What Do You Think?

[PokerGuy]

It would be scary to think that 911 was allowed to happen and terrorists allowed to escape by the United States government so that the people in charge could implement all the new security department policies that effectively nullify the united states constitution.



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http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/NB11Ak03.html

Feb 11, 2012

9/11 REVISITED
Was Saudi Arabia involved?
By Paul Church

At 9:37 Eastern Daylight Time on September 11, 2001, American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into the western side of the Pentagon, killing all 59 passengers and 125 others in the building. News of the crash went global within minutes; yet another symbol of American power was ablaze. For the few still struggling to believe that the United States was under attack, doubt evaporated like the bodies of the many dead.

Conspiracists have puzzled for a decade over the failure to intercept the aircraft - or indeed, take even the elementary step of phoning the Pentagon to warn them of the approach. But only recently has wider attention been paid to the failure of the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA's) Bin Laden unit to tell anyone that "muscle" hijackers, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, were in the country.

The chairman of the 9/11 Commission, Thomas Keane, is now on record [1] as calling this "one of the most troubling aspects of our entire report". How is it that, despite having known for several months about al-Midhar and al-Hazmi, nobody at Alec Station saw fit to mention them to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the counter-terrorism policy board in Washington, Immigration or the Defense Department?

The Bin Laden Issue Station - codenamed Alec by insiders such as US Army Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Shaffer - was the CIA unit dedicated to reporting on al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and militants in Afghanistan. It was this unit that had called on authorities in Malaysia to monitor the Kuala Lumpur "terror summit" at which plans for 9/11 were probably finalized. Both al-Midhar and al-Hazmi were at that meeting.

Accounts differ as to exactly when the CIA became aware of the hijackers' presence in America. But specific orders were issued not to share the information: Doug Miller, an FBI agent loaned to the Bin Laden unit, was among those who received the instructions. In his book Pretext for War, author James Bamford quotes another FBI agent loaned to Alec: "[T]hey didn't want the bureau meddling in their business - that's why they didn't tell ... that's why September 11 happened."

Author Lawrence Wright has speculated that, so desperate was the CIA to get a source inside al-Qaeda, the agency shielded the aspiring terrorists while it tried to recruit them. In his book The Looming Tower, Wright also suggests a more serious possibility: lacking any domestic jurisdiction, the agency colluded with Saudi Arabian intelligence to keep their own fingerprints off events. According to Wright, this was the view of a team of FBI investigators known as Squad I-49.

In an interview for the documentary Who Is Richard Blee?, former counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke was another insider to hint at possible Saudi involvement. Sensationally, Clarke also accused Central Intelligence Department head George Tenet of personally withholding evidence from Washington.

Filmmakers John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski managed to identify two key analysts involved in burying the evidence. Despite legal threats from the agency [2], the film is now available as a podcast.

Backtrack to January 2001: Prince Bandar bin Sultan is head of the Saudi Embassy in Washington. Bandar was the man at the center of the al-Yammah arms deal, a corruption scandal involving the exchange of arms for crude oil with Britain. A White House insider since he arrived in Washington nearly two decades before, Bandar's close ties with the Bush family are common knowledge. Less widely known is that in January 2001, the Saudi Prince sat with vice president Dick Cheney, defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers discussing US strategy for the invasion of Iraq.

In his book Plan of Attack, investigative journalist Bob Woodward claimed that when Bandar was handed a map labeled "Top Secret Noforn" in the vice president's office, not even the secretary of state had been informed that his country would be at war. Colin Powell has denied this, but the incident serves to illustrate the prince's extraordinary access to the inner workings of government.

All the more shocking, then, that between 1998 and 2002, up to US$73,000 in cashier cheques was funneled by Bandar, via his wife Haifa - who once described the elder Bushes as like "my mother and father" - to two Californian families known to have bankrolled al-Midhar and al-Hazmi. The very same would-be terrorists protected by the CIA.

Princess Haifa sent regular monthly payments of between $2,000 and $3,500 to Majeda Dweikat, wife of Osama Basnan, believed by various investigators to be a spy for the Saudi government. Many of the cheques were signed over to Manal Bajadr, wife of Omar al-Bayoumi, himself suspected of covertly working for the kingdom.

The Basnans, the al-Bayoumis and the two 9/11 hijackers once shared the same apartment block in San Diego. It was al-Bayoumi who greeted the killers when they first arrived in America, and provided them, among other assistance, with an apartment and social security cards. He even helped the men enroll at flight schools in Florida.

When al-Bayoumi moved to England just days before the attacks, his apartment was raided by Scotland Yard. Beneath the floorboards were discovered the phone numbers of several officials at the Saudi Embassy.

Bandar and his wife deny any links to terrorism, but both former co-chairs of the US Senate Intelligence Committee, Richard Shelby and Bob Graham, think otherwise. They claim the FBI refused to allow the committee to interview investigators who had followed the money from the embassy. Other sources allege that the 9/11 Commission similarly failed to fully investigate leads, partly because commissioner Phillip Zelikow removed or relegated to footnotes any findings which cast doubt on the Saudis. A 28-page section of the report exploring possible foreign government involvement remains classified.

Then there is the suppressed testimony of Special Agent Steven Butler, described by officials familiar with his account as "explosive". [3] Butler had been monitoring a flow of Saudi money to the would-be hijackers. After he testified, staff director for the 9/11 Committee Eleanor Hill sent a memo to the Justice Department detailing Butler's allegations. When reporters quizzed the Justice Department about the content of Butler's testimony, they were told it was classified.

If possible Saudi Arabian involvement in 9/11 raised eyebrows at the Justice Department, what would they have made of mysterious but little publicized meetings between the Saudi ambassador and George Tenet? In his book State of War, author James Risen recounts how Tenet "set the tone for the CIA's Saudi relationship by relying heavily on developing close relationships with top Saudi officials, including Prince Bandar bin Sultan ..."

Around once a month, Tenet would slip away to Bandar's estate in McLean, Virginia, for talks so secretive he refused to tell officers working under him what they were discussing. Colleagues would complain that it was difficult for them to tell what deals were being made with the Saudis. Were al-Midhar or al-Hazmi ever mentioned?

"Bandar and Tenet had a very close relationship," confirmed one CIA officer.

The frantic rush to get Saudi Arabian nationals - including members of the Bin Laden family - out of America in the days after the 2001 attacks led to public outrage, and was featured in Michael Moore's seminal but flawed documentary, Fahrenheit 911. Less was made of a return trip by Crown Prince Abdullah, then de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, in 2002. The Crown Prince, Prince Saud al-Faisal and Prince Bandar bin Sultan were scheduled to meet president George W Bush, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and national security advisor Condoleezza Rice at the president's ranch in Texas.

No fewer than eight airliners arrived from Saudi Arabia, and as the planes landed, US intelligence learned that two members of the royal entourage were on a terrorist watchlist. The next day, Osama Basnan reported his passport stolen to Houston police - proving he was in Texas the same day as the crown prince. Were the wanted men on the planes Basnan and al-Bayoumi?

According to the Wall Street Journal, the FBI planned to "storm the plane and pull those guys off" until, evidently fearing an international incident, the State Department intervened.

[PokerGuy]

http://www.salon.com/2011/10/14/insiders_voice_doubts_cia_911/


Friday, Oct 14, 2011

Insiders voice doubts about CIA’s 9/11 story
Former FBI agents say the agency's bin Laden unit misled them about two hijackers

By Rory O'Connor and Ray Nowosielski .

Topics:9/11, CIA

A growing number of former government insiders — all responsible officials who served in a number of federal posts — are now on record as doubting ex-CIA director George Tenet’s account of events leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. Among them are several special agents of the FBI, the former counterterrorism head in the Clinton and Bush administrations, and the chairman of the 9/11 Commission, who told us the CIA chief had been “obviously not forthcoming” in his testimony and had misled the commissioners.

These doubts about the CIA first emerged among a group of 9/11 victims’ families whose struggle to force the government to investigate the causes of the attacks, we chronicled in our 2006 documentary film “Press for Truth.” At that time, we thought we were done with the subject. But tantalizing information unearthed by the 9/11 Commission’s final report and spotted by the families (Chapter 6, footnote 44) raised a question too important to be put aside:

Did Tenet fail to share intelligence with the White House and the FBI in 2000 and 2001 that could have prevented the attacks? Specifically, did a group in the CIA’s al-Qaida office engage in a domestic covert action operation involving two of the 9/11 hijackers, that — however legitimate the agency’s goals may have been — hindered the type of intelligence-sharing that could have prevented the attacks? And if not, then what would explain seemingly inexplicable actions by CIA employees?

As we sought to clarify how the CIA had handled information about the hijackers before 9/11, we found a half dozen former government insiders who came away from the Sept. 11 tragedy feeling burned by the CIA, particularly by a small group of employees within the agency’s bin Laden unit in 2000 and 2001, then known as Alec Station.

Among them was Gov. Thomas Kean, co-chairman of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, which was responsible for investigating 9/11. He agreed to an on-camera interview for our documentary in 2008. He surprised us by voicing many doubts and questions about the CIA’s actions preceding Sept. 11 — and especially about former CIA director George Tenet.

Four years after Tenet testified to the commission, Kean said the CIA director had been “obviously not forthcoming” in some of his testimony. Tenet said under oath that he had not met with President Bush in the month of August 2001, Kean recalled. It was later learned he had done so twice.

Did Tenet misspeak? we asked the New Jersey Republican.

“No, I don’t think he misspoke,” Kean responded. “I think he misled.”

A tale of two hijackers

The story buried in footnote 44 of Chapter 6 of the 9/11 Commission report was this:

The commission became aware in early 2004 of a warning written by Doug Miller, an FBI agent working inside the CIA’s Alec Station. In January 2000, Miller tried to inform his bosses about a man named Khalid Al Mihdhar, who had previously been identified as a member of an al-Qaida operational cadre. By the spring of 2000, the CIA had learned that Mihdhar and another suspected al-Qaida operative, Nawaf Al Hazmi, had likely arrived in Southern California. But the CIA did not pass along the information to the FBI.

The draft cable — blocked by Miller’s CIA superiors — was not turned over to the commissioners or to the earlier congressional investigation. It was discovered in CIA records by an investigator working for a concurrent inquiry conducted by the Justice Department’s inspector general. Apparently it had been missed by Tenet’s DCI Review Group, convened immediately after the attacks to examine CIA records in order to prepare the director for the coming government investigations.

Kean was disturbed by the revelation.

“The idea that that information was left out of something that was so essential for the FBI, whose job it is to work within the United States and track these people … you know, it’s one of the most troubling aspects of our entire report, that particular thing,” Kean said.

We pushed Kean. Could it be this was a simple mistake, a failure to recognize the significance of Mihdhar and Hazmi, as the CIA had initially characterized it?

“Oh, it wasn’t careless oversight,” Kean replied. “It was purposeful. No question about that in my mind … In the DNA of these organizations was secrecy.”

Mihdhar and Hazmi boarded American Flight 77 at Washington Dulles airport on the morning of Sept. 11. After the plane took off, they joined three other men in commandeering the aircraft and flying it into the Pentagon, killing a total of 184 people.

So how then had George Tenet and those responsible at the CIA managed to get away with misrepresenting the incident as a mistake for so long?

“Tenet was a likable guy,” Kean concluded. “He got away with some stuff because people liked him.”

“Malfeasance and misfeasance”

In 2009, former White House counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke took the scenario further. In an on-camera interview he suggested that Tenet, once a close friend and colleague, had ordered the withholding of the information about the two al-Qaida operatives from the FBI and from the White House.

Clarke explained why he had come to that remarkable conclusion. Tenet, he said, followed all information about al-Qaida “in microscopic detail” and would call Clarke at the White House several times a day to share “the most trivial of information.” In addition, there were terrorism threat meetings held in person every other day.

We must have had dozens, scores of threat committee meetings over the time when they knew these guys had entered the country … They told us everything except this … So now the question is, why?

The only explanation Clarke could offer was admittedly speculative: that the CIA may have been running an operation to recruit the two al-Qaida operatives while they were living under their own names in Southern California. This might appear to have been a reasonable thing for the CIA to do. After all, Bill Clinton’s White House had long complained to the agency about the lack of penetration agents in al-Qaida.

But if the CIA was following or recruiting or monitoring Mihdhar and Hazmi in the United States, that might well have qualified as operating on U.S. soil, a violation of the agency’s charter. Once the two men were identified as hijackers on Flight 77, CIA officials may have begun a coverup of their earlier “malfeasance and misfeasance,” as Clarke charges.

His language is blunt, especially for a national security policymaker.

“I am outraged and have been ever since I first learned that the CIA knew these guys were in the country,” explained Clarke. “But I believed for the longest time that this was probably one or two low-level CIA people who made the decision not to disseminate the information. Now that I know that 50 CIA officers knew this, and they included all kinds of people who were regularly talking to me, saying I’m pissed doesn’t begin to describe it.”

Clarke said he assumed that “there was a high-level decision in the CIA ordering people not to share that information.” When asked who might have issued such an order, he replied, “I would think it would have been made by the director,” referring to Tenet — although he added that Tenet and others would never admit to the truth today “even if you waterboarded them.”

The view from the FBI

We found the same suspicion was also prevalent among FBI counterterrorism agents from the time, particularly those who had worked under a legendary FBI agent named John O’Neill in New York. O’Neill, movingly portrayed in Lawrence Wright’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Looming Tower,” was one of the special agents in charge of counterterrorism in the FBI’s New York office. He retired to serve as chief of security at the World Trade Center and was killed in the Sept. 11 attacks, only three weeks after leaving the bureau.

O’Neill’s deputy for counterterrorism was Pasquale D’Amuro, who was appointed inspector in charge of the FBI’s investigation into the attacks.

“I am cautious about saying it, because you have to deal with the facts,” D’Amuro told us. He said that he was told that Richard Blee, the chief of Alec Station, and his deputy, Tom Wilshere, had blocked the sharing of intelligence on Mihdhar and Hazmi with the FBI.

“I had heard that Blee stopped it from coming over, that Blee and Wilshere had had the conversation and stopped it,” D’Amuro said. “There’s no doubt in my mind that that went up further in the agency than just those two guys. And why they didn’t send it over — to this day, I don’t know why.”

Jack Cloonan, former manager at the FBI’s al-Qaida-busting I-49 Squad, is another insider pained by the CIA’s actions.

“If you start to look into everything that’s Khalid Al Mihdhar and Nawaf Al Hazmi, you can’t help but conclude to most people’s minds that this is it,” Cloonan, said during an emotional interview in his New Jersey living room. “9/11 occurred not because the systems failed. The systems actually worked. Somebody made a critical decision not to share this information … If you look at this, it’s really just a handful of people. I don’t know how they sleep at night, I really don’t.”

The CIA’s failure to inform the FBI meant that a last chance to stop the hijackers was missed, says Clarke.

“And if they had….” Clarke told us, his voice trailing off. “Even as late as Sept. 4,” he went on, “we would have conducted a massive sweep. We would have conducted it publicly. We would have found those assholes. There’s no doubt in my mind — even with only a week left — we would have found them…”

Clarke is not an infallible or even a disinterested witness. As a top counterterrorism adviser at the time of the attack, he cannot help but take the tragedy personally. That said, the fact that at least three FBI agents share his views certainly enhances his credibility.

A spokesman for the CIA rejects the notion, telling Salon, “any suggestion that the CIA purposely refused to share critical lead information on the 9/11 plots with the FBI is simply wrong.” The spokesman cited the 9/11 Commission report and a report of the CIA’s independent inspector general. (The latter study, completed in 2004, has never been made public.)

The story of the alleged CIA intelligence failure attracted little other media interest until this August. That’s when Tenet, Richard Blee and another CIA official criticized by Clarke, Counterterrorism Center director J. Cofer Black, replied to our request for an interview. We had asked them to respond to Clarke’s speculation.

Although they declined to be interviewed, Tenet, Black and Blee sent us a joint written statement that charged Clarke was “reckless and profoundly wrong” and that he had “suddenly invented baseless allegations which are belied by the record and unworthy of serious consideration.”

The statement, which we shared with the Daily Beast, was newsworthy because the three men had never before felt the need to explain their actions directly to the American public.

“We testified under oath about what we did, and what we didn’t know,” they stated. “We stand by that testimony.”

The relevance of their testimony to Clarke’s theory is hard to assess. Tenet and Black were never asked about the surveillance of Mihdhar and Hazmi, at least in their public testimony. Blee’s testimony has never been made public.

“You’re not going to say anything”


The CIA’s explanation is not convincing to Mark Rossini, an FBI agent who was assigned to Alec Station in 2000 and 2001. The assignment of tracking Khalid Al Mihdhar, he told us, had been given to a young staff operations officer who shared responsibility for watching events in Yemen along with Alec Station deputy chief Tom Wilshere.

Rossini, who resigned from the FBI in the wake of legal troubles, recalled in a phone interview that the staff officer’s direct supervisor was a redheaded analyst working directly for Wilshere. He says that this supervisor, not referred to by even so much as an alias in any of the government reports on 9/11, is the same woman who told congressional investigators that she had hand-delivered Mihdhar’s visa information to FBI headquarters. This was later proven false when the investigators checked the log books at the FBI headquarters, discovering that she had never set foot in the building. Eleanor Hill, staff director of the congressional inquiry, also told us that her investigators found no evidence that the FBI had ever received the information.

Rossini remembered that the staff operations officer working under that redhead had ordered him and his fellow FBI agent Doug Miller not to tell their colleagues at the bureau, including John O’Neill’s New York office, that Mihdhar was likely on his way to the United States in early 2000.

“She got a little heated,” Rossini recalled. “She just put her hand on her hip and just said to me, ‘Listen, it’s not an FBI case. It’s not an FBI matter. When we want the FBI to know, we’ll let them know. And you’re not going to say anything.’”

Only two days before, this same officer had sent a message internally throughout the CIA misleading her fellow agents into believing that the information had been passed on to the FBI. Her later conversation with Rossini makes it appear that this was a deliberate misstatement. According to the Justice Department inspector general, she sent the misleading message only hours after posting an electronic note on Doug Miller’s draft warning to the FBI: “pls hold off … for now per [the CIA deputy chief of bin Laden unit],” a reference to Tom Wilshere.

We now know the staff officer is a woman named Michael Anne Casey. Her red-haired supervisor was a woman named Alfreda Frances Bikowsky.

Google penetrates the CIA

How we learned the names of those two CIA personnel can be summarized in one word: Google. In the case of the redhead, an Associated Press article from February 2011 seemed to refer to her. She had also been referenced in Jane Mayer’s book “The Dark Side,” by her middle name, Frances. The AP article stated that she had an unusual first name. After searching State Department nominations from the past decade — often cover positions for CIA personnel but still entered into the Congressional Record -– a contemporary historian named Kevin Fenton with whom we work closely found a name that seemed to fit.

For the staff officer, we knew three important facts. She had a “man’s name” — most likely Michael, the name used in the Commission Report. She was in her late 20s at the time of the incident, and was a “CIA brat,” meaning she had at least one parent or another family member inside the agency. We wondered if she might be related to a prominent CIA figure, as her boss Richard Blee had turned out to be. One of the first names that came to mind, given her probable birth year, was William J. Casey, Ronald Reagan’s CIA director.

Pairing the first name “Michael” with the last name “Casey,” we found a number of people with that name working in State Department or military positions. Again looking in the Congressional Record, we found the name Michael Anne Casey — a woman with a man’s name — and another website listing Casey as 27 years old in 1999 and living in the D.C. area, which seemed to make her very likely the person in question. (Incidentally, we were later informed that she is no relation to William J. Casey.)

A CIA threat

When we informed the agency’s Public Affairs office that we planned to release an investigative podcast on iTunes on Sunday, Sept. 11, that named Bikowsky and Casey, the agency replied immediately.

“We strongly believe it is irresponsible and a potential violation of criminal law [emphasis added] to print the names of two reported undercover CIA officers who you claim have been involved in the hunt against al-Qaida,” said spokesman Preston Golson.

Erring on the side of caution, we took the names out of our podcast. On the day we released the revised podcast on our website, we heard from Sibel Edmonds. A former FBI analyst and prominent whistleblower, Edmonds posted a story on her blog Sept. 21 stating that she had three credible sources and a document confirming that the redhead in our revised story was Bikowsky. She also stated that the staff officer involved was Michael Anne Casey and cited our website, Secrecy Kills. It was only then that we discovered our webmaster had briefly and inadvertently placed our entire email to the CIA on our site. Edmonds saw the information and published it.

Within minutes the information had spread widely through social media on the Internet. Before long Gawker breathlessly announced the latest of the CIA’s problems: that Bikowsky, who had risen to become the head of the CIA’s global jihad unit, had been outed. The rather more significant story — that a CIA intelligence failure had contributed to the 9/11 attacks — got short shrift from the popular gossip site.

In an effort to clarify the story, we asked the CIA two factual questions. We asked if Bikowsky’s statement to the congressional 9/11 inquiry — that she had delivered Mihdhar’s visa information to the FBI prior to the attacks — was accurate.

We also asked if former FBI agent Mark Rossini’s recollection that Michael Anne Casey had told him not to report information about Mihdhar and Hazmi was accurate.

The agency did not address the specifics of either question.

“We do not, as a rule, publicly confirm or deny the identities of currently serving agency officers,” a spokesman replied. “That includes those dedicated to the disruption of terrorist plots. The officers involved in those critical efforts have, thanks to their skill and focus, saved countless American lives.”

The story of Mihdhar and Hazmi could easily be clarified, says Robert Baer, a retired CIA officer in the Middle East who worked directly with some of the people involved.

“A lot of these people who withheld this information were not covert operatives,” he explained. “There was no reason to hide their names. They are out there in the public. You can find them in data and credit checks and the rest of it … They certainly could have been brought before the House or the Senate in closed session and an explanation and a report put out there.”

Langley on the defensive

The CIA prefers not to disclose but to protect the handful of people at the heart of this story.

Tenet remained George W. Bush’s CIA director for another two and a half years, where he was famously involved in passing along faulty intelligence about weapons of mass destruction that justified the disastrous invasion of Iraq. On Dec. 14, 2004, George Tenet was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Bush.

Richard Blee, chief of Alec Station in 2001, reportedly took over the CIA operation during the invasion of Afghanistan to capture or kill Osama bin Laden when bin Laden was surrounded in the mountains of Tora Bora three months after 9/11. According to 23-year career CIA officer Gary Berntsen, as reported in his book, “Jawbreaker,” Blee was in charge at the time bin Laden managed to slip away to Pakistan to live comfortably for nearly a decade. Harper’s Ken Silverstein reported that Blee was active in the controversial renditions and detainee-abuse programs. He is now retired and living in Los Angeles.

We do not know exactly what became of Tom Wilshere, a mysterious figure who has managed to maintain an even lower profile than the rest. Dale Watson, former head of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, told us that us that Wilshere became a White House briefer during the Bush era.

Casey and Bikowsky have risen in the CIA’s ranks, despite the fact that Bikowsky has been associated with at least one major blunder. The AP reported that Bikowsky was at the center of “the el-Masri incident,” in which an innocent German citizen was renditioned (a euphemism for kidnapped) by the CIA in 2003 and held under terrible conditions (a euphemism for tortured) in a secret Afghan prison. The AP characterized it as “one of the biggest diplomatic embarrassments of the U.S. war on terrorism.” It was no doubt something more to Khaled el-Masri. Despite that episode Bikowsky was promoted.

As chief of the counterterrorism center, Cofer Black was the boss of Casey, Bikowsky and Blee. He too was associated with the abuses of the extraordinary rendition program. He resigned shortly after George Bush was elected to a second term. Black then served as vice chairman of Blackwater USA, the controversial U.S.-based private security firm, from 2005 to 2008. Earlier this month Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney announced that Black would join his campaign as a foreign policy adviser.

[PokerGuy]

http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/2011/09/15/the-still-developing-story-of-the-recently-issued-cia-threats-to-producers-nowosielski-duffy/

The Still Developing Story of the Recently Issued CIA Threats to Producers Nowosielski & Duffy
Thursday, 15. September 2011




CIA’s Maneuver: A Case of Bluffing? Buying Time? Or Something More?

Last week we broke the story of the CIA issued legal threats against producers Ray Nowosielski and John Duffy on their discovery of the identities of the two key CIA analysts who executed the Tenet-Black-Blee cover-up in the case of two key 9/11 hijackers. The analysts were referred to only by first names initially, but were going to be fully named in a follow up segment. It appears the story is still developing, but we now have further details on the case, an analysis by an expert producer, and a few comments on assessing the nature and possible implication of this move by the CIA.

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.

[PokerGuy]

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/features/saudi_021129.htm


November 29, 2002

EXCLUSIVE
The road to Riyadh
A stillborn FBI inquiry and a money trail from the Saudi Embassy to two of the 9/11 hijackers
By Gloria Borger, Edward T. Pound, and Linda Robinson

On October 9, members of the special congressional committee investigating the 9/11 attacks met privately with a key FBI witness. The next day, panel members were to meet in open session with CIA Director George Tenet and FBI Director Robert Mueller. After the FBI agent finished testifying, the open meetings with Tenet and Mueller were summarily canceled. Several members were "appalled" at what informed sources described as the "explosive" testimony of Special Agent Steven Butler, who recently retired from the FBI after his final posting in the bureau's San Diego field office.

Government officials told U.S. News that Butler disclosed that he had been monitoring a flow of Saudi Arabian money that wound up in the hands of two of the 9/11 hijackers. The two men had rented a room from a man Butler had used as a confidential informant, the sources say. According to officials familiar with his account, Butler said that he had alerted his superiors about the money flows but the warning went nowhere. "Butler is claiming ... that people [in the FBI] didn't follow up," says a congressional source. Adds another: "He saw a pattern, a trail, and he told his supervisors, but it ended there."

Roommates. In a conversation outside his home in the gated Rancho Penasquitos community in San Diego, Butler told U.S. News, "It's very sensitive stuff.'' Wearing a Buffalo Bills cap, Butler said, "I'd love to talk to you guys," but added that he couldn't without permission from the Justice Department.

Butler's testimony comes after disclosures that FBI executives failed to take action in response to memorandums by agency lawyers and agents in Minneapolis and Phoenix about suspicious activities involving young Muslim men enrolled in flight schools. One of the men, Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker, is awaiting trial on charges stemming from the attacks.

In his closed-door appearance on Capitol Hill, Butler described his dealings with a leader in San Diego's Muslim community, a 68-year-old man named Abdussattar Shaikh. In 2000, Shaikh rented a room in his house in a San Diego suburb, Lemon Grove, to Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi. Almihdhar and Alhazmi helped hijack American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon. Shaikh did not respond to a phone message.

After Butler testified, Eleanor Hill, the staff director for the 9/11 committee, detailed his statements in a memo to the Justice Department. Justice officials, saying Butler's testimony is classified, declined comment. FBI officials also declined comment, saying they are pursuing "all investigative leads ... in a thorough and confidential manner."

FBI agents and CIA officers reconstructing the activities of the 19 hijackers were intrigued by two men, Osama Basnan and Omar al-Bayoumi, Saudi nationals who lived in the United States, despite having been charged with visa fraud. Investigators say Bayoumi helped Almihdhar and Alhazmi pay their rent and even threw them a party. According to Newsweek, Bayoumi also helped the two men open a bank account and called flight schools in Florida to arrange flying lessons for them.

Congress, the FBI, and the CIA are now trying to learn whether any of the money Bayoumi spent on behalf of Almihdhar and Alhazmi came from the Saudi Embassy in Washington. Newsweek reported that Basnan first requested financial help from the Saudi Embassy in 1998, saying he needed money to cover his wife's medical problems. Princess Haifa bint Faisal, the wife of the Saudi ambassador, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, wrote several cashier's checks to Basnan's wife. She endorsed some of them to Bayoumi's wife. Proceeds from the cashed checks, investigators believe, were used by Almihdhar and Alhazmi.

Basnan and Bayoumi have left the United States and could not be reached for comment. In an interview with a Saudi-owned, London-based newspaper, Basnan denied that his wife had passed money from Princess Haifa to Bayoumi's wife.

The disclosure of the Saudi money trail has further strained ties between Washington and Riyadh. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens, and Republicans and Democrats have criticized the royal family for underwriting a radical form of Islam that has been used by some adherents to countenance violence against the West. In an interview with the New York Times last week, Prince Bandar and Princess Haifa described themselves as committed to President Bush's war against terrorism and said they were "outraged" at suspicions that they would have knowingly supported anyone involved in terrorist activities.

Cash. Even before investigators began tracing the cashier's checks from Princess Haifa, government officials told U.S. News, FBI and treasury investigators had begun formal inquiries into the flow of funds through the Saudi Embassy in Washington. Bank accounts of the embassy and embassy personnel enjoy diplomatic immunity. But the government officials say investigators have taken a number of steps–not including electronic surveillance–to attempt to monitor money flows through the embassy. Of particular concern, several officials said, is cash that may have been transported under diplomatic seal from Riyadh to Washington.

Separately, U.S. government officials say, FBI and treasury investigators believe that as much as $100 million has flowed from Saudi Arabia to terrorist organizations in recent years. "We're talking about major-league businessmen who have ties to the royal family,'' says a senior treasury official. "Over the years, they've put funds into a lot of different mechanisms–business charities, moneymaking ventures–and routed them through offshore havens. They distance themselves from the money–it gets washed again and finally disbursed to the bad guys.''

The escalating investigations come at a time when the Bush administration is receiving increasing criticism for "easing up" on the Saudis–because of concerns over both oil prices and the importance of Saudi bases if Bush authorizes an attack against Iraq. Administration officials bristle at such suggestions. "It's on the front burner," a senior official says, "at ... the very highest levels."