US acted to conceal evidence of intelligence failure before 9/11

[meow2u3]

Source: Guardian News

The US government shut down a series of court cases arising from a multimillion pound business dispute in order to conceal evidence of a damning intelligence failure shortly before the 9/11 attacks, MPs were told.

Moreover, the UK government is now seeking similar powers that could be used to prevent evidence of illegal acts and embarrassing failures from emerging in court, David Davis, the former shadow home secretary, told the Commons.

The Justice and Security green paper being put forward by Ken Clarke's justice ministry has already faced widespread criticism from civil rights groups, media representatives and lawyers working within the secret tribunal system that hears terrorism-related immigration cases.

Davis demanded to know how its proposals could be prevented from being used to cover up crimes and errors. "In light of previous revelations about the UK government's complicity in torture and rendition of detainees to locations like of Libya, Afghanistan, or illegally into American hands … how will the Government prevent the Justice and Security green paper proposals being misused in a similar way to cover up illegal acts and embarrassments rather than protect national security?"

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/27/us-intelligence-failure-911-fbi-cia

[gratuitous]

1. And 10 years from now, we'll get caught up a little on what the U.S. is doing now

Isn't this fun? Suppression and oppression, but it's all sub rosa. Until it isn't. Then it's too late to do anything about it, and why didn't you say something at the time? Oh, you did? Well, everybody knows that it was just a dumbshow, and that we were subverting the Constitution the whole time. Too bad you got called a traitor, and worse, but now it's old news. All cleaned up now.

Wait 10 years.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

[Octafish]

11. 10 years PLUS...

...all the propaganda, drivel, disinformation, misinformation, uninformation and whatnot that will have spewed from ABCNNBCBSFakeNoiseNutworks and the rest of Corporate McPravda in those years, making it even more difficult to discern signal from the noise.

Newer DUers should ask about George Herbert Walker Bush. He was in Dallas on November 22, 1963 and no corporation or publisher in the national press corpse gives a shit. Ask Russ "A List to Black List" Baker or Gary "Contra Cocaine" Webb, about both of whom the LA Times lied.

Lather, rinse, repeat. My Friend.

[dogknob]

14. Reading Webb's "Dark Alliance..."

...upset me so much I had an urge to shoot myself twice in the head just like he did.

[loudsue]

2. LIHOP. Someday it's all going to come out, just like DUers knew back in 2001, 2002.

The facts were all there, right in front of everyone, and the bush family mafia covered their asses as they stole this country blind.

[FarPoint]

4. They used 911 to become

war profiteers! It was like hitting the lottery for *bush and compamy.

[wildbilln864]

5. It gave them their....

"new Pearl Harbor event!

[olddad56]

8. you will never get me to believe that 911 wasn't an inside job

[snappyturtle]

9. +1 nt

[KansDem]

3. "...would allow the FBI and NSA to record or listen live..."

Davis said that in 1998 the FBI seized upon an opportunity to eavesdrop on every landline and telephone call into and out of Afghanistan in a bid to build intelligence on the Taliban. The Bureau discovered that the Taliban regime had awarded a major telephone network contract to a joint US-UK venture, run by an American entrepreneur, Ehsanollah Bayat and two British businessmen, Stuart Bentham and Lord Michael Cecil.

"The plan was simple" Davis said. "Because the Taliban wanted American equipment for their new phone network, this would allow the FBI and NSA, the National Security Agency, to build extra circuits into all the equipment before it was flown out to Afghanistan for use. Once installed, these extra circuits would allow the FBI and NSA to record or listen live to every single landline and mobile phone call in Afghanistan. The FBI would know the time the call was made and its duration. They would know the caller's name, the number dialled, and even the caller's PIN."

But weren't we told that the intel agencies lacked agents fluent in mideast languages? Why, "yes," we were--

When Soufan finished training at Quantico in November 1997, he was assigned to one of the FBI's busiest field offices in New York. He was the only agent in the office who spoke Arabic at the time; one of only eight agents in the country who was fluent, he says.

A new job is an exciting time for anyone, and Soufan was thrilled and nervous.

"You want to talk about fear? I was scared, I was nervous on my first day," he said. "I thought, really, my God, how the heck did I end up here? It was fear mixed with excitement, mixed with adventure."

In his first months on the job, Soufan relied on his language ability and his personal interest in the Middle East and North Africa to keep close watch on what mattered in the region.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/09/30/world/meast/fbi-interrogator/index.html

So what's the use of tapping into every phone in the MidEast when you don't have enough agents who know the language to monitor the calls?

[Ezlivin]

6. Those agents were too gay to be of any use

And by "too gay" I mean gay.

This woman was a CIA asset and has some very interesting things to say about the CIA and 9/11:

[JDPriestly]

15. Quite a strange story.

I don't understand what she means when she says she was a CIA asset. Is she claiming she was an employee of the CIA, or does she mean she volunteered to do something? I don't understand her claimed relationship with the CIA. Has anyone read the book?

[Ezlivin]

18. Yes, it is

I've not read her book, but I've known other people with high security clearances. She's not atypical.

What's particularly disturbing about her testimony is her imprisonment without charges. This is the unfortunate side-effect of our "terrorism" laws.

People often muse over the lack of whistleblower testimony. I think we'll see far fewer people like Daniel Ellsberg in the future. It's becoming nearly impossible to change the system.

[OnyxCollie]

7. Attorney General Michael Mukasey

On March 27, 2008, Attorney General Michael Mukasey, speaking at the Commonwealth Club in defense of the Bush Administrations surveillance program and proposing changes to FISA, made the statement that before the 2001 terrorist attacks

“We knew that there had been a call from someplace that was known to be a safe house in Afghanistan and we knew that it came to the United States. We didn’t know precisely where it went. You’ve got 3,000 people who went to work that day, and didn’t come home, to show for that.” (Egelko, 2008).


In a letter to Attorney General Mukasey from Rep. John Conyers, Jr., Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee; Rep. Jerry Nadler, Chairman of the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties; and Rep. Bobby Scott, Chairman of the Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security (hereinafter “Conyers Letter”), Rep. Conyers responds to Attorney General Mukasey’s statement:

This statement is very disturbing for several reasons. Initially, despite extensive inquiries after 9/11, I am aware of no previous reference, in the 9/11 Commission report or elsewhere, to a call from a known terrorist safe house in Afghanistan to the United States which, if it had been intercepted, could have prevented the 9/11 attacks. In addition, if the Administration had known of such communications from suspected terrorists, they could and should have been intercepted based on existing FISA law. For example, even assuming that a FISA warrant was required to intercept such calls, as of 9/11 FISA specifically authorized such surveillance on an emergency basis without a warrant for a 48 hour period. If such calls were known about and not intercepted, serious additional concerns would be raised about the government’s failure to take appropriate action before 9/11. (Conyers, Nadler, Scott, 2008).


In a statement provided to Glenn Greenwald (2008) at Salon, former Rep. Lee Hamilton, the vice chair of the 9/11 Commission, stated:

I am unfamiliar with the telephone call that Attorney General Michael Mukasey cited in his appearance in San Francisco on March 27. The 9/11 Commission did not receive any information pertaining to its occurrence.


Additionally, Greenwald (2008) provides an email response from Philip Zelikow, the 9/11 Commission Executive Director (and former Counselor to Condolleeza Rice) (ellipses in original):

Not sure of course what the AG had in mind, although the most important signals intelligence leads related to our report -- that related to the Hazmi-Mihdhar issues of January 2000 or to al Qaeda activities or transits connected to Iran -- was not of this character. If, as he says, the USG didn't know where the call went in the US, neither did we. So unless we had some reason to link this information to the 9/11 story....

In general, as with several covert action issues for instance, the Commission sought (and succeeded) in publishing details about sensitive intelligence matters where the details were material to the investigative mandate in our law.


Greenwald (2008) offers two possible scenarios regarding Mukasey’s statement. Either

(1) The Bush Administration concealed this obviously vital episode from the 9/11 Commission and from everyone else, until Mukasey tearfully trotted it out last week; or
(2) Mukasey, the nation’s highest law enforcement officer, made this up in order to scare and manipulate Americans into believing that FISA and other surveillance safeguards caused the 9/11 attacks and therefore the Government should be given unchecked spying powers.

[dipsydoodle]

10. 9/11: The Tapping Point

What if, two years before the 9/11 attacks—with the installation of a cell-phone-and-Internet system in Afghanistan—the U.S. had been handed complete access to al-Qaeda and Taliban calls and e-mails? A secret deal was in place in 1999, the author reveals, but Washington dropped the ball.

One morning in June 2001, three months before the 9/11 attacks on the United States, I happened to be interviewing a senior official from the British Secret Intelligence Service, M.I.6. His current focus was the war on drugs, not international terrorism, but he shared a piece of information that united the two subjects.

A short time earlier, the official told me, the U.S. National Security Agency had intercepted a call between two satellite-telephone users in Afghanistan—the al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and the Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar. They had been discussing the Taliban’s ban on growing opium poppies, imposed the previous summer—a remarkably effective edict that had shrunk production in areas they controlled almost to zero.

According to the M.I.6 official, bin Laden sounded unhappy. “Why stop growing opium?” he asked. “Heroin only weakens our enemies.” There was no need to worry, Mullah Omar replied. The ban was merely a tactic. “There has been a glut, and the price is too low. Once the world price has risen, the farmers can start growing it again.”

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/09/preventing-9-11-201109

Please note there are 3 pages in that article.

The last para in that article contains a claim by Bayat that he won the court cases. He didn't. The first case in the USA was shut down and sealed and the second in the UK was shut down at the request of US security services. That was clear in our UK Parliament late this afternoon - I watched all of it.

[underpants]

12. One word - failure

[lib2DaBone]

13. What people must remember.. the military has 40 years of advanced weapons we don't know about...

The military has technology that is 40 years advanced of what is common knowledge to most of the American people.

No... all the pieces of 911 don't fit exactly.. that is because we don't have the insider information on black ops weapons currently classified as "secret". But they DO exist.

Back on Sept 10, 2001 I remember reading in many publications that there was NO WAY the planes could have been remote-controlled and flown into the WTC.

Today... most people take for granted that the military is flying drones into Pakistan and Afghanistan and killing people by remote control on a daily basis. The drones aare controlled from a bunker somewhere in Colorado. Old news.. but cutting edge back in 2001.

[IDemo]

16. I'm sure Coleen Rowley is shaking her head

http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/rowley.html

[jakeXT]

17. Reminds of PDS praising the book disconnecting the dots

http://tinyurl.com/c7fekpd

In 2011 an important book by Kevin Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, demonstrated conclusively that the withholding was purposive, and sustained over a period of eighteen months.8 This interference and manipulation became particularly blatant and controversial in the days before 9/11; it led one FBI agent, Steve Bongardt, to predict accurately on August 29, less than two weeks before 9/11, that “someday someone will die.”9
As will be seen, the motives for this withholding remain inscrutable. At one time I was satisfied with Lawrence Wright’s speculations that the CIA may have wanted to recruit the two Saudis; and that “The CIA may also have been protecting an overseas operation [possibly in conjunction with Saudi Arabia] and was afraid that the F.B.I. would expose it.”10 The purpose of this essay is to suggest that the motives for the withholding may have had to do with the much larger neocon objective being imposed on American foreign policy at this same time: the consolidation of U.S. global hegemony by the establishment of U.S. forward-based bases around the oil fields of Central Asia.
In short, the withholding of evidence should be seen as part of the larger ominous pattern of the time, including the malperformance of the U.S. government (USG) in response to the 9/11 attacks, and the murderous anthrax letters which helped secure the passage of the Patriot Act.

http://japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3723