; that Blee got lucky, over and over. However, none of this is direct evidence, and conceivably the whole truth is more complex. A full investigation is in order.

In the epilogue, Fenton acknowledges the existence of many other unanswered 9/11 questions. He questions whether there was a relationship between the failures outlined in the book and other “alleged failures” surrounding 9/11 – specifically the failure to intercept any of the hijacked airliners over a nearly two hour period – and states the only way this can be resolved is with a “new, credible investigation” (394). Assuming there is a relationship – and coincidence/luck seems unlikely – then a plot to facilitate 9/11 must have existed which was much larger than Blee. However, these other areas are outside of Fenton’s area of expertise, and, being cautious and conservative regarding a very serious matter, he only points to these as areas deserving of closer scrutiny, and does not render prior judgment on what a full investigation might uncover. In my view, his credibility is enhanced by his refusal to do so. He supports a credible investigation, and that is what is needed.

If someone wants to gain a broader understanding of 9/11, I would recommend visiting the site Fenton contributes to, HistoryCommons.org, in particular the section called The Complete 9/11 Timeline. Two other very useful web-based resources are 911Research.WTC7.net and 911Review.COM. Three credible books dealing with a broader focus are: The Complete 9/11 Timeline by Paul Thompson; The Road to 9/11 by Peter Dale Scott; and The War on Truth by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed.

Disconnecting the Dots is a valuable aid to those seeking to understand what happened at NSA, CIA and FBI leading up to 9/11, who was involved, what evidence is available, and what are some of the lines of investigation that need to be pursued. This book is also useful for understanding how this information and these questions fit into the whole of the events surrounding and intersecting 9/11, for those who are familiar with, or will research other areas of 9/11. One will not gain a broad understanding of the entirety of the problems with the official 9/11 conspiracy theory from this book, but, by itself, it disproves the Establishment’s explanation of 9/11 and proposes a much more probable explanation. It is clear that a new investigation is called for simply based on the evidence and analysis presented in it. Any new investigation cannot itself be considered credible if it does not account for the facts in the contexts Fenton presents them, does not pursue the questions he raises, and does not conduct itself in a transparent manner, including by compelling those named to testify in public under oath, and by making the underlying records public.

*Disclosure: Kevin Fenton and I are both contributors to HistoryCommons.org. In addition, many of the 9/11 Commission records that Fenton cites in Disconnecting the Dots were obtained by me, from the National Archives.

An interview I conducted with Fenton on August 8, 2011 is kindly being hosted by Jeff Hill at PumpItOut.com:

http://www.pumpitout.com/disconnectingthedots.html

...

[Wombaticus Rex]

^^Damn, another hit for Trine Day. I will be ordering that this weekend.

[bks]

The book is excellent. Would love to get a discussion going here about the particulars, so please do check back w/ comments.

[thatsmystory]

The Soufan censorship story is being presented as a continuation of the CIA vs. FBI feud. Note how the FBI spokesperson didn't want to comment because that might upset some folks at the CIA. As if sweeping everything under the rug is justified by a desire to maintain CIA/FBI harmony. This is a distraction from the more important issue of CIA and FBI conduct in regard to obstructing pre-9/11 al Qaeda investigations. For years the public has been scolded into accepting the premise that the failure to prevent 9/11 was in large part due to the lack of intelligence agency power. Too many civil liberty concerns. Too much red tape. All that bullshit goes out the window if it turns out the real reason for the failure was a deliberate effort to obstruct al Qaeda investigations.

[JackRiddler]

.

In the Holy Name of Thread Consolidation!

From seemslikeadream at http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/ ... =8&t=33069

New Documents Suggest DoD Watchdog Covered Up Intelligence Unit's Work Tracking 9/11 Terrorists
Friday 9 September 2011
by: Jeffrey Kaye and Jason Leopold, Truthout | Report

The north tower of the World Trade Center collapses after two highjacked planes crashed into the twin towers of the center, in New York on September 11, 2001. (Photo: Angel Franco / The New york Times)

Senior Pentagon officials scrubbed key details about a top-secret military intelligence unit's efforts in tracking Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda from official reports they prepared for a Congressional committee probing the 9/11 terrorist attacks, new documents obtained by Truthout reveal.

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. The discrepancy further 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 has focused heavily over the past decade on CIA and FBI "intelligence failures." Only a few details about the military intelligence unit have surfaced since then, 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," 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 [Taliban leader] 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."

However, Iron Man, whose unit also developed original intelligence on al-Qaeda targets, which included the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the documents show, claimed JFIC was told to stop tracking Bin Laden, suspected al-Qaeda terrorists, and members of the Taliban some months prior to 9/11.

Iron Man further alleged 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's watchdog prepared its report following an investigation into Iron Man's complaints, the IG concluded Iron Man's most explosive allegations related to the withholding of intelligence from Congress was unfounded. But a close look at the report reveals it is rife with numerous factual errors.

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 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.

Additionally, 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.)

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."

But 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, which intelligence unit considered to be part of the team of hijackers.

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

Revealing New Documents

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, which was marked classified, and other secret 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.

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 and conclusions into the charges Iron Man had leveled.

One batch of documents Truthout recently obtained from Iron Man is a slide presentation for a briefing held for the head of counterintelligence and counterterrorism at the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS). The date of the meeting could not be confirmed.



However, 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 Iron Man's 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 who was present at the briefing was Vice Adm. Martin J. Meyer, the deputy commander-in-chief of Joint Forces Command.

Vice Adm. Meyer is the military official who 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 one of the individuals JFIC briefed on al-Qaeda's interest in attacking targets in the United States it is difficult to comprehend why he would dismiss the threats.

What is clear, however, is that the slides Truthout obtained from Iron Man show that the military intelligence unit he was a part of actively pursued Bin Laden, contradicting the IG report's conclusions.

Indeed, one of the slides explicitly states, "JFIC routinely supplements national agencies with original intelligence on UBL [Usama Bin Ladin] and Afghanistan." (Emphasis added.)

Another slide, "NCIS Support to Joint Forces Intelligence Command and NCIS Field Office, Norfolk," contains a description of Iron Man's responsibilities as deputy chief of JFIC's Asymmetric Threat Division.

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.

The Asymmetrical Threats Division had what is known as "gamma" security clearance, one of the slides noted, 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.

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."

[JackRiddler]

From 2012 Countdown at http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/ ... =8&t=33051

Link to 9/11 hijackers found in Sarasota
FBI found ties between hijackers and Saudis in Sarasota but never revealed the findings

Posted on Wednesday, 09.07.11

BY ANTHONY SUMMERS AND DAN CHRISTENSEN

SPECIAL TO THE MIAMI HERALD

Just two weeks before the 9/11 hijackers slammed into the Pentagon and World Trade Center, members of a Saudi family abruptly vacated their luxury home near Sarasota, leaving a brand new car in the driveway, a refrigerator full of food, fruit on the counter — and an open safe in a master bedroom.
In the weeks to follow, law enforcement agents not only discovered the home was visited by vehicles used by the hijackers, but phone calls were linked between the home and those who carried out the death flights — including leader Mohamed Atta — in discoveries never before revealed to the public.
Ten years after the deadliest attack of terrorism on U.S. soil, new information has emerged that shows the FBI found troubling ties between the hijackers and residents in the upscale community in southwest Florida, but the investigation wasn’t reported to Congress or mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report.
Former U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who co-chaired the congressional Joint Inquiry into the attacks, said he should have been told about the findings, saying it “opens the door to a new chapter of investigation as to the depth of the Saudi role in 9/11. ... No information relative to the named people in Sarasota was disclosed.”
The U.S. Justice Department, the lead agency that investigated the attacks, refused to comment, saying it will discuss only information already released.
The Saudi residents then living at the stylish home, Abdulazzi al-Hiijjii and his wife Anoud, could not be reached, nor could the then-owner of the house, Esam Ghazzawi, who is Anoud’s father. The house was sold in 2003, records show.
For Graham, the connections between the hijackers and residents raise questions about whether other Saudi nationals in Florida knew of the impending attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people.
The FBI investigation began the month after 9/11 when Larry Berberich, senior administrator and security officer of the gated community known as Prestancia, reported a bizarre event that took place two weeks before the hijackings of four passenger jets that originated in Boston, Newark and Washington.
The couple, living with their small children at the three-bedroom home at 4224 Escondito Circle, had left in a hurry in a white van, probably on Aug. 30.
They abandoned three recently registered vehicles, including a brand-new Chrysler PT Cruiser, in the garage and driveway.
After 9/11, Berberich said he had “a gut feeling” the people at the home may have had something to do with the attacks, prompting the FBI’s probe that would eventually link the hijackers to the house.
As an advisor to the Sarasota County sheriff — Berberich was with the group that received President Bush during his aborted visit to a Sarasota school on the morning of 9/11 — he alerted sheriff’s deputies. Patrick Gallagher, one of the Saudis’ neighbors, had become suspicious even earlier, and had fired off an email to the FBI on the day of the attacks.
Gallagher said law enforcement officers arrived and began an investigation, with agents swarming “all over the place, in their blue jackets,” he recalled.
Jone Weist, president of the group that managed Prestancia, confirmed the arrival of the FBI, which requested copies of the Saudis’ financial transactions involving the house.

Berberich and a senior counterterrorism agent said they were able to get into the abandoned house, ultimately finding “there was mail on the table, dirty diapers in one of the bathrooms … all the toiletries still in place … all their clothes hanging in the closet … opulent furniture, equal or greater in value than the house … the pool running, with toys in it.”
“The beds were made … fruit on the counter … the refrigerator full of food. … It was like they went grocery shopping. Like they went out to a movie ... [But] the safe was open in the master bedroom, with nothing in it, not a paper clip. ... A computer was still there. A computer plug in another room, and the line still there. Looked like they’d taken [another] computer and left the cord.”
The counterterrorism officer, who requested his name not be disclosed, said agents went on to make troubling discoveries: Phone records and the Prestancia gate records linked the house on Escondito Circle to the hijackers.
In addition, three of the four future hijackers had lived in Venice — just 10 miles from the house — for much of the year before 9/11. Atta, the leader, and his companion Marwan al-Shehhi, had been learning to fly small airplanes at Huffman Aviation, a flight school on the edge of the runway at Venice Municipal Airport.
A block away, at Florida Flight Training, accomplice Ziad Jarrah was also taking flying lessons. All three obtained their pilot licenses and afterwards, in the months that led to 9/11, spent much of their time traveling the state, including stints in Hollywood, Fort Lauderdale and Delray Beach, among other areas.
The counterterrorism agent said records of incoming and outgoing calls made at the Escondito house were obtained from the phone company under subpoena.
Agents were able to conduct a link analysis, a system of tracking calls based on dates, times and length of conversations — finding the Escondito calls dating back more than a year, “lined up with the known suspects.”
The links were not only to Atta and his hijack pilots, the agent said, but to 11 other terrorist suspects, including Walid al-Shehhri, one of the men who flew with Atta on the first plane to strike the World Trade Center.
Another was Adnan Shukrijumah, a former Miramar resident identified as having been with Atta in the spring of 2001. Shukrijumah is still at large and is on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.
But it was the gate records at the Prestancia development that produced the most telltale information.
People who arrived by car had to give their names and the address they were visiting. Gate staff would sometimes ask to see a driver’s license and note the name, Berberich said. License plates were photographed.
Atta is known to have used variations of his name, but the license plate of the car he owned was on record.
The vehicle and name information on Atta and Jarrah fit that of drivers entering Prestancia on their way to visit the home at 4224 Escondito Circle, said Berberich and the counterterrorism officer.
Sarasota County property records identify the owners of the house at the time as Ghazzawi and his American-born wife Deborah, both with a post office box in al-Khobar, Saudi Arabia, and the capital, Riyadh.
Ghazzawi was described as a middle-aged financier and interior designer, the owner of many properties, including several in the United States, said the counterterrorism agent.


While Ghazzawi visited the house, the people living there were his daughter Anoud and her husband al-Hiijjii, who appeared to be in his 30s and once identified himself as a college student, said Berberich, who met the son-in-law.
The couple’s sudden departure two weeks before 9/11 was tracked in detail by the FBI after the attacks, the agent said.
First, they traveled to a Ghazzawi property in Arlington, Va., then — with Esam Ghazzawi — via Dulles airport and London’s Heathrow, to Riyadh.
The counterterrorism agent said Ghazzawi and al-Hiijjii had been on a watch list at the FBI and that a U.S. agency tracking terrorist funds was interested in both men even before 9/11.
“464 was Ghazzawi’s number,” the officer said. “I don’t remember the other man’s number.”
About a year after the family abandoned the home, the FBI made an attempt to lure the owner back.
Scott McKay, a Sarasota lawyer for the Prestancia homeowners’ association in its claim for unpaid dues, said the FBI tried to get him to bring the Saudis back for the transaction.
McKay said he tried to get the Ghazzawis to sign the necessary documents in person, but the ploy failed because the documents could legally be signed elsewhere using a notary. Records show Ghazzawi’s signature was notarized by the vice consul of the U.S. embassy in Lebanon in September 2003. Deborah Ghazzawi’s signature was notarized in Riverside County, Calif.
During an interview on Sunday, Graham said he was surprised he wasn’t told about the probe when he was co-chair of Congress’ Joint Inquiry into 9/11 — even though he was especially alert to terrorist information relating to Florida.
“At the beginning of the investigation,” he said, “each of the intelligence agencies, including the FBI, was asked to provide all information that agency possessed in relation to 9/11.”
The fact that the FBI did not tell the Inquiry about the Florida discoveries, Graham says, is similar to the agency’s failure to provide information linking members of the 9/11 terrorist team to other Saudis in California until congressional investigators discovered it themselves.
The Inquiry did nevertheless accumulate a “very large” file on the hijackers in the United States, and later turned it over to the 9/11 Commission. “They did very little with it,” Graham said, “and their reference to Saudi Arabia is almost cryptic sometimes. … I never got a good answer as to why they did not pursue that.”
The final 28-page section of the Inquiry’s report, which deals with “sources of foreign support for some of the Sept. 11 hijackers,” was entirely blanked out. It was kept secret from the public on the orders of former President George W. Bush and is still withheld to this day, Graham said.
This in spite of the fact that Graham and his Republican counterpart, U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, both concluded the release of the pages would not endanger national security.
The grounds for suppressing the material, Graham believes, were “protection of the Saudis from embarrassment, protection of the administration from political embarrassment … some of the unknowns, some of the secrets of 9/11.”
Anthony Summers is co-author of The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 & Osama bin Laden. Dan Christensen is the editor of the Broward Bulldog, a not-for-profit online only newspaper created to provide local reporting in the public interest. http://www.BrowardBulldog.org


Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/09/07/2 ... z1XMSQPnxO[/quote]

[thatsmystory]

From http://secrecykills.com:

On Thursday, the CIA threatened the journalists behind Who Is Rich Blee? with possible federal prosecution if the investigative podcast is released in its current form.

We are delaying that release while we consult with others and weigh our options. A press statement with a more complete explanation will be made available at this site soon.

This sort of threat is credible because the DOJ is evidently as corrupt as the CIA. For example Thomas Drake was prosecuted on trumped up charges.

[thatsmystory]

Ali Soufan, the Lebanese-American FBI agent whose questioning of Qaeda members after 9/11 gleaned valuable intelligence - including confirmation that Khalid Sheik Mohammed was the mastermind of the attacks - reveals his face for the first time in a "60 Minutes" interview with Lara Logan to be broadcast Sunday, September 11 at 7 p.m. ET/PT on the CBS Television Network.

Ex-FBI agent who interrogated Qaeda members speaks out

In the same article 60 Minutes puts Soufan's allegations in proper context:

According to several intelligence sources contacted by "60 Minutes," so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" such as water boarding and sleep deprivation, were effective and they told us that in the case of Zubaydah, who was water boarded 83 times, the techniques did lead to additional information.

Who are you going to believe? Several intelligence sources vetted by 60 Minutes or a lone disgruntled FBI agent?

[JackRiddler]

From http://secrecykills.com:

On Thursday, the CIA threatened the journalists behind Who Is Rich Blee? with possible federal prosecution if the investigative podcast is released in its current form.

We are delaying that release while we consult with others and weigh our options. A press statement with a more complete explanation will be made available at this site soon.

This sort of threat is credible because the DOJ is evidently as corrupt as the CIA. For example Thomas Drake was prosecuted on trumped up charges.

They're journalists. They didn't work for CIA. They didn't sign non-disclosures.

Notwithstanding the attacks on inside whistleblowers, like Edmonds and Schaeffer, nothing like this ever happened with 9/11 skeptic writers. Not after so many books and conferences and films. It is not only scary. It's exciting. Off the bat, it's the first thing in years that's made me want to fight in solidarity with 9/11 truth activists. They may be hitting the long-awaited jackpot.

.

[thatsmystory]

They're journalists. They didn't work for CIA. They didn't sign non-disclosures.

That is an important distinction.

Notwithstanding the attacks on inside whistleblowers, like Edmonds and Schaeffer, nothing like this ever happened with 9/11 skeptic writers. Not after so many books and conferences and films. It is not only scary. It's exciting. Off the bat, it's the first thing in years that's made me want to fight in solidarity with 9/11 truth activists. They may be hitting the long-awaited jackpot.

It is a mystery as to why the CIA would be so concerned with the exposure of faulty watchlisting procedures.

[8bitagent]

From http://secrecykills.com:

On Thursday, the CIA threatened the journalists behind Who Is Rich Blee? with possible federal prosecution if the investigative podcast is released in its current form.

We are delaying that release while we consult with others and weigh our options. A press statement with a more complete explanation will be made available at this site soon.

This sort of threat is credible because the DOJ is evidently as corrupt as the CIA. For example Thomas Drake was prosecuted on trumped up charges.

They're journalists. They didn't work for CIA. They didn't sign non-disclosures.

Notwithstanding the attacks on inside whistleblowers, like Edmonds and Schaeffer, nothing like this ever happened with 9/11 skeptic writers. Not after so many books and conferences and films. It is not only scary. It's exciting. Off the bat, it's the first thing in years that's made me want to fight in solidarity with 9/11 truth activists. They may be hitting the long-awaited jackpot.

.

I re-read your reply to me in the other thread. It IS an interesting idea that the damn could be on the verge of breaking...though some may still label it "limited hangout".
Still, even if something massively UN-Lihop/incompetence spilled out, the public wouldnt even pay attention. Maybe Job Stewart and SNL Seth Myers would give a one liner reference. That's it.

Also for all the "is it possible so in so didnt die of a heart attack/car crash/etc" ascribed to truther heroes, I find things like the Franklin Coverup have a much more deliberate and higher rate of
mortality amongst whistleblowers. Same with 9-99.

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

OMG! The noble CIA...make an error! And is just covering up...their error!

Give me a break, lying asshole Clark.

[JackRiddler]

I re-read your reply to me in the other thread. It IS an interesting idea that the damn could be on the verge of breaking...though some may still label it "limited hangout".

That little pack would not concern me.

Still, even if something massively UN-Lihop/incompetence spilled out, the public wouldnt even pay attention. Maybe Job Stewart and SNL Seth Myers would give a one liner reference. That's it.

This is the problem. And the latter vintages of "truthers" are largely to blame. A real "big tent" should have been a coalition from those seeing blowback and "unanswered questions" all the way to most radical ideas. Instead, government and insider foreknowledge with deliberate inaction or facilitation for the purpose of transforming the US and starting wars of aggression -- a crime against humanity actually equal to full orchestration! -- is now practically the fall-back position for those defending the official story and the status-quo policies under Obama. So they knew? They let it happen intentionally? So what! And that's just pathetic. And I do blame the latter-day "truthers," the LC/WAC/Jones and demolitions approach, for having helped to create this atmosphere. Because "9/11 truth" is now equated with demolitions, and if you can deny demolitions, there was no other crime committed on the American side.

.

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

My font empahsis of JR's comment-

.....
I do blame the latter-day "truthers," the LC/WAC/Jones and demolitions approach, for having helped to create this atmosphere. Because "9/11 truth" is now equated with demolitions, and if you can deny demolitions, there was no other crime committed on the American side.

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OMG. You have no use for the SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE OF THE CRIME...and you blame people who 'indulge in this devisiveness' INFORMATION?

No wonder you suck up to the likes of c2w.

Thanks for making it clear, JR. You are in a cloud *allegedly* and you will drag others into the NO-SCIENCE-based mud. Fuck. I'm so disappointed in you.