CIA Director George Tenet would have done much, much better to apologize in front of the 911 Commission:
Telegraph | News | Bush 'failed abjectly' to protect America: Earlier Mr Bush had a welcome boost when George Tenet, the CIA chief, gave a sweeping defence of his record in the eight months between his assuming office in January 2001 and the attacks. Mr Tenet said warnings of a terrorist attack "lit up" in the weeks before September 11, indicating that "multiple spectacular attacks were planned and that some of the plots were in their final stages". But "the reporting was maddeningly short on actionable details".
He said attempts to pre-empt the attacks were hampered by bureaucratic feuding between the FBI and the CIA.... But he denied that Mr Bush had under-estimated the threat. "Clearly there was no lack of care or focus in the face of one of the greatest dangers our country has ever faced," he said.
But there was a great lack of care and focus, a great lack on the part of some members of the staff of the CIA.
From Richard Clarke, Against All Enemies, p. 13:
Posted by DeLong at March 24, 2004 05:50 PM | TrackBack | | Other weblogs commenting on this postDale Watson, counterterrorism chief at FBI, was waving at the camera.... "And, Dick, call me in SIOC when you can."... Dale had something he did not want to share with everyone....
Frank Miller took over... I stepped out and called Watson on a secure line. "We got the passenger manifests from the airlines. We recognize some names, Dick. They're Al Qaeda." I was stunned, not that the attack was Al Qaeda but that there were Al Qaeda operatives on board aircraft using names that the FBI knew were Al Qaeda.
"How the fuck did they get on board then?" I demanded.
"Hey, don't shoot the messenger, friend. CIA forgot to tell us about them." Dale Watson was one of the good guys at FBI. He had been trying hard to get the Bureau to go after Al Qaeda in the United States with limited success...
I haven't seen much on the contempt that the Cheney-Wolfowitz-et-al cadre of the neocon conspiracy had for Clinton and Clinton's foreign policy objectives, so, in essence, while they shirked all this to the side so that they could put into motion their grand scheme to support Ariel Sharron by remaking the Middle East, beginning with Iraq. 'Yes, yes, yes, Osama was a bad boy, a religious nut;" but the Bushies, in their own assessment, had more important things on their minds. This is why they were so Iraq focused on the response immediately after 9/11. But no one really wants to connect their Iraq-centrism with Sharron support. You know they were sitting around openly fantasizing about how they would change the world to make the Middle East less, if no, threat to Isreal; pro-US (out of fear) "democracies" super friendly to Western oil interests. Tut, tut, the Noble Peace Prize sewed up for years . . . Then they just concluded that they would take out al Queda as part of their grand reallignment strategy for the Middle East.
Posted by: Cal on March 24, 2004 07:07 PMRichard N. Perle
Long-time Washington cold warrior Richard N. Perle is a man of many hats: Pentagon policy adviser, former Likud policy adviser, media manager, international investor, op-ed writer, talk show guest, think tank expert and ardent supporter of the war in Iraq. Known in Washington circles as "The Prince of Darkness," Perle is associated with the American Enterprise Institute and the Project for the New American Century, both of which have been prominent behind-the-scenes architects of the Bush administration's foreign policy, in particular its push for war with Iraq. He is closely allied with Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Dundes Wolfowitz, another Iraq hawk. Perle is also a vocal supporter of Israel and a critic of Saudi Arabia. Perle is on the Advisory Board of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), and is a former chairman of the Defense Policy Board, a Defense Department advisory group composed primarily of former government officials, retired military officers, and academics.
Born in New York City, Perle graduated from the University of Southern California in 1964 and worked in a variety of Senate staff jobs, including the office of late Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson from 1969 to 1980, when he went to work for a private military-consulting firm. The following year he was appointed Assistant Secretary of Defense in the presidential administration of Ronald Reagan. During the presidential campaign of George W. Bush, Perle served as a foreign policy advisor.
A veteran Washington insider, Perle has on occasion been accused of being an Israeli agent of influence. It has been reported that, while he was working for Jackson, an "FBI summary of a 1970 wiretap recorded Perle discussing classified information with someone in the Israeli embassy." In 1983, after stepping into a Pentagon job in the Reagan administration, Perle came under fire for accepting a $50,000 payment from an Israeli arms manufacturer. He explained that the payment was for work done as a Washington lobbyist before entering government. According to a Dec. 24, 1985, Associated Press report, Perle, still a Reagan Defense Department official, was challenged by Jeremiah Denton, then a Republican senator from Alabama, on Perle's choice of Stephen D. Bryen as a Pentagon aide. In the email copy of Lee Byrd's report provided by John Sugg (JohnSugg@aol.com), Denton charged that Bryen, moving from a job with the powerful American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, had been forced to resign his Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff job after being investigated for trying to gain information for the Israeli government. Federal prosecutors dropped the case, with Perle defending Bryen's integrity, the AP report says.
In February 2002, the dispute spilled over into the Washington Post's editorial pages, with one writer blasting the 'toxic' charge that Israel was unduly influencing President Bush's Iraq policy. A Post editorial responded by pointing out that Perle, who was chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, and two other Bush policy men, Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy, and David Wurmser, a State Department special assistant, had in 1996 participated in Likud policy deliberations. Under the auspices of the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, a Likud-leaning Israeli think tank, the three helped come up with a paper, 'A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,' which declared that 'removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq' was an 'important Israeli strategic objective...
http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Richard_N._Perle
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Bin Laden comes home to roost
His CIA ties are only the beginning of a woeful story
By Michael Moran
MSNBC
http://www.msnbc.com/news/190144.asp?cp1=1
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Friendly Fire
Book: U.S. Military Drafted Plans to Terrorize U.S. Cities to Provoke War With Cuba
By David Ruppe
N E W Y O R K, May 1 [2001] — In the early 1960s, America's top military leaders reportedly drafted plans to kill innocent people and commit acts of terrorism in U.S. cities to create public support for a war against Cuba...
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/jointchiefs_010501.html
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9/11_Timeline:_2001_to_9/11
.............June 9, 2001: Robert Wright, an FBI agent who spent ten years investigating terrorist funding (see October 1998), writes a memo that slams the FBI. He states, "Knowing what I know, I can confidently say that until the investigative responsibilities for terrorism are transferred from the FBI, I will not feel safe... The FBI has proven for the past decade it cannot identify and prevent acts of terrorism against the United States and its citizens at home and abroad. Even worse, there is virtually no effort on the part of the FBI's International Terrorism Unit to neutralize known and suspected international terrorists living in the United States." [Cybercast News Service, 5/30/02] He claims "FBI was merely gathering intelligence so they would know who to arrest when a terrorist attack occurred" rather than actually trying to stop the attacks. [UPI, 5/30/02] Wright's shocking allegations are largely ignored when they first become public a year later. He is asked on CNN's Crossfire, one of the few outlets to cover the story at all, "Mr. Wright, your charges against the FBI are really more disturbing, more serious, than [Coleen] Rowley's (see August 28, 2001). Why is it, do you think, that you have been ignored by the media, ignored by the congressional committees, and no attention has been paid to your allegations?" The Village Voice says the problem is partly because he went to the FBI and asked permission to speak publicly instead of going straight to the media as Rowley did. The FBI put severe limits on what details Wright can divulge. He is now suing them (see also May 30, 2002). [Village Voice, 6/19/02].....
....August 28, 2001 (D): A previously mentioned unnamed RFU agent (see August 27, 2001 (B)) edits the Minnesota FBI's request for a FISA search warrant to search Zacarias Moussaoui's possessions. Minnesota is trying to prove that Moussaoui is connected to al-Qaeda through a rebel group in Chechnya, but the RFU agent removes information connecting the Chechnya rebels to al-Qaeda. Not surprisingly, the FBI Deputy General Counsel who receives the edited request decides on this day that there isn't enough connection to al-Qaeda to allow an application for a search warrant through FISA, so FISA is never even asked. [Senate Intelligence Committee, 10/17/02] According to a later memo written by Minneapolis FBI legal officer Coleen Rowley (see an edited version of the memo here: Time, 5/21/02), FBI headquarters is to blame for not getting the FISA warrant because of this rewrite of the request. She says "I feel that certain facts ... have, up to now, been omitted, downplayed, glossed over and/or mis-characterized in an effort to avoid or minimize personal and/or institutional embarrassment on the part of the FBI and/or perhaps even for improper political reasons." She asks, "Why would an FBI agent deliberately sabotage a case?"�The superiors acted so strangely that some agents in the Minneapolis office openly joked that these higher-ups "had to be spies or moles ... working for Osama bin Laden." Failing to approve the warrant through FISA, FBI headquarters also refuses to contact the Justice Department to try and get a search warrant through ordinary means. Rowley and others are unable to search Moussaoui's computer until after the 9/11 attacks. Rowley later notes that the headquarters agents who blocked the Minnesota FBI were promoted after 9/11 (see December 4, 2002). [Sydney Morning Herald, 5/28/02, Time, 5/21/02] FTW ............
http://www.cooperativeresearch.net/timeline/main/timelinebefore911.html#a082801fisa
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The Enron-Cheney-Taliban Connection?
By Ron Callari, Albion Monitor
February 28, 2002
Enron is a scandal so enormous that it's hard to wrap your mind around it. Not just a single financial disaster, it's actually a jigsaw of interlocking scandals, each outrageous in its own right.
There's Enron the Wall St. con game, where company bookkeepers used sleight of hand to turn four years of steady losses into stunning profits. There's Enron the reverse Robin Hood, which stole from its own employees even as its executives were hauling millions of dollars out the backdoor. There's Enron's Ken Lay the Kingmaker, who used the corporation's fraudulent wealth to broker elections and skew public policy to his liking. And then there are the Enron coverups, as documents are shredded and the White House seeks to conceal details about meetings between Enron and Vice President Cheney.
The coverups are still very much a mystery. What were the documents that were fed into the shredder – even after the corporation declared bankruptcy? What is the White House fighting to keep secret, even going to the length of redefining executive privilege and inviting the first Congressional lawsuit ever filed against a president? Were the consequences of releasing these documents more damaging than the consequences of destroying them?
Could the Big Secret be that the highest levels of the Bush Administration knew during the summer of 2001 that the largest bankruptcy in history was imminent? Or was it that Enron and the White House were working closely with the Taliban – including Osama bin Laden – up to weeks before the Sept. 11 attack? Was a deal in Afghanistan part of a desperate last-ditch "end run" to bail out Enron? Here's a tip for Congressional investigators and federal prosecutors: Start by looking at the India deal. Closely...
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=12525
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The Counter-Terrorist
by Lawrence Wright
The New Yorker Magazine, June 1, 2002
John O'Neill was an F.B.I. agent with an obsession: the growing threat of Al Qaeda.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/06.03A.oneill.nyer.htm
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Blood Money
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Thursday 27 February 2003
"In the counsels of Government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the Military Industrial Complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes."
- President Dwight Eisenhower, January 1961.
George W. Bush gave a speech Wednesday night before the Godfather of conservative Washington think tanks, the American Enterprise Institute. In his speech, Bush quantified his coming war with Iraq as part of a larger struggle to bring pro-western governments into power in the Middle East. Couched in hopeful language describing peace and freedom for all, the speech was in fact the closest articulation of the actual plan for Iraq that has yet been heard from the administration.
In a previous truthout article from February 21, the ideological connections between an extremist right-wing Washington think tank and the foreign policy aspirations of the Bush administration were detailed.
The Project for a New American Century, or PNAC, is a group founded in 1997 that has been agitating since its inception for a war with Iraq. PNAC was the driving force behind the drafting and passage of the Iraqi Liberation Act, a bill that painted a veneer of legality over the ultimate designs behind such a conflict. The names of every prominent PNAC member were on a letter delivered to President Clinton in 1998 which castigated him for not implementing the Act by driving troops into Baghdad....
http://truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi?archive=1&num=53
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July 19, 2003, 12:12AM
U.S. tallied up assets well before war
Documents list Cheney group's activities
By DAVID IVANOVICH
Copyright 2003 Houston Chronicle Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON -- The energy task force led by Vice President Dick Cheney was examining maps of Iraq's oil assets in March 2001, two years before the United States led an invasion to oust Saddam Hussein, newly released documents show.
The documents, obtained by the public interest group Judicial Watch after a protracted court battle with the White House, show Iraq's oil fields, its major refineries and pipelines.
The papers also list companies from countries that were interested in doing business with Saddam's regime, ranging from Algeria to Vietnam.
The documents also detail oil and gas projects in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and include information on the cost and status of projects in those countries.
The context and importance of the documents remained murky Friday. They were accompanied by a series of e-mails between the State Department and the Commerce Department. The e-mails, however, had been "redacted..."
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/business/2001799
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Published on Wednesday, March 10, 2004 by Salon.com
The New Pentagon Papers
A High-Ranking Military Officer Reveals how Defense Department Extremists Suppressed Information and Twisted the Truth to Drive the Country to War
by Karen Kwiatkowski
In July of last year, after just over 20 years of service, I retired as a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force...
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0310-09.htm
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I saw Tenet testify. He seemed remarkably contemptuous of the commission and its proceedings. I can see him telling W, I won't tell them you fucked up if you don't tell them I fucked up.
Posted by: tstreet on March 24, 2004 08:10 PMI didn't watch it but I can see Tenet telling Cheney:
"As long as they continue to believe we our al Qeda 'blind spot' was...ahhhhh...'inadvertant' boss, we MIGHT get out of this with our pensions in tact."
Posted by: Mike on March 24, 2004 08:26 PMThere's a lot of ass-covering going on. Clarke apparently was implicated in the Bin Laden evacuation of ~ 9/14 and says a little uncertainly that he doesn't believe there was a real problem. The Tenet today. I think that some of the chatter we're getting from the CIA et al is them pushing back against Bush's attempt to make them the fall guys.... but then the CIA seems to be fingering the FBI.
Posted by: Zizka on March 24, 2004 09:18 PMIt might be worth remembering why the CIA wasn't talking to the FBI, and why the CIA didn't have decent agents on the ground any more.
Was tempted to pull a "Mike" and post the entire contents of my D-Drive here, but decided against it.
Posted by: tbrosz on March 24, 2004 09:37 PMGeorge Tenet told the 9-11 commission: "I'm not a policymaker".
Too true.
http://www.9-11commission.gov/hearings/hearing8/staff_statement_7.pdf
Posted by: James on March 25, 2004 02:12 AMtbrosz, thank you. One core dumper is enough.
Posted by: Barry on March 25, 2004 04:11 AMtbrosz on March 24, 2004 09:37 PM & Barry on March 25, 2004 04:11 AM:
It might be worth remembering too that whether or not CIA, FBI, NSA, Defense, State were talking to each other about what they knew at the time, EVERY(BUREAUCRATIC)BODY "in the 'terrorism' loop" reported AND reports to the "fortunate few" at the White House. That's a fact of bureaucratic life. As it happens, that is where they ALL get their 'marching orders' too.
Cover your eyes guys, here comes some more:
---------------
9/11 Commision Director, Philip Zelikow, has Major Conflict of Interest
Members of several 9/11 victim groups are calling for the Director of the 9/11 Commission, Philip Zelikow, to step down [c]iting a conflict of interest
Groups call for the resignation of Sept. 11 commission director
By Chris Strohm
cstrohm@govexec.com
Public interest groups are demanding the immediate resignation of the director of the federal commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, just as the commission prepares to hold high-profile hearings this week with senior officials from the Bush and Clinton administrations.
The 9-11 Family Steering Committee and 9-11 Citizens Watch, two separate groups, are demanding the resignation of Philip Zelikow, executive director of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, after information surfaced over the weekend that he participated in Bush administration briefings prior to Sept. 11 on the threat al Qaeda posed to the country.
"We believe that the very integrity of the commission is at stake here, and that he should resign immediately," Kyle Hence, co-founder of Citizens Watch, said Monday.
On Saturday, the Family Steering Committee wrote a letter to the commission arguing that Zelikow has a conflict of interest because he could potentially be held culpable for failing to heed warnings about al Qaeda prior to Sept. 11.
"It is clear that [Zelikow] should never have been permitted to be a member of the commission, since it is the mandate of the commission to identify the source of failures," the committee wrote. "It is now apparent why there has been so little effort to assign individual culpability. We now can see that trail would lead directly to the staff director himself."
Zelikow was a member of the team that helped with the Bush administration transition to office. When he became executive director of the commission, he recused himself from participating in any part of the investigation that dealt with the time he served on the Bush transition team.
Critics have previously called for Zelikow to resign because they believed he had at least an appearance of a conflict of interest. He co-wrote a book in 1995 with Condoleezza Rice, who is now Bush's national security adviser. Additionally, only Zelikow and commission member Jamie Gorelick are permitted to read classified intelligence reports known as the presidential daily briefs in their entirety...
http://la.indymedia.org/news/2004/03/106073.php
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Posted by: Mike on March 25, 2004 05:15 AM
So your saying CIA should routinely review passenger flight manifests to see if there are Al Qaeda on board? And then tell the FBI? I don't think you want the Agency doing stuff like this.
Whose responsibility was it to monitor what was going on within our borders where terrorist plotting was concerned? Not CIA. Try FBI. If FBI wanted to know the intelligence on Al Qaeda operatives, all it had to do was pay attention to their in boxes, for crying out loud.
Posted by: Jim Harris on March 25, 2004 05:49 AMMr Tenet said warnings of a terrorist attack "lit up" in the weeks before September 11, indicating that "multiple spectacular attacks were planned and that some of the plots were in their final stages". But "the reporting was maddeningly short on actionable details".
The phrase "actionable intelligence" has become very popular with the Bush administration. It is recommended for use in statements such as "We didn't do anything for want of actionable intelligence." Funny how the absence of "actionable intelligence" didn't prevent them from launching a war.
Posted by: Handy Fuse on March 25, 2004 08:29 AMAgreed, Tenet came off as a pompous blustering ass. One of my friends pointed out that he kind of reminded him of a mafioso testifying before the committee. However, he did a good job of not blaming anybody for anything and basically obfuscating the whole affair. I guess that's how he got to where he is.
Posted by: non economist on March 25, 2004 08:53 AM"Mr Tenet said warnings of a terrorist attack "lit up" in the weeks before September 11, indicating that "multiple spectacular attacks were planned and that some of the plots were in their final stages". But "the reporting was maddeningly short on actionable details"."
And what was Bush doing in "the weeks before September 11"?
Oh, yeah. He was clearing brush in Crawford for a month.
Posted by: Jon H on March 25, 2004 09:15 AMClarke commented last night at Charlie Rose, that we should not believe Tenet while he is still director of the CIA (it is no about morals, it is politics kind of comment) and that he was also frustrated with the Bush administration...but Tenet was under oath.
Posted by: Chilean on March 25, 2004 09:41 AMEven Richarde Clarke admits what the real problem with FBI and CIA effectiveness is (FISA):
---------quote-----------
And there is something else that I think we need to understand about the CIA's covert action capabilities.
For many years, they were roundly criticized by the Congress and the media for various covert actions that they carried out at the request of people like me and the White House -- not me, but people like me. And many CIA senior managers were dragged up into this room and others and berated for failed covert action activities, and they became great political footballs.
Now, if you're in the CIA and you're growing up as a CIA manager over this period of time and that's what you see going on and you see one boss after another, one deputy director of operations after another being fired or threatened with indictment, I think the thing you learn from that is that covert action is a very dangerous thing that can damage the CIA, as much as it can damage the enemy.
Robert Gates, when he was deputy director of CIA, and when he was director of CIA, and when he was deputy national security adviser, Robert Gates repeatedly taught the lesson that covert action isn't worth doing. It's too risky. That's the lesson that the current generation of directorate of operations managers learned as they were growing up in the agency.
Now, George Tenet says they're not risk-averse, and I'm sure he knows better than I do.
But from the outside, working with the D.O. over the course of the last 20 years, it certainly looks to me as though they were risk- averse, but they had every reason to be risk-averse, because the Congress, the media, had taught them that the use of covert action would likely blow up in their face.
------------endquote----------
You cannot learn without already knowing.
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