Response to Peter Dale Scott: Alec Station Must Have Known

Over the last few months, former diplomat and author Peter Dale Scott has published a series of articles about one of the 9/11 hijackers, Khalid Almihdhar, and the parallels between his handling by Alec Station, the CIA's bin Laden unit, and events in the 1960s, such as an apparent CIA operation involving Lee Oswald, John Kennedy’s alleged assassin. They are Deep Events and the CIA's Global Drug Connection, The JFK Assassination and 9/11: the Designated Suspects in Both Cases and The Assassinations of the 1960s as “Deep Events”.

”Errors”

Scott looks at the CIA's apparent “errors”—due to which Alec Station repeatedly and over a period of 20 months before the attacks failed to pass on information about Almihdhar and his associates Nawaf Alhazmi and Khallad bin Attash to the FBI. He concludes, correctly in my view, that they were not really errors, but were intentional and that Alec Station intended to protect Almihdhar from the FBI. He then goes on to say that this protection was not because Alec Station wanted the 9/11 attacks to succeed, but ascribes to it another, lesser motive. Although this may be a reasonable explanation for some of the officers involved in hiding information about Almihdhar, at least one of—and probably both—the “ringleaders” were aware Almihdhar was to be involved in a forthcoming major attack in the summer of 2001, making Scott's explanation unlikely in their case.

Continued here.

From Kevin's conclusion...

Conclusion

Presumably, the other CIA officers who had walk-on parts in the withholding of the information from the FBI did believe that the information was being withheld for some purpose other than allowing attacks against the US, such as to penetrate al-Qaeda networks in the US without interference from the bureau. However, given that Wilshire stated that he thought Almihdhar was “very high interest” in connection with the forthcoming attacks, he cannot have thought a presumed “black” operation monitoring the hijackers in the US was solely aimed at following Almihdhar to uncover al-Qaeda networks in the US and had no connection to the attacks. It is also highly likely that Rich B was aware of Almihdhar’s link to a forthcoming attack in the US.

Finally, it should be pointed out that the hijackers’ operational security was poor. For example, members of the four different teams lived together, including with Almihdhar and Alhazmi, and the two men repeatedly telephoned bin Laden’s operations centre in Yemen, which was under surveillance by the NSA and CIA. It would not have been at all difficult for the “black” team monitoring Almihdhar and Alhazmi to discover the other hijackers, their flight training and their ticket purchases shortly before 9/11. Yet there is no known attempt by this team to disrupt the plot.

Alec Station had ample information that could have been used to stop the plot, but prevented the FBI from acting on this information. In addition, it took no known actions to stop the plot itself. The conclusion that it wanted the attacks to go ahead seems inescapable.

-------------------------------------------------------

I'll email this blog entry to Scott.