In the first two parts of this series we saw how a group of officers at Alec Station, the CIA’s bin Laden unit, concealed information about al-Qaeda’s Malaysia summit from their FBI colleagues in January 2000. In particular they hid information about a US visa in the possession of Flight 77 hijacker Khalid Almihdhar. We also saw how this protection of Almihdhar, his partner Nawaf Alhazmi and al-Qaeda leader Khallad bin Attash continued even after the involvement of Almihdhar and bin Attash in the October 2000 USS Cole bombing became known to the US intelligence community. Concealing information about terrorists involved in seventeen homicides was bad enough, but things were about to get much worse.

Shortly after the CIA had failed to respond truthfully to a second formal request for information about the Cole bombing from FBI agent Ali Soufan in April 2001, the cables the CIA drafted about the Malaysia summit were reviewed at Alec Station. The review was conducted by Tom Wilshire, the station’s deputy chief and one of the key figures in the withholding of the information, and a female CIA officer whose name is not known. The two of them re-read cables from the previous year that said Almihdhar had a US visa and that Alhazmi had flown to Los Angeles with a companion, but neither of them took the appropriate action—watchlisting the Malaysia attendees and alerting the FBI.

After this review, Wilshire ordered another review of the same information. The review was to be carried out by Margaret Gillespie, a CIA detailee to Alec Station whose alleged memory loss regarding the events of January 2000 makes one suspicious of her motives. Wilshire believed, correctly as it turns out, that the cables contained the key to preventing the next major al-Qaeda attack—had they been handled properly, 9/11 would never have happened.

Three weeks before the attacks, Gillespie allegedly discovered a key cable, and this led her to tell the FBI about Almihdhar and Alhazmi. As you know, the FBI hunt for Almihdhar and Alhazmi was unsuccessful and this, as you probably don’t know, was largely due to Wilshire. Nevertheless, Wilshire received substantial praise from the post-attack investigations for getting Gillespie to do the review. Plenty of his other actions cast suspicion on him, but this review seemed to put him in the clear—if he really was trying to hide the information, why start a review?

If we look at how Wilshire started the review, two things stand out. First, Wilshire told Gillespie that the review was not urgent and that she should do it in her free time. There were obviously other things to do at the time, but figuring out the location of the next major al-Qaeda attack should have been fairly high on the Counterterrorist Center’s to-do list. Second, the reason it allegedly took Gillespie three months to review a handful of relatively short documents is reportedly that she could not find them in the CIA’s database. However, Wilshire had the cables when the review started, but simply failed to give them to Gillespie. Had he done so, the review would have lasted closer to a couple of hours than three months. As we will see, Gillespie says she discovered the key cable that led her to alert the Bureau shortly after the 9/11 hijackers finalised the date of the attack.

After the above facts are taken into consideration, we can come up with a theory about why Wilshire started the second review: after the first review by Wilshire and the unnamed CIA officer, it was obvious that action should be taken; specifically, the FBI and INS should be contacted and told what Alec Station knew, which would have prevented Almihdhar re-entering the US late in the year, or enabled the FBI to follow him when he did. In order to prevent the unknown officer from doing this, Wilshire suggested a second review, which he may have represented as being, for example, more complete, thorough, wide-ranging, etc. Initiating such a review was the only way he could come up with to stop this officer from doing what she knew she should do.

Shortly after this, Wilshire moved to the FBI, where he became deputy chief of the International Terrorism Operations Section. He also initiated a series of events that led to the FBI’s Cole investigators being shown photos of Almihdhar and Alhazmi, although all information about the two men continued to be withheld.

First, Wilshire initiated a discussion with a CIA analyst named Clark Shannon in which a group of three surveillance photos taken at al-Qaeda’s Malaysia summit were mentioned. In this discussion, Wilshire committed a slip, suggesting that the photo of Alhazmi that, based on the January 4 meeting with “Omar” discussed in part two of this series, the CIA believed showed bin Attash did not actually show bin Attash at all. “Someone saw something that wasn’t there,” he wrote to Shannon. Given that Wilshire claims he had not even read the cable reporting on the January 4 identification of bin Attash, this is surprising to say the least. Wilshire was, in fact, correct and the photo showed Alhazmi, not bin Attash, but Wilshire appeared to know al-Qaeda operatives better than one of the US’s top sources inside the organization. The explanation for this seems clear: Wilshire knew well who Alhazmi was, and he knew bin Attash too.

After e-mailing with Wilshire, Shannon mentioned the photos to Dina Corsi, an FBI headquarters analyst who worked closely with Wilshire and will go on to play a key role in the story. Wilshire then printed the photos off for Corsi, who was to show them to the Cole agents. Naturally, Wilshire forgot to mention that bin Attash, the mastermind of the attack they were all investigating, had been in Malaysia with Almihdhar in January 2000. Corsi also obtained information from the NSA about the Malaysia meeting.

On June 11, 2001, Shannon, Corsi and Gillespie went to meet with the Cole agents, in particular Steve Bongardt and Russell Fincher, at the FBI’s New York office. After a presentation by the Bureau about the state of the investigation, Shannon told Corsi to take the photos out and show them to her FBI colleagues. Bongardt was immediately curious and asked some basic questions about the photos, such as who was in them and what was going on. The “Wilshire” side of the table mostly refused to answer them. There was an argument, a “shouting match,” which continued between Bongardt and Corsi when the meeting broke up.

It is hard to sustain a good-faith explanation for this meeting, which represents another opportunity to interdict Almihdhar, Alhazmi and the whole 9/11 plot. The claimed reason for showing the photos was that the CIA wanted to know if any of them showed Fahad al-Quso, one of the Cole plotters who was in Yemeni custody and had been interviewed by the FBI. However, one of the photos showed Almihdhar. Wilshire identified him as such when he gave Corsi the photos and she even wrote Almihdhar’s name on the back of the photo. How was the FBI supposed to identify al-Quso in a photo of Khalid Almihdhar? Another photo showed Alhazmi, who looked nothing like al-Quso. Also, Shannon provided conflicting accounts of the meeting afterwards, and his claim that he went to an information-sharing meeting without any information to share is both bizarre and contradicted by Corsi’s notes, which show he did disclose that Almihdhar was travelling on a Saudi passport in January 2000.

Corsi’s refusal to provide the Cole investigators with the NSA information is also incredible. She claimed she could not do so because of an offshoot of the “wall” regulations, which primarily governed the sharing of information between FBI intelligence agents and criminal prosecutors. However, the regulations did not apply to one of the New York agents at the meeting, who was a designated intelligence agent. In addition, it would have taken Corsi one day to get permission to pass the information to the other agents, who were on the criminal side, from the NSA’s general counsel.

When the events of the meetings and what preceded it are weighed up, the following conclusion seems inescapable: the meeting was not a good faith attempt to share information, but a ruse—orchestrated by Wilshire—to learn whether the Cole agents recognised Alhazmi and Almihdhar.

When this meeting is compared to the January 4, 2001 meeting with “Omar” referenced in part two of this series, there is a striking similarity: photos of Almihdhar and Alhazmi are passed under the pretext that they show other people, and information just happens not to be shared. Meanwhile, the group around Wilshire learns whether the people recognise Almihdhar and Alhazmi or not.

Another significance of the June 11 meeting is that it shows us that whatever the CIA was doing with Almihdhar and Alhazmi was still very much ongoing. The two men had not been forgotten, they were at the front of the minds of Wilshire and his now-former boss, Richard Blee. As we will see in part 4 of the series, both men were highly aware of the drumbeat of threat reporting in the summer of 2001 and Wilshire even linked Almihdhar to the forthcoming major al-Qaeda attack in a highly incriminating e-mail.

Kevin Fenton is the author of Disconnecting the Dots: How CIA and FBI Officials Helped Enable 9/11 and Evaded Government Investigations.

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Warrick’s book, The Triple Agent, focuses on Jennifer Matthews, the CIA station chief at forward base Chapman who was among those killed by a Jordanian suicide bomber.  In discussing the role of Matthews in the CIA’s withholding of critical pre-9/11 intelligence from the FBI and counterterrorism official Richard Clarke, Collins asked if Jennifer Matthews had connections to Alfreda Frances Bikowsky—the CIA officer recently identified here at Boiling Frogs Post. Warrick responded:

“There is a group of very, shall we say, strong personalities within the counterterrorism division, you’ve named 2 of them, they were good friends, they worked together on these cases, and the list of people the IG has identified as potentially deserving of disciplinary review for their actions before 9/11 never been published, but we know from multiple counts that Jennifer Matthews had been on that list…”

In this response, Warrick directly confirms the role of Bikowsky in the pre-9/11 intelligence debacle, as well as her presence at the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydeh, which was being directed by Matthews.  And without explicitly naming Bikowsky, he confirms that she was a friend and colleague of Matthews and that they worked together on counterterrorism at CIA. 

Warrick also asserts that he knows of the Inspector General’s list of some 60 CIA employees proposed for investigation over the pre-9/11 intelligence suppression, and that he has been able to get multiple confirmations that Matthews was on that list. But it appears that The Post has acquiesced to the CIA, and its editors believe that the public is not interested in learning the truth and seeking accountability on these matters.

“We’d still love to get that list. And we tried at the time to get the names of the individuals. It was decided at a high level, this was back during the Bush administration, when Porter Goss was CIA Director that these names would never be published, as far as the CIA was concerned, and there is not much of a process to force the CIA to retreat from that decision….and no one in either the Bush or Obama administration has pushed for further disclosure, they’d like for this thing pretty much to be put to rest and forgotten about.

There is nothing that makes officials here want to change the subject more quickly than those kinds of questions; politicians and certainly the intelligence people would just rather see it go away…and there just doesn’t seem to be much public interest, either, that we’ve detected….there are certainly pockets of it, but in terms of getting people excited and interested in this again, it’s been a real struggle.”

These comments raise serious questions about the integrity and independence of The Washington Post, as Warrick says his newspaper has had this information for years but appears to take editorial direction from the CIA and the White House.  The failure of The Post and the 9/11 Commission to fully investigate the CIA for its actions prior to 9/11 and explore the Malaysia summit and visas issued to al-Hazmi and al-Midhar are part of an obvious cover-up, and suggest widespread obstruction of justice. 

In addition, the Washington Post and more recently the Associated Press  refrained from reporting the complete story and Bikowsky’s involvement in the German citizen el-Masri’s rendition and torture, in compliance with the CIA pressure. The well-known New Yorker journalist Jane Mayer also complied with CIA’s unofficial request and withheld certain facts and the identities of the CIA employees and contractors involved in rendition and barbaric cases in her book The Dark Side.

Boiling Frogs Post broke the story and identified Alfreda Frances Bikowsky for the first time a week ago on September 21, 2011. Although the CIA had threatened producers Nowosielski and Duffy, and had prevented them from identifying the two CIA officers Bikowsky and Michael Anne Casey, the agency did not threaten or request redaction when asked for confirmation by the alternative news site Gawker. Despite Boiling Frogs Post’s exposé as the first alternative news site to publish the story, complete coverage by Cryptome, the video report by independent investigative journalist James Corbett at Corbett Report, and the subsequent coverage and analyses by Gawker, the mainstream media and the so-called independent outlets have so far readily complied with the establishment’s no-no rule and have abstained from covering this significant report involving obstruction of justice, cover up, lying to Congress, rendition and torture.

Here is the relevant portion of the audio interview of Joby Warrick by Peter B Collins:

To listen to the entire show visit Peter B Collins’ website: here.

We have so far identified and confirmed three CIA officers, Alfreda Frances Bikowsky, Jennifer Matthews and  Michael Anne Casey, who were involved in the intentional cover up of significant pre 9/11 intelligence, subsequent cover up during the quasi 9/11 investigations, and the CIA’s rendition and torture cases. As we can see, the partnership between the government, mainstream media, pseudo alternative media, and Congress makes sure the facts pertaining to these crimes and criminals remain untouched and buried.

*For additional more background check out the following links:

BFP Breaking News: Confirmed Identity of the CIA Official behind 9/11, Rendition & Torture Cases is Revealed 

Boiling Frogs Breaking News: CIA Goes After Producers Nowosielski & Duffy

The Still Developing Story of the Recently Issued CIA Threats to Producers Nowosielski & Duffy

Podcast: The Boiling Frogs Presents Ray Nowosielski & John Duffy

As you can see we are doing our share as one of the very few true alternatives. Please do your share and help us continue our operation by subscribing to Boiling Frogs Post. Thank you.

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Author and researcher Kevin Fenton joins us to discuss the recent case involving the CIA’s withholding of the release of audio documentary “Who is Richard Blee?” and the extensive research and findings which have resulted in the unmasking of three former top CIA officials and their role in withholding intelligence on two key 9/11 hijackers and subsequent cover-ups. He details the findings on the two key CIA analysts who were instrumental in this cover up – who were recently identified and exposed as Alfreda Frances Bikowsky and Michael Anne Casey. Mr. Fenton discusses the CIA’s Alec Station, and questions the notion of incompetence versus intentional when it comes to the events leading to and making the terrorist attacks possible on 9/11.

Kevin Fenton is an independent researcher and the author of Disconnecting the Dots: How CIA and FBI Officials Helped Enable 9/11 and Evaded Government Investigations.

Here is our guest Kevin Fenton unplugged!

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For tons of brilliant and truly independent podcast, video and interviews visit our partner James Corbett’s own website here at: http://www.corbettreport.com/

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The producers Nowosielski and Duffy have now made both names available [link removed] at their website. They also identify the second CIA culprit as M. A. C. We have not been able to obtain confirmation by other sources on this person yet, but we are still working on it.

Alfreda Frances Bikowsky is the person described in New Yorker journalist Jane Mayer’s book The Dark Side as having flown in to watch the waterboarding of terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammad without being assigned to do so. “Its not supposed to be entertainment,” superiors were said to have told her.  She was also at the center of “the el-Masri incident,” in which an innocent German citizen was kidnapped by the CIA in 2003 and held under terrible conditions without charges for five months in a secret Afghan prison. The AP characterized it as “one of the biggest diplomatic embarrassments of the U.S. war on terrorism.”

Both the previous and current administrations appear to have deemed Alfreda Frances Bikowsky’s direct involvement in intentional obstruction of justice, intentional cover up, lying to Congress, and overseeing rendition-kidnapping-torture practices as qualifying factors to have kept promoting her. She now leads the CIA’s Global Jihad Unit and is a close advisor to the President.

*For more background check out the following links:

Boiling Frogs Breaking News: CIA Goes After Producers Nowosielski & Duffy

The Still Developing Story of the Recently Issued CIA Threats to Producers Nowosielski & Duffy

Podcast: The Boiling Frogs Presents Ray Nowosielski & John Duffy

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September 11^th Advocates:

Patty Casazza

Monica Gabrielle

Mindy Kleinberg

Lorie Van Aucken

*For more background check out the following links:

Boiling Frogs Breaking News: CIA Goes After Producers Nowosielski & Duffy 

The Still Developing Story of the Recently Issued CIA Threats to Producers Nowosielski & Duffy

Podcast: The Boiling Frogs Presents Ray Nowosielski & John Duffy

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by subscribing .

I asked Mr. Nowosielski how the CIA was informed about the schedule and the content of their upcoming segment, and he provided us with the following details:

We emailed CIA Public Affairs on Thursday morning telling them of our intention to name two current agents in our journalism piece and explained the context of their use — the things they were accused of. We also explained that their names had been deduced through open-source materials and that our sources had told us they were working from headquarters.

As for the CIA’s reaction and response Mr. Nowosielski recounted the following:

Their media spokesperson called back almost immediately. After a brief discussion, we emailed him the script for official reply. We also requested an interview with the two to ensure that we were telling the full story accurately. The reply email began “This is off the record:” and then informed us that we may be violating federal law by including those two names. When we asked him to cite the law, we were told it was the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. This and follow up calls occurred on Thurs, Fri, and Sat, until we explained that we were not recognizing “off the record” in our official interactions with the Agency. We have heard nothing further since.

My own immediate response to the way in which CIA responded to the producers can be summed up in three questions:

1- Is this one of those fairly common cases where the government agency tries its ‘bluffing tactic’ to see whether that suffices to intimidate and stop the whistleblower or reporter in question?

Because the threat is issued by e-mail, and ludicrously, it starts off by stating ‘off the record.’ When confident and on solid ground the agencies come after the targets armed with official- legal letters or even court orders. In my days, in my own case as a government whistleblower, and later as the director of NSWBC dealing with many intelligence agencies whistleblowers and  also reporters, I have experienced the government agency ‘Bluffing Tactic’ more than a few times. For example, the FBI tried to stop my interview with CBS-60 Minutes and later attempted to stop the airing of the segment, but when challenged and invited to go ahead and take legal action, they changed their mind; they went away.

2- Is this an attempt by the CIA to buy needed time to take further action against the producers through the Department of Justice?

One thing I know is that government bureaucracy takes time. It takes time to get ‘things done’ when it comes to the government. In this case, the CIA would have to bring and make the case to the Justice Department. The DOJ then would have  to go through its own bureaucracy and reviews to decide whether it could turn this into a legal action via the courts. Thus, this could possibly be a case of the CIA trying to buy more time to translate its ludicrous ‘off the record’ threat issued by a casual e-mail into a real threat with some teeth. If so, wouldn’t that mean a window of opportunity for the producers to release the information? Or not?

3- What are the real legal liabilities facing the Producers, since the names of the two culprit CIA analysts are already out in public records? Further, with other sources in addition to the public records ‘outing’ the names of the analysts who happen to be involved in possible criminal actions, what level of threat are the producers faced with?

Again, based on my own experience and the experiences of many government intelligence agencies whistleblowers, the CIA would have to first classify the already public information-documents out there revealing the identities of the two CIA analysts; classification after the fact. Next, they would have to legally pursue the other involved sources who have either confirmed or released those names. The CIA hasn’t done that. At least not yet. And what does this mean? Does it mean the producers still have the burden of abiding by the casually issued ‘off the record’ e-mail by the CIA? Or not?

We are still waiting for further analysis by our legal experts and other intelligence sources. Meanwhile I asked our media advisor Kristina Borjesson to give us her take and expert analysis on this case. Internationally acclaimed for her work, Ms. Borjesson has produced for major American and European television networks and published two groundbreaking books on problems of the U.S. press: Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press and Feet to the Fire: the Media After 9/11, Top Journalists Speak out. Her awards include an Emmy and Murrow Award in TV, the National Press Club’s Arthur Rowse award for Media Criticism, and two Independent Publishers Awards for her books.

Here is the analysis of this case by Ms. Borjesson for Boiling Frogs Post:

The Pitfalls of Due Diligence for Deep Journalism

When independent filmmakers Ray Nowosielski and John Duffy interviewed Richard Clarke in 2009, the former counterterrorism czar dropped a bomb on camera.  Clarke accused former CIA head George Tenet and two other CIA officials, Cofer Black and Richard Blee of withholding critical intelligence from the FBI, DOD, White House and Immigration on the presence in the US of two alleged 9/11 hijackers well before 9/11.  In their film, “Who is Richard Blee?” Nowosielski and Duffy also identify two CIA analysts who participated in the cover-up.

After interviewing Clarke, the filmmakers tried for more than a year to interest media outlets in their bombshell information. “We pitched everywhere and were told no,” says Nowosielski, “We always held out hope to get funding for it to be a real documentary, which we thought [the subject] deserved.” Finally, the filmmakers settled on putting the film out as a podcast.

The CIA is now holding up the release of the recording as a result of the filmmakers doing due diligence as reporters.  It is a standard practice of good journalism to get in touch with subjects that other subjects in a print or TV news piece are talking about if the talked-about subjects are being accused of malfeasance or illegal or unethical behavior.  It is only fair to allow accused subjects to answer and/or defend themselves. It is also then incumbent upon the reporter to get to the bottom of who exactly is telling the truth—the accuser or the accused.

In this case, the filmmakers contacted CIA public affairs to give the two CIA analysts a chance to defend themselves. They followed proper procedure in contacting the CIA public affairs people, because public affairs (not the analysts) are authorized to decide whether to speak on behalf of the analysts or to allow the analysts to speak for themselves.  

Nowosielski and Duffy went one step further in their due diligence.  They sent their entire script to CIA public affairs. “We sent the full piece because we wanted them to know these people were going to be outed. So if they’d been sent in some deep cover thing, we wanted to give them time to pull those people out of those positions.  We thought maybe they would be compelled to defend themselves, because people from the 9/11 commission, the FBI…even Tony Shaffer from Able danger [were] piling on, so we thought maybe we’re misinterpreting this story or they need to defend themselves.”

No doubt the producers did all their digging and proof-gathering into what the CIA analysts allegedly did before calling CIA public affairs. You call public affairs AFTER you have the goods on their employees, not before getting the goods or to get the goods. It’s an ethical protocol, but usually one that is done after it’s too late for public affairs to shut down sources or otherwise interfere in the reporting process.  In this case, contacting CIA public affairs kept the producers on the straight and narrow journalistically, which is a good place to be at all times when reporting on highly sensitive issues.

CIA public affairs responded with an emailed threat. “Off the record,” the CIA’s spokesperson wrote, Nowosielski and Duffy might be violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act by outing their analysts. The penalty for outing CIA agents without using classified sources includes fines and/or prison time. The spokesperson’s use of the “off the record” line is a ploy.   When journalists go off the record, it is usually a mutually agreed upon pre-arrangement.  The CIA’s public affairs person’s attempt to silence Nowosielski and Duffy didn’t work but it has given them pause.

The filmmakers are withholding the release of “Who is Richard Blee?” so the threat, even though it has no legal force, has for now had the desired effect. But the story probably won’t end there. Nowosielski and Duffy are currently in assessment mode.  The question they are asking themselves, says Nowosielski, is “Are we in a position that we want to face the heat involved in that? We’re in no rush; we want to make a good decision.”  Meanwhile, they’re getting advice from a number of friendly legal quarters. 

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In the first part of this series we saw how, in January 2000, the CIA learned that Flight 77 hijacker Khalid Almihdhar had a US visa, but kept this secret from the FBI. At the time, concealing a terrorist or two from the FBI may have been wrong, but it was nothing to get that excited about. However, the withholding of the information took on a new meaning on October 12, 2000, when al-Qaeda bombed the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen.

Although there is no stone-cold proof of Almihdhar’s involvement in the bombing, there is a small hill of circumstantial evidence linking him to it. For example, he was in Yemen at the time, reportedly with one of the masterminds of the attack, Khallad bin Attash, and the bombers called his phone number in Sana’a, Yemen, although this was an al-Qaeda communications hub and they could have been talking to somebody else there. In addition, one day after al-Qaeda’s previous ship-bombing attempt in Yemen, he had left the country and gone to meet with other people suspected of involvement in the operation. Also, he worked on another al-Qaeda ship-bombing plot, to be carried out in Singapore.

The team that went to Yemen to investigate the bombings was mostly from the FBI, although there were also Naval Criminal Investigative Service agents, and the CIA station in Yemen was supposed to co-operate. The team was led by FBI managers John O’Neill, who died on 9/11, and Ali Soufan, who later became famous due to his opposition to torture by the CIA and US military.

They quickly found evidence linking the bombing to al-Qaeda. This was both through the calls to the communications hub where Almihdhar lived and through evidence linking the attack to bin Attash and another al-Qaeda leader, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. Both bin Attash and al-Nashiri were known to the US intelligence community. Indeed, the number of core bin Laden operatives was so small that both had also played a part in the 1998 East African embassy bombings, something already known to US authorities in 2000.

Investigating bin Attash, Soufan picked up hints of an al-Qaeda meeting somewhere in Southeast Asia around January 2000. Thinking this might be significant; in November 2000 he sent a formal request to the CIA asking whether the Agency knew anything about such meeting. The reply that came back was that it knew nothing. This was not true, as the CIA was highly aware of the meeting, having followed the participants around Kuala Lumpur for several days.

It is hard to comprehend how the CIA could simply have forgotten it knew about Malaysia. It is even harder when one learns that Soufan sent not one such request, but three, the latter two coming in the spring and summer of 2001. Each request was more specific than the last. In the end, Soufan even linked the Cole operation to a pay phone used by the militants outside the condominium in Kuala Lumpur where al-Qaeda’s Malaysia summit was held and asked the CIA about this pay phone. The Agency had watched the attendees coming out of the building, walking round the block and then making calls from the pay phone, but they were determined not to tell Soufan any of this before 9/11.

Soufan’s requests were first made public in a New York Times piece by James Risen in April 2004, a few months before the 9/11 Commission and Justice Department inspector general, which investigated the FBI’s pre-9/11 performance, reported. Yet, there is not a single mention of these three requests in either of these two reports. Neither is there any mention of them in what remained unredacted of the 2002 Congressional Inquiry report or the executive summary of the CIA inspector general’s report into that agency’s failings. Soufan was interviewed three times by the 9/11 Commission, which also looked at documentation from the Cole bombing enquiry. There was a plan to have Soufan testify publicly at a 9/11 Commission hearing, but it never came to fruition.

Working the bin Attash angle, Soufan received a photo of a person thought to be bin Attash from the Yemeni authorities on November 22. He sent it to the US embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, via the CIA, to check that it was the same Khallad a joint FBI-CIA source inside al-Qaeda who was handled out of Islamabad had previously reported on. On December 16, an FBI agent known as “Michael D.” and a CIA officer known as “Chris” took the photo to the source, who we will call “Omar.” Chris showed the photo to Omar while Michael D., who could not speak any of the source’s languages, was out of the room. When Michael D. came back, Chris showed the photo again, and Omar identified it again as bin Attash in front of Michael D. The news that Omar said the photo showed the Khallad bin Attash he knew was passed along. This might seem less glamorous than assassinating someone with a missile, but it is real police work.

Shortly after this, an unknown CIA official drafted a cable containing some information about bin Attash and some information not about bin Attash. The cable instructed officers to share the information not about bin Attash with the Bureau, but contained no such order regarding the information about bin Attash. Again, this seems to be part of a plan to withhold evidence about certain terrorists from the FBI, although it is unclear whether the center of attention is bin Attash, Almihdhar or someone else.

The CIA alleges that it then somehow convinced itself that Almihdhar may in fact be bin Attash. This despite the fact that it had photos of the two men and they have remarkably different facial features. The idea led the agency to send one of the Malaysia photos showing Almihdhar to Islamabad for Chris and Michael D. to show Omar. However, when the photo arrived in Islamabad it was accompanied by another one; it showed Alhazmi and was also taken in Kuala Lumpur.

Chris and Michel D. went to meet Omar on January 4, 2001. While Michael D. was out of the room, Chris showed Omar the photos of Alhazmi and Almihdhar. Omar did not recognize Almihdhar, but said that the photo of Alhazmi actually showed bin Attash. Although this might sound odd, the two men actually have similar facial features. Unlike on the previous occasion, when Michael D. came back into the room Chris did not have the identification repeated for his benefit. In fact, he never mentioned it to Michael D. at all. He then drafted three cables about the meeting. Two of them, crucially including one disseminated to the wider intelligence community, made no mention of the identification of bin Attash. The one that mentioned his identification was sent only to the CIA.

However, this was very significant information for the Agency, as it now officially believed a senior al-Qaeda operative, one who had just masterminded an operation that cost 17 American lives, had been at the Malaysia summit. The CIA claims it did not know this before—even though it is hard to credit these protestations of ignorance.

Chris sent the information that the photo showed bin Attash and that he had therefore been at the Malaysia summit to the CIA station in Sana’s, Yemen. That station was supposed to be working closely with the FBI on the Cole investigation. The day Sana’a station received the news bin Attash had been at the Malaysia summit, it failed to tell the FBI. It also failed to do so the next day, and the next, and so on, right up until 9/11. The 9/11 Commission knew the information had been sent to the CIA station in Sana’a, but omitted this from its report. It is hard to imagine what good-faith explanation could be advanced for such error.

The same as the station in Sana’a, Alec Station also failed to pass on the information to its FBI colleagues, this despite the fact that in mid-January 2001 Chris asked his Alec Station counterparts to contact FBI headquarters and tell it about recent developments.

Two of the Cole agents, apparently including Soufan, then flew out to Islamabad to have Omar formally identify the first bin Attash photograph for possible use in a criminal proceeding against bin Attash. When they met with Omar, on February 1, 2001, Chris was present. He made no mention of the fact that just four weeks previously Omar had seen bin Attash in a Malaysia meeting photograph. In fact, like all other CIA agents, he made no reference to the Malaysia summit at all.

This is perhaps the most confusing episode of the pre-9/11 intelligence failures, so some explanations are in order. When one views the facts as set out above, something seems to be missing, the whole episode is a series of loose ends and unanswered questions. Why would the CIA think Almihdhar and bin Attash were the same person? Why send the additional photo, showing Alhazmi, to Islamabad? And what happened between the meeting when Omar identified bin Attash in the Yemeni photograph, when everything went swimmingly, and the subsequent one, when Chris had evidently gone over to the dark side?

The explanation that best fits the facts is this: nobody involved in the withholding of the Malaysia information from the FBI realized any danger when Soufan sent the first photo to Islamabad, so Chris did his job the way the taxpayers pay him to do it. However, one of the coterie of officials who was withholding information from the FBI subsequently realized that, as Omar had identified bin Attash and bin Attash was an associate of Almihdhar and Alhazmi, then Omar might also identify these two men as well, if shown photos from the FBI. Therefore, it was necessary to ascertain to what extent this danger was real. The speculation that Almihdhar and bin Attash were the same person was then simply a ruse under which a photo could quickly be transmitted to Islamabad to be shown to Omar. The reason the Alhazmi photo arrived unannounced was that there was concern Omar might identify Alhazmi to the FBI as well. The reason neither Chris nor anyone else mentioned the apparent identification of bin Attash to the Bureau is that, well, this was information the CIA had been working hard to keep from the Bureau for a year, why tell it to them now?

It has become a truism that intelligence operations that go on for a long time get screwed up, often for the strangest reasons, and this is a perfect example of that. Nobody could have anticipated that Omar would look at the photo of Alhazmi and say it was bin Attash, but it had happened. Now Alec Station was forced to withhold crucial information about the USS Cole bombing mastermind and tied itself up in knots about how it had failed to pass this information along after 9/11. The tale of incompetence in withholding the information about Almihdhar, Alhazmi and bin Attash had been stretched well beyond breaking point, but much more, and much worse, was to come in the late spring and summer of 2001. These events will be the subject of part 3 of this series.

Kevin Fenton is the author of Disconnecting the Dots: How CIA and FBI Officials Helped Enable 9/11 and Evaded Government Investigations

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Nowosielski and Duffy are working with legal advisors and we will have more on this soon. Meanwhile you can listen to our recent exclusive interview with the producers and their discovery here at Boiling Frogs Post:

Podcast Show #55: The Boiling Frogs Presents Ray Nowosielski & John Duffy 

Also, here are related interviews with Paul Thompson based on the exposé by the two producers: Part 1 & Part 2.

The producers’ website was taken down yesterday. We are in touch with them, and we will keep you informed. Please disseminate this stunning new development, the CIA’s panic, and the content of their interview. Thank You.

Sibel Edmonds

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

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

Here are our guests Ray Nowosielski & John Duffy unplugged!

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Although the story of the CIA’s actions in the run-up to 9/11 is complicated, at a fairly early point in any examination of them it becomes clear the agency committed multiple failures, and that these failures enabled the attacks to go forward. The key issue that remains in dispute ten years on is whether these “failures” were deliberate or simply the product of overwork and incompetence. Making an informed judgment means taking the time to look at all the failures, put them in order, and analyze what it all means.

Perhaps the most comprehensible problem is the scope of the CIA’s failings. There was not one error by some lowly neophyte, but a massive string of failures. As Tom Wilshire, one of the key CIA officials involved in the withholding of the information commented to the Congressional Inquiry, “[E]very place that something could have gone wrong in this over a year and a half, it went wrong. All the processes that had been put in place, all the safeguards, everything else, they failed at every possible opportunity. Nothing went right.”

In addition, some of the failures were extremely serious. For example, the alleged failure by Alec Station, the CIA’s bin Laden unit, to inform CIA Director George Tenet that Flight 77 hijacker Khalid Almihdhar was in the country in August 2001 is simply beyond comprehension. Added to this, the failures were committed by a small group of intelligence officers, centered on Wilshire and his boss Richard Blee, and focused on a few al-Qaeda operatives, in particular Almihdhar and his partner Nawaf Alhazmi. Finally, one of the officers who withheld information has admitted this publicly, and a second reportedly in private, and some surviving documents contradict the “incompetence excuse.”

The story of the CIA’s pre-9/11 failings starts in late December 1999, when the NSA intercepted an al-Qaeda communication, apparently between Almihdhar and bin Laden associate Khallad bin Attash, who is currently in Gitmo. One end of the call was at al-Qaeda’s operations hub in Yemen, which the NSA had been monitoring for some time. The communication showed that a group of al-Qaeda operatives would soon be travelling to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The NSA told the CIA and FBI.

The CIA tracked Almihdhar from Yemen to a stopover in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where a photocopy of his passport was made. US officials discovered he had a US visa, issued several months earlier and due to expire in April 2000. This information was reported to the various CIA stations involved in the tracking operation and to Alec Station at CIA headquarters on January 5, 2000.

An FBI detailee named Doug Miller read the relevant cables from the field and drafted a message to the FBI to telling them Almihdhar had a US visa. The FBI is a domestically focused organization, so without the US visa Almihdhar was just a foreign terrorist abroad, and not of much concern to it. It was the US visa that would have made Almihdhar significant to the Bureau. A female CIA officer who we will call “Michael” then told Miller not to send the cable yet, saying Wilshire wanted to hold off on it—no one below Wilshire had authority to release such information to the FBI.

A few hours after she blocked Miller’s cable to the FBI, Michael sent out a cable stating that the FBI had been informed of Almihdhar’s visa information. This was not true, and Michael must have known this at the time.

You will not find this episode in the main text of the 9/11 Commission report. Despite its obvious importance, the commission relegated it to a small-type endnote, number 44 to chapter 6.

Miller turned to a fellow FBI detailee, Mark Rossini, who went to Michael to ask what was happening. According to Rossini, Michael said that the FBI was not going to get the information until the CIA wanted it to and that the next al-Qaeda attack was going to be in Southeast Asia.

In addition, according to several CIA officers interviewed by the Agency’s inspector general, it was standard practice to confirm the Bureau had received such information. This was not done.

Around a week later, Miller sent an e-mail to Wilshire asking whether he could send the message to the FBI now. He received no reply.

After 9/11, investigators were unable to find Miller’s draft cable for nearly two and a half years and the people involved allegedly forgot all about it. It was discovered in early 2004, necessitating they relevant officials be interviewed again. However, they still claimed to have no recollection.

Rossini began to talk more freely about what happened to Lawrence Wright for his 2006 book The Looming Tower, which has an unnamed CIA official tell Miller “This is not a matter for the FBI.” However, Rossini then left the Bureau in disgrace and gave a full account of what happened to author James Bamford and journalist Jeff Stein in 2008. According to Rossini, there was nothing wrong with his memory when interviewed by investigators; he simply chose to lie under pressure from the CIA. Rossini also says there was a minder in the room during the interview, a depressingly typical occurrence for the post-9/11 investigations.

On the same day Miller’s cable was blocked, a CIA officer on loan to the FBI who we will call “Robert” briefed two FBI colleagues on what the CIA knew about the Malaysia meeting. Robert told the two FBI agents pretty much everything the CIA knew except the one key thing the Bureau needed to make it sit up and take notice—that Almihdhar had a US visa. Robert then told another CIA officer on loan to the Bureau there was no need to brief the FBI about Malaysia because he had already done so, ensuring this officer would not let slip the Almihdhar visa information.

Meanwhile in Malaysia, the CIA and a local Malaysian intelligence service were following Almihdhar, Alhazmi and their contacts around. Numerous photos were taken, the attendees at the meeting were videoed on the first day, the operatives went out to use computers at an internet cafe, and intelligence officials then examined the computers. However, an attempt to bug the meeting allegedly failed.

The full list of the attendees is not known. However, in addition to Almihdhar and Alhazmi, we do know that two leading radicals, bin Attash and Hambali, a leader of the al-Qaeda affiliate Jemaah Islamiyah, were present, along with several other lower-level militants. According to counterterrorism expert Rohan Gunaratna and a Pentagon document about Hambali, 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohamed was also there. If true, this would make the CIA’s failure to exploit the meeting all the more bizarre—the Agency was actively looking to rendition him to New York for trial at this time due to his involvement in the 1995 Bojinka plot to blow up multiple airliners.

On January 8, Almihdhar, Alhazmi and bin Attash left Kuala Lumpur for Bangkok, Thailand. The CIA claims it lost them at this point, failing to get men to the airport in time to follow them. This claim needs to be taken with a pinch of salt—bin Attash was monitored in Malaysia making a call to the Washington Hotel in Bangkok, where the three men ended up staying, so it would not be too hard to find them there.

Something strange happened at Alec Station on January 12 and 14. Four days after the three men had left Kuala Lumpur, Wilshire’s boss Blee briefed his superiors, presumably including Counterterrorist Center chief Cofer Black and CIA Director George Tenet, about what was happening. He falsely claimed the surveillance in Malaysia was ongoing. Two days later, he gave another false briefing, saying that the meeting had broken up and, again falsely, that the attendees were still being tracked.

This is a puzzle. It is hard to believe that Blee, who managed only a couple of dozen officers, could be so ignorant of the various cables sent and received about the travel to Bangkok. So why did he misinform his superiors? Was he genuinely misleading them? Or had they told him they wanted no paper trail linking them to what was happening?

On January 15, Alec Station dropped the matter entirely, even allegedly failing to write up a full report on the matter. However, in February a foreign intelligence service made an offer to help with Almihdhar, an offer mentioned in the 9/11 Congressional Inquiry Report, but not the 9/11 Commission Report. The reply that came stated that no help was needed because the CIA was in the middle of an investigation “to determine what the subject is up to.” This is a key document, as it contradicts the claim Alec Station had forgotten all about the two men at the time.

Also in February, a CIA station (almost certainly the one in Kuala Lumpur) prodded Bangkok station about Almihdhar. What had happened to him? Bangkok was silent for some time, then replied they did not know, and would have difficulty finding out. As Thailand had watchlisted Almihdhar and Alhazmi at the CIA’s request in mid-January, it almost certainly did know, or could get the information with a simple phone call. A couple of weeks later, Bangkok got round to replying in a cable also sent to Alec Station: it said Alhazmi had taken a flight to Los Angeles on January 15 with a companion, who was not named but who was in fact Almihdhar. The non-naming of the companion was totally bizarre, the March 5 cable was drafted in response to a query about Almihdhar and Bangkok must have known his name, so why omit it?

Alec Station did nothing with this cable, which was yet another opportunity to watchlist the two men and inform the FBI. This was not the last time such failures were committed.

How the two main inquiries, by the two Congressional intelligence committees and the 9/11 Commission handled the March 5 cable is instructive. The 9/11 Commission report just glosses over it in a couple of lines. The Congressional Inquiry, however, realized just how important it was and zeroed in. Tenet was asked about this publicly under oath by Senator Carl Levin and Tenet… well, he was less than a hundred per cent truthful. In response to the questioning he claimed, “I know that nobody read that cable,” and then repeated the assertion twice. In actual fact, as the public learned five years later, at least 50 people at the CIA had read the cable. It is hard to believe that Tenet, who must have prepared thoroughly for such an important appearance before Congress, thought what he was saying was accurate. So the simple question is: what was he trying to cover up?

Part two of this series will focus on the bombing of the USS Cole and the CIA’s continuing failure to share information with the FBI.

Kevin Fenton is the author of Disconnecting the Dots: How CIA and FBI Officials Helped Enable 9/11 and Evaded Government Investigations.

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Last month the former White House counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke made headlines in the alternative press when he revealed that the CIA’s failure to pass on information it knew about two of the alleged 9/11 hijackers living in the United States for over a year before the attacks did not merely involve a few lowly CIA analysts who did not understand the importance of the information, but instead extended all the way to former CIA director George Tenet.

The claim that the Director of Central Intelligence knowingly and purposely blocked the White House Counter-Terrorism Czar and high-level FBI officials from learning about known Al Qaeda agents living in the United States is profound in its implications. Given that any interpretation of this assertion would necessarily mean that Tenet and the other CIA officials who blocked this information actually aided the alleged 9/11 attackers and have now participated in a decade-long cover-up of their role, the question necessarily becomes: Why did they do this?

This is our EyeOpener Video Report by James Corbett on 9/11, the CIA & the Art of the Hangout: for boilingfrogspost.com.

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This is Part II of our three-part one-of-a-kind interview series with author and researcher Paul Thompson. For additional background information please visit the complete 9/11 Timeline Investigative Project at HistoryCommons.Org and Richard Clarke’s interview by John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski at SecrecyKills.Com.

Paul Thompson joins us to discuss the latest revelations by former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke and his explosive allegations against three former top CIA officials – George Tenet, Cofer Black and Richard Blee – accusing them of knowingly withholding intelligence about two of the 9/11 hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, who had entered the United States more than a year before the attacks. He provides us with the most comprehensive history and context to date on Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, who hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 with three other terrorists and flew the jetliner directly into the Pentagon killing 189 people. Mr. Thompson takes us through a mind-boggling journey through the Yemen Hub, the highly critical Malaysia Summit, Thailand, USS Cole bombing, CIA’s Alec Station, NSA, FBI and beyond!

Paul Thompson is the author of the Terror Timeline, a compilation of over 5,000 reports and articles concerning the September 11, 2001 attacks. His research in the field has garnered over 100 radio and TV interviews. Mr. Thompson holds a psychology degree from Stanford University obtained in 1990. For the complete 9/11 Timeline Investigative Project visit HistoryCommons.Org

Here is our guest Paul Thompson unplugged!

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This is Part I of our three-part one-of-a-kind interview series with author and researcher Paul Thompson. For additional background information please visit the complete 9/11 Timeline Investigative Project at HistoryCommons.Org and Richard Clarke’s interview by John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski at SecrecyKills.Com.

Paul Thompson joins us to discuss the latest revelations by former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke and his explosive allegations against three former top CIA officials – George Tenet, Cofer Black and Richard Blee – accusing them of knowingly withholding intelligence about two of the 9/11 hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, who had entered the United States more than a year before the attacks. He provides us with the most comprehensive history and context to date on Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, who hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 with three other terrorists and flew the jetliner directly into the Pentagon killing 189 people. Mr. Thompson takes us through a mind-boggling journey through the Yemen Hub, the highly critical Malaysia Summit, Thailand, USS Cole bombing, CIA’s Alec Station, NSA, FBI and beyond!

Paul Thompson is the author of the Terror Timeline, a compilation of over 5,000 reports and articles concerning the September 11, 2001 attacks. His research in the field has garnered over 100 radio and TV interviews. Mr. Thompson holds a psychology degree from Stanford University obtained in 1990. For the complete 9/11 Timeline Investigative Project visit HistoryCommons.Org

Here is our guest Paul Thompson unplugged!

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

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

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

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

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

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

I hate to underestimate incompetence and petty infighting as explanations for things, but I also hate to accept as the only possible explanation Clarke’s theory — of which he himself does not seem at all convinced — as to why Tenet apparently withheld information. I asked FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds what she thought, and her reply suggested a level of contempt for both Clarke and Tenet:

“I think sometimes it takes one evil fighting another evil to get to the truth. In this case, the clash of two guilty egos has helped unearth some truth on 9/11. Hope to have more clashes.“

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And so it goes.”

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

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

David Swanson is the author of “War Is A Lie” http://warisalie.org This article was originally published here.

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Recent allegations made by former counterterrorism “tsar” Richard Clarke against former CIA Director George Tenet and two other former CIA managers, Cofer Black and Richard Blee, have thrown one of the key unanswered questions of 9/11 into sharp relief. What happened at Alec Station, the CIA’s bin Laden unit, after an officer there discovered that two of the 9/11 hijackers, Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, had entered the US?

The officer, Margaret Gillespie, says she made the discovery on August 21 and the record indicates she began to notify the FBI and other government agencies on this day. However, while a substantial amount of information has been made public about how the news circulated around the FBI, almost nothing is known of how Alec Station dealt with it.

In an interview recently broadcast as a trailer for the forthcoming audio documentary “Who Is Rich Blee?” Clarke alleged that the CIA had deliberately withheld from him information about Almihdhar and Alhazmi—in particular the news that Almihdhar had a US visa—for over twenty months before 9/11. Clarke also highlighted the importance of the information, saying it was more important than, for example, any of the key pieces of intelligence discussed at a controversial meeting with National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice on July 10, 2001.

According to a statement recently released by Tenet, Black and Blee, neither Tenet nor any other senior CIA official was told of the visa or of travel to the US by Alhazmi and Almihdhar before 9/11. This was also the 9/11 Commission’s conclusion, although this conclusion was hedged. If this is true, then one appropriate question would be: why not?

After the attacks, it emerged that the FBI had arrested one of the possible hijackers, Zacarias Moussaoui. However, it blew the case, failing to obtain a warrant to search Moussaoui’s belongings and even failing to inform its own director of what was happening. This later failure became a badge for the FBI’s general uselessness. And Thomas Pickard, the acting director whom the information did not reach, made matters worse when he suggested Tenet, who had been informed of the case, should have stepped in and done the job Pickard’s staff failed to do.

In his 2007 book At the Center of the Storm Tenet piled on the agony for Pickard (emphasis in original):

During the 9/11 Commission hearings, I was stunned to hear Tom Pickard, who was acting FBI director in August 2001, suggest that I had somehow failed to notify him about Moussaoui. Failed to tell him? Hell, it was the FBI’s case, their arrest. I had no idea that the Bureau wasn’t aware what its own people were doing.

However, the CIA’s failure to inform Tenet of the Almihdhar and Almihdhar information must be regarded as more serious than the FBI’s failure to inform Pickard of Moussaoui. While the local Bureau agents who arrested Moussaoui thought he may well be a terrorist, they did not even realise he was a bin Laden operative, let alone connected to a suspected forthcoming al-Qaeda attack. On the contrary, the CIA knew Almihdhar was linked to the next attack.

In a July 23, 2001 e-mail published following Moussaoui’s trial in 2006, one of Blee’s former deputies, Tom Wilshire, warned CIA Counterterrorism Center (CTC) managers of Almihdhar’s link to the next attack: “When the next big op is carried out by UBL hardcore cadre, Khalad will be at or near the top of the command food chain—and probably nowhere near either the attack site or Afghanistan. That makes people who are available and who have direct access to him of very high interest. Khalid Mihdar should be very high interest anyway, given his connection to the (redacted).”

Khalad (usually spelt Khallad) was a known al-Qaeda leader, currently in Guantanamo. The redaction is probably a reference to al-Qaeda’s global operations hub in Yemen, to which Wilshire knew Almihdhar was linked. The e-mail appears in none of the relevant reports published by the Congressional Inquiry, 9/11 Commission and Justice Department inspector general. It was a follow up to one sent ten days earlier that Blee is known to have read. Wilshire, who was on loan to the FBI at this point, is one of the officials who failed to pass on notification of the Moussaoui case towards Pickard.

The scenario that Tenet, Black and Blee are selling is this: Gillespie found that Almihdhar and Alhazmi had entered the US and notified multiple other agencies. Four weeks previously, Wilshire had informed his former CTC colleagues that Almihdhar was “very high interest.” Yet, nobody at the CTC was able to put this together. Indeed, the significance of the two militants’ presence in the US would usually necessitate prompt notification to Tenet, even without Wilshire’s e-mail. Yet this was not done.

Here, then, is a very simple question: If Tenet did not know that Alhzami and Almihdhar had entered the US after August 21, who failed to tell him?

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Kevin Fenton is the author of Disconnecting the Dots: How CIA and FBI Officials Helped Enable 9/11 and Evaded Government Investigations.

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After 15 years of legal battles the CIA agrees to pay $3 million to a former DEA agent who accused a former CIA official of illegally eavesdropping on him as part of a joint CIA and State Department effort to thwart DEA’s anti-narcotics mission in Burma in the early 1990s.

Richard Horn was stationed in Burma in the early 1990s as the DEA country attaché to Burma, a nation that is ranked as one of the top opium poppy producing countries in the world. He was in charge of overseeing DEA’s mission in Burma involving eradication of the opium poppy, which is used to produce heroin.

Bill Conroy of Narco News covers the latest on State Secrets Privilege recipient Richard Horn. As always Conroy dares to dig and cover this significant story when the rest of the media stenographers are avoiding it like the plague and as they are told by their mighty government sources above.

“The CIA’s efforts to undermine Horn’s work in Burma in getting that nation’s government to stem the flow of heroin to the United States should come as no surprise to those who are familiar with the “Agency’s” history. It seems the CIA, over the decades, has often found itself in the corner of narco-traffickers and thugs who support the Agency’s covert objectives in areas deemed critical to U.S. special interests – whether that be in Southeast Asia, Central Asia or Latin America.”

The CIA list of hotshots involved in the case includes former CIA Director George Tenet and recently retired Acting CIA General Counsel John Rizzo. Tenet and Rizzo played major roles in setting up the legal basis to justify the CIA’s use of torture. Here is Mr. Rizzo in action during the agency’s cover up operation on torture:

And now, as part of the Horn case filed in a Washington D.C. federal court, we find a U.S. District judge, former FISA court member Royce Lamberth, opening the door for sanctions to be brought (as a result of the fraud, or lie, perpetrated on the court) against Tenet and Rizzo — as well as several other current and former CIA officials, among whom is Robert Eatinger, the current Acting Deputy General Counsel for Operations in the CIA’s Office of General Counsel (OGC).

If Lamberth’s judicial opinions in the Horn case are allowed to remain in the court record — to be recalled and cited going forward by other lawyers, judges and academics — then untold damage could be done to the reputation of the CIA and its leadership. Those judicial opinions memorializing the CIA’s fraud on the court also would serve as a permanent reminder of the occasionally dubious credibility of the Agency’s pronouncements invoking national security and the state-secrets privilege.

As part of this article Conroy provides a complete timeline and background on Horn’s case, involved CIA culprits, and of course, the mind-boggling and nauseating conclusions and implications. I highly encourage you to read Bill Conroy’s A+ piece: Click Here. Afterwards we will have plenty to discuss over here, and plenty to show those who write off CIA’s long past and still present involvement in global Narco-Trafficking as fiction or conspiracy!

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