A CIA 9/11 Cover-Up?
Did the CIA keep mum about two 9/11 hijackers because it tried and failed to recruit them? Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan, authors of 'The Eleventh Day,' on whether there’s any truth behind ex-Bush official Richard Clarke’s claim.
A CIA 9/11 Cover-Up?
Did the CIA keep mum about two 9/11 hijackers because it tried and failed to recruit them? Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan, authors of 'The Eleventh Day,' on whether there’s any truth behind ex-Bush official Richard Clarke’s claim.
Aug 12, 2011 4:04 PM EDT
Former White House counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke has reignited controversy by speculating, in an interview cited in Thursday’s Daily Beast, that the CIA intentionally withheld advance knowledge of two of the 9/11 hijackers from the White House and the FBI, in an attempt to cover up the agency’s failed effort to recruit the two men as assets.
Clarke’s comments—and immediate, emphatic denials from former CIA director George Tenet and two senior CIA officials involved—go to the core of one of the enduring enigmas about 9/11.
Things began to unravel for the CIA on the day of the attacks, just four hours after the Qaeda strikes, according to research we conducted for our new book, The Eleventh Day. Soon after 1 p.m. that day, at agency headquarters in Langley, an aide handed Director Tenet the passenger manifests for the four downed airliners. “Two names,” he said, placing a page on the table where the director could see it, “these two we know.”
Tenet looked, then breathed, “There it is. Confirmation. Oh, Jesus ...”
There on the manifest for Flight 77, listed as traveling in first class, were the names of Nawaf al-Hazmi and his brother, Salem. Also on the manifest, near the front of the coach section, was passenger Khalid al-Mihdhar.
The names Hazmi and Mihdhar were instantly familiar, Tenet has said, because his people had learned only weeks earlier that both men might be in the United States. According to the director’s version of events, the CIA had known of Mihdhar since as early as 1999, identified him as a terrorist suspect by December that year, had him followed, learned he had a valid multiple-entry visa for the United States, and placed him and comrades—including Hazmi—under surveillance for a few days in Southeast Asia. Later, in the spring of 2000, the agency had learned that Hazmi, who also had a multiple-entry visa, had arrived in California.
The director said after 9/11, though, that—in spite of having gained such dynamite information—the CIA had done absolutely nothing about it. The agency had not asked the State Department to place the two terrorists on watch lists at border points, nor asked the FBI to track them down if they were in the United States—not until 19 days before 9/11. The omission, according to the CIA, was simply the result of multiple mistakes.
Historical puzzles are as often explained by screw-ups as by darker truths. What is known of the evidence on Hazmi and Mihdhar, however, makes the screw-up version hard to swallow. Not least because the CIA version of events suggests its officials blew chances to grab the two future hijackers time and time and time again.
clarke-cia-911-summers-swan
Former White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke (top left), former CIA Director George Tenet, and one of the twin towers shown after the attack on September 11, 2001, AP Photo (2); Getty Images
At the heart of the suggestion that the agency intentionally withheld information was the discovery by the Justice Department’s inspector-general of a draft cable—one that was prepared but never sent—by an FBI agent on attachment to the CIA’s bin Laden unit.
The CIA’s “screw-up” explanation of its lamentable failure to act remains at best unconvincing, at worst indicative that it conceals a very different, secret scenario.
In January 2000, having had sight of a CIA cable noting that Mihdhar possessed a U.S. visa, agent Doug Miller had swiftly drafted a memo on the matter addressed to the bureau’s own bin Laden unit and its New York field office. Had that memo been sent, the FBI would have learned right then of Mihdhar’s entry visa. The report was blocked, however, on the order of then-deputy chief of the CIA’s bin Laden unit, Tom Wilshire.
Why did he block it? Could it be that the CIA concealed what it knew about Mihdhar and Hazmi because officials feared that precipitate action by the FBI would blow a unique lead? Did the CIA want to monitor the pair’s activity itself, even though its mandate does not allow it to run operations in the United States? Or did it, as some bureau agents suspected—and Clarke has surmised—even hope to turn the two terrorists, to recruit them as informants?
Clarke’s speculation may not be idle. A heavily redacted congressional document shows that in early December 1999, before Mihdhar’s U.S. visa came to light, top CIA officials had debated the lamentable fact that the agency had as yet not penetrated Al Qaeda:
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Oh, say it ain't so.
A CIA cover-up of 9/11?
Shocking.
That is very likely some people's reaction.
While I think most of this is an EVIDENCE TRAIL of PATSIES & DUPES. AKA CIA FBI MODUS OPERANDI,
some will be thinking, "those TRUTHERS may be on to something, that there is and has been an ongoing cover up.
agree w/ Joe and shocked at Kevin's reaction
CIA's 'failures', for which there is documentary evidence, are evidence of the patsies and dupes being protected; laws were broken, and if the intent was to facilitate an attack on the US, the crimes include treason and mass murder. Attempts by CIA officials to hide and explain these failures have the appearance of a cover up, which would be a crime in itself. False statements were made under oath; if these statements were known to be false by those making them, they committed another crime; perjury. At a minimum, the record must be corrected, for the sake of truth and justice, posterity and history - and if these things are important, all those at CIA, and all other US agencies, and anyone else involved in the 9/11 crimes in any way, should be held accountable; publicly named, imprisoned, fined, ill-gotten gains confiscated, barred from holding public office, etc.
I'm shocked that Kevin Ryan publicly yawns when he learns of this info.
Kevin, do you really believe this aspect of the 9/11 plot is that mundane and unimportant?
That only those involved in controlled demolition of the WTC should be held accountable; that those at CIA and FBI who helped enabled 9/11 should not be?
REACTION
I feel sure Kevin's reaction was only a little sarcastic humor for us who already know just far and wide the cover up goes.
CIA
>>That only those involved in controlled demolition of the WTC should be held accountable; that those at CIA and FBI who helped enabled 9/11 should not be?
Seems likely that individuals within the CIA probably had a hand in all different parts of it (albeit perhaps compartmentalized), be it demolition, coordinating hijackers, destroying FAA evidence, shutting out evidence and witnesses, on and on. Interestingly there is a long history of outrageous abuses that are posted for the public to read, like MKULTRA, with relevant evidence conveniently missing, and others like Operation Paperclip, Project ARTICHOKE, Project MKCHICKWIT, Project MKDELTA, Project MKNAOMI, Project CHATTER, Project MKOFTEN . . . of which they have been essentially immune, regardless of the Church Committee hearings, which seemed -- in today's world -- to effectively have had no real impact at all.
I found it fascinating that despite the healthy amount of time that has elapsed since most of the abuses listed openly on wikipedia, their destruction of the videos of enhanced interrogation -- which did briefly appear in MSM headlines for about 24 hrs -- was removed off their wikipedia page and has never returned. It was too close to causing trouble if it remained, so it was effectively erased from history.
Yes -
If I were to take away something from Clarke's allegations thus far, it would be his revelation that the CIA tried to recruit two of the 9/11 hijackers. This shows that the CIA has involvement in terrorist activities and recruiting assets, including known Muslim terrorists. Their hands are dirty. They aren't merely a spy agency that hid intelligence from the FBI.
Combine this with the revelations of Sibel Edmonds that the CIA leader himself, Osama bin Laden, was an operative all the up until 9/11. That's a bombshell....
And the Commission co-chairs' remark that the "CIA made a conscious effort to impede our panel's inquiry" regarding the tapes that were withheld of detainees.
Plus the fact that the CIA's National Reconnaissance Office outside Washington DC was running a drill of a plane hitting their building on the morning of 9/11!
Not to mention the CIA offices in Building 7.
So yes, I am completely for shining a spotlight on the CIA in general, and 9/11-related activities in particular. If Clarke can help to shine the light on the CIA, then it could open up a lot of the other things. And like Joe said, the mere fact that Clarke is saying there's a cover-up helps to connect to people far outside our movement.
wiki: 2005 CIA interrogation tapes destruction
Vic: "I found it fascinating that despite the healthy amount of time that has elapsed since most of the abuses listed openly on wikipedia, their destruction of the videos of enhanced interrogation -- which did briefly appear in MSM headlines for about 24 hrs -- was removed off their wikipedia page and has never returned. It was too close to causing trouble if it remained, so it was effectively erased from history."
Do you mean this still live wiki page:
2005 CIA interrogation tapes destruction
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/2005_CIA_interrogation_tapes_destruction
History Commons has an extensive project on this:
http://www.historycommons.org/project.jsp?project=us_torture_abuse
Yes
Yes, that page is an off-shoot that for awhile was totally orphaned from the main page. I know someone who happened to observe the process of trickery just days after the scandal erupted in which they managed to disconnect the tapes page from any other page -- something only Admins can do.
But they do not allow even a single sentence about it on the main CIA page that I've seen:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Intelligence_Agency
It's not the info isn't out there, it's that they are able to blank it out on the main wikipedia CIA page, despite its obvious importance.
And this is just another example of the difficulty of seeing anything they do have a consequence. The title of this section is fairly brazen, is even called "Lying to Congress" . . . whoops, yawn, there goes another lie!
Former Speaker of the United States House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi has stated that the CIA repeatedly misled the Congress since 2001 about waterboarding and other torture, though Pelosi admitted to being told about the programs.[141][142] Six members of Congress have claimed that Director of CIA Leon Panetta admitted that over a period of several years since 2001 the CIA deceived Congress, including affirmatively lying to Congress. Some congressmen believe that these "lies" to Congress are similar to CIA lies to Congress from earlier periods.[143]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Intelligence_Agency#Lying_to_Congress
They paraded Congress people in front of the evidence to shut them up when the time came, and it worked, for the most part.
Excessive sarcasm
Is against the (new) rules.
I trust there will be a stern reprimand for this intolerable indiscretion.
No sarcasm intended. I would have never thought such a breakthrough would be rejected with prejudice by prominent 9/11 researchers. We're well aware of who Richard Clarke is, but that is no justification for the knee-jerk assumption that he must be acting in bad faith and that this is some elaborate ploy to construct a limited hangout.
Based on the guilt by association fallacy, any insider blowing the whistle can be discarded. Then what?
Richard Clarke's opinion is a matter of perspective. The facts speak for themselves.
>>the knee-jerk assumption
>>the knee-jerk assumption that he must be acting in bad faith
Usually responses to a person's behavior are not knee jerk if they are based on many years of a person acting in a particular fashion, then supposedly suddenly changing. I'm not sure why there is so much consternation about people feeling skeptical about relying on Clarke, given his past, rather than simple acknowledgement of his past and a strong presentation of the true relevance of the information and its implications.
from a FB post:
"Clarke worked for Rumsfeld in the Ford DOD, was Reagan's Deputy Sec of State for Intel, was Bush I's Asst Sec State for Military relations, was on the NSC throughout the time that al Qaeda was created and nourished, was a member of the COG group whose plan was implemented on 9/11, was "particularly close to the UAE royal family" (think BCCI network), and today is in business with CIA director Woolsey. In February, 1999, it was Richard Clarke who voted down the plan to strike a camp where OBL was hunting with Clarke's good friends in the UAE royal family. And the next month it was Clarke who warned his UAE royal friends to stop visiting OBL, enabling the failure of yet another CIA attempt to capture OBL."
I do agree it's important to follow up on leads where ever they come from, but I also think it's over the top for some to be focusing implied motives on those who express skepticism or respond with sarcasm as having some particular motive, i.e., "You're only against this because it isn't demolition!", or "You're trying to discredit the filmmakers!", "Snitch-jacket!" etc.
If some are skeptical of valuable information, they should be positively won over through a presentation of the relevance and value of the information, not attacked for simply being skeptical (sound familiar?).
Contradictions
According to the Tenet, Black and Blee statement:
According to the Summers/Swann article:
I searched "confirmation" in The Eleventh Day at books.google.com and got 3 hits; the above quote is not among them. While Summers/Swann reached some incredible conclusions considering the material they were exposed to, I doubt they would make up a quote out of whole cloth. They indicate they did interview Tenet, i.e. it's not a second-hand quote: "Tenet has said." It's surprising the quote is not in their book, as it adds the kind of dramatic tension they made use of in their book.
Regardless, though they don't point this out in their article, even though they link to the Tenet et al statement - they're claiming Tenet knew two weeks prior to 9/11, according to his own account, while Tenet claims he was "unaware" until after 9/11.
Am I reading this wrong? It seems, from the context in which Tenet et al made the statement about being unaware, they're referring to the hijacker travel info to the US.
Tenet's claim he was unaware is incredible; Tenet was intensely interested in Al Qaeda info (Clarke says he read raw intelligence before analysts and others have said similar things), his aides knew he was interested, "In the period January through March 2000, some 50 to 60 individuals read one or more of six Agency cables containing travel information related to these terrorists." [CIA IG report, p. xiv], and "After her meeting with Donna on August 22, 2001, Mary asked another CTC officer to draft a CIR to the State Department, INS, U.S. Customs Service, and FBI requesting the placement of Mihdhar and his travel companions, Hazmi and Salah Saeed Muhammed bin Yousaf, on U.S. watchlists.242 The CIR briefly outlined Mihdhar’s attendance at the Malaysia meetings and his subsequent travel to the U.S. in January 2000 and July 2001." [DOJ IG report, p. 302].
And now Summers/Swann are saying Tenet knew, based on their research. Or maybe, if the words are parsed correctly, there's no contradiction.
Even so, it would still be incredible that Tenet didn't know, and if he didn't, it seems somehow the info must've been prevented from getting to him. And regardless of this detail, there's a wealth of other documentary evidence that Wilshire, Blee and certain subordinates were actively preventing the FBI from learning about the presence in the US of Almihdhar and Alhazmi. And Tenet, Black and Blee - and the MSM - are trying to pretend there's no "there" there, and to ignore this issue, while the war on terror and domestic national security state that 9/11 was the pretext for, that is making billions for the MIC, continues under Democrat and Republican control of the govt.
clarifications re Summers/Swann quotes
books.google.com search is unreliable; the word "confirmation" appears in the Summers/Swann book in at least one other place.
The part I quoted from the Summers/Swann article is taken, w/ minor changes, from pp. 375-376 of their new book, The Eleventh Day. I found no indication in the book that they sourced anything to an interview of Tenet that they conducted.
They source the aide/Tenet quotes to Ron Suskind's One Percent Doctrine, p. 3. Tenet would probably say his statement "Confirmation" refers to his hunch it was an Al Qaeda attack, confirmed by seeing the names on the manifests.
The Summers/Swann statement, "The names Hazmi and Mihdhar were instantly familiar, Tenet has said, because his people had learned only weeks earlier that both men might be in the United States." is sourced to Tenet's own book Center of the Storm, 2007, p. 195. That page covers CIA's receipt of the info in Jan 2000 that al-Mihdhar had a US visa and that CIA thought it passed this info to the FBI; it has nothing to do w/ Tenet's knowledge as of 9/11, and nothing to do w/ CIA learning "only weeks earlier" what had been in its records since early 2000, and which 50-60 people at CIA had learned of at the time. At the time, al-Mihdhar's US visa alone was considered important enough for Tom Wilshere to block Doug Miller from passing it on to the CIA, and important enough for Wilshere's subordinate "Michelle" to cable several CIA stations informing them it had been passed on to the FBI when it had not been - but not important enough to confirm w/ FBI that it had been passed on, a standard CIA procedure.
Another page in Tenet's book recounts the same event as Suskind, the aide bringing in the manifests; Tenet quotes the aide as saying, "Some of these guys on one of the planes are the ones we've been looking for in the last few weeks." (p. 167) and Tenet writes, "He pointed specifically to two names: Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. That was the first time we had absolute proof of what I had been virtually certain of from the moment I heard of the attacks: we were in the middle of an al-Qa'ida plot"
In another place Tenet writes: "In August, I directed a thorough review of our files to identify potential threats. I didn't want to leave any stone unturned, even if that meant replowing old ground. ... I later learned the CTC officials had begun a similar review even before I asked them to do so. It was during this period that they discovered cables from the year before that suggested possible al-Qa'ida operatives might have entered the United States. The issue involved two men, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi ..." (p. 159)
I haven't found what Summers/Swann interpret as, "The names Hazmi and Mihdhar were instantly familiar, Tenet has said, because his people had learned only weeks earlier that both men might be in the United States."
However, the above passages, and perhaps others from Tenet's own book, raise questions concerning what he knew and when:
FBI detailee to CIA Margaret Gillespie was assigned by Wilshere to do the search in her free time; for some reason it took 3 months, but she discovered the travel info on Aug 21, and shortly afterward the FBI, State and INS were alerted.
Would Tenet really have not been informed about this info, after directing a review of CIA files on Al Qaeda?
Tenet quotes his aide as saying two Al Qaeda operatives on the AAL 77 manifest "are the ones we've been looking for in the last few weeks."
Was Tenet really unaware prior to Sept 11, that CIA had realized on Aug 21 that it had this info in its files since early 2000, had just now passed it to FBI, State and INS Aug 22-24, and that they "were looking for" them, or was he only informed about this after planes began crashing into US buildings?
Did he mean something else by the statement on secrecykills.com, though it seems clearly intended to imply he was unaware?
Why is he trying to imply he was unaware of this info prior to 9/11?
Why does he skate around this issue in his book?