Two intelligence agents who could settle the intelligence community vs. Bush White House debate

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Despite the highly classified world of special ops 60 Minutes has now interviewed Dalton Fury, the Delta team commander involved in the Tora Bora hunt for Bin Laden and Mark Owen, one of the Seals involved in the Abbottabad raid. For some reason the investigative journalists at 60 Minutes evidently don't believe it would be newsworthy to hear from Richard Blee or Rodney Middleton even though these guys headed CIA and FBI Bin Laden units in the lead up to 9/11. CIA's Alec Station and the FBI UBLU were the units directly involved in pre-9/11 investigations of Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar.

Last year Lara Logan interviewed former FBI agent Ali Soufan. Posted on the website was an accompanying article:

But, Soufan says he later learned the CIA knew - eight months before 9/11 - that this same operative had met in Malaysia with two terrorism suspects who would later hijack the plane that crashed into the Pentagon. And the CIA also knew that those two suspects were heading to the U.S.

"The agency knew that these al Qaeda operatives in Southeast Asia flew to America or they have visas to come to the United States, and somebody decided, 'Let's not share the information,'" Soufan said.

"And if it had been shared with you, what then?" Logan asked.

"I try not to think about that. I try not to think about, about what could have happened. Maybe, maybe thousands of American lives will be spared, maybe," Soufan said.

The CIA told us any suggestion it purposely refused to share critical information on the 9/11 plots with FBI is "baseless" and "these allegations diminish the hard work and dedication of countless CIA officers."

The Interrogator

Here is author Lawrence Wright talking about the pre-9/11 investigation:

Anyway, Ali, while he was questioning the people involved in the Cole bombing, developed leads to a meeting that had taken place earlier that year, in January of 2000, somewhere in Southeast Asia, as it happens in Kuala Lumpur. Three times he and O'Neill queried the CIA, asking for information about this meeting, and three times the CIA refused to respond. Just set aside 9/11, what happened; Sufan is investigating the death of seventeen American sailors and the CIA is essentially obstructing justice and refusing to help him. They knew about the meeting in Kuala Lumpur, they had surveilled it, they had the Malaysian authorities surveil it for them, they had photographs of the participants who included some of the plotters of the Cole bombing but also two future 9/11 hijackers who flew from Kuala Lumpur to Los Angeles and then to San Diego.

In March of 2000 the CIA knew that two members of al Qaeda were in America and they refused to tell the FBI. This is one of those parallels with my movie that I find really regrettable, the inability of these two organizations to work together. Had the CIA shared that information with the FBI, which they were really obligated to do -- once they're on American soil, they're part of the FBI's jurisdiction. The Bureau had all the authority it needed legally, because they were in al Qaeda and they were subsumed under the bin Laden indictment, to follow these men, to wiretap them, to clone any computer they [used] -- they didn't need any illegal wiretaps or warrants. They had already all the authority they needed, and they had twenty months before 9/11 to do their work, had they been given the knowledge that al Qaeda was in America, but that information was shielded from them.

Conversation with Lawrence Wright

Why won't the media interview Blee or Middleton so we can finally find out why pre-9/11 intelligence wasn't acted upon?

[1StrongBlackMan]

1. Because ...

it might so that the were not so ?

Or, if not , then ?

[patrice]

2. K&R

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3. It should be noted that the withholding of information began during

the Clinton administration when Richard Clarke was still reporting to the principals committee. Both major US political parties have kept the public from understanding why intelligence was not acted upon.