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Egypt's former foreign minister and ex-head of the Arab League who is the front-runner in the country's upcoming presidential elections, called Israel's new coalition government a "war cabinet" that could make an Israeli military strike on Iran's nuclear facilities more likely.
In an interview while campaigning in the Nile delta on Tuesday night, Amr Moussa, 75, said that because Israel's new national unity Israeli coalition government would give Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu an overwhelming majority in Israel's parliament, it would be a government that would take "tough" positions and might shore up Israeli support for a possible strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. "It will be a rough cabinet," he said of the new coalition government that Netanyahu unveiled on Tuesday.
But Moussa said he still hoped that Israel would not resort to military action against Teheran. "No country will stand with Israel if it takes such uncouth action," he said.
Moussa spoke with this reporter about his views of Egyptian domestic and foreign policy in an interview aboard his campaign bus while speaking to rallies throughout Egypt's traditional agricultural area.
The delta is viewed as a stronghold of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose nominee for president, Mohamed Morsi, is also seen as a leading candidate.
Tens of thousands of Egyptians poured into the streets of villages and towns to cheer him and shout their support for his candidacy. At some stops, supporters were so enthusiastic that they refused to permit his bus to leave until Moussa stepped down to speak to them, which he did in at least one unscheduled stop.
Moussa, who served as Egypt's foreign minister under ousted President Hosni Mubarak, was virtually the only one of Egypt's 13 candidates for the presidency to react to Prime Minister Netanyahu's surprise deal with Israel's main opposition party to form a national unity government.
Netanyahu's agreement with Shaul Mofaz, who leads the centrist Kadima party, gives the ruling coalition the support of an unprecedented 94 out of 120 members of the Knesset, Israel's parliament.
Egypt's transition government, appointed and heavily influenced by the Egyptian military, the country's de facto rulers, had no comment today on the new Israeli government. None of the other leading candidates in Israel's presidential race chose to comment either on the sudden and politically dramatic development in Israel, with whom relations have been tense for years.
Although Egypt was the first Arab state to make peace with Israel, relations between Egypt and the Jewish state have been increasingly strained since the mass protests that forced President Hosni Mubarak from office in early 2011.
In April, Egypt's transitional government cancelled a deal signed in 2005 in which Cairo had agreed to supply Israel with natural gas for the next 15 years. Israel has been getting about 40 percent of its gas from Egypt, which ended the contract after 14 attacks on the pipeline linking the countries.
Last September, Israel's embassy in Cairo was also attacked, along with the Saudi embassy by the Muslim Brotherhood and young protesters from Tahrir Square, the heart of the mass uprisings that ended the Mubarak regime last February.
Israel's ambassador left the country, along with most of the embassy staff and their families. Several months later, a new Israeli ambassador took up residence in Cairo, but Jerusalem has not been able to find a new office for its embassy.
Moussa, both as foreign minister and head of the Arab League, was a frequent and vocal critic of Israel, particularly of the stalemate in the Palestinian-Israeli peace process. He has also previously criticized Israel's possession of nuclear weapons, which Israel has never officially acknowledged having.
Last week, he called the Camp David peace accords between Egypt and Israel "dead and buried," and said that the agreement should be put "on the shelves of history." But an aide said that Moussa's statement did not mean that Egypt would not respect its peace agreement with Israel. "Egypt respects all of its international treaties and commitments," he quoted Moussa as saying.
[Information contained in BKNT E-mail is considered Attorney-Client and Attorney Work Product privileged, copyrighted and confidential. Views that may be expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of any government, agency, or news organization.]
"The war on terror is over." That's what a senior State Department official told the National Journal in light of the Arab spring uprisings and the killing of Usama Bin Laden.
The article's ink was barely dry when a White House spokesman corrected the record. The State Department official had misspoken: President Obama's "war on Al Qaeda" was being fought furiously, and would continue.
In fact, Obama rejected George W. Bush's war on all of the violent Islamists and terrorists who might threaten America– his "Global War on Terror" – back in 2009. Instead, he had embraced a more intensely focused "war on Al Qaeda, its affiliates, and adherents."
That this more concentrated war continues was crystal clear during a trial last week in Brooklyn featuring Najibullah Zazi, the home-grown mastermind of the 2009 Al-Qaeda plot to bomb New York's subways. The suicide strike might have been the deadliest attack on American soil since 9/11 had the FBI and NYPD not thwarted it, police say. While Zazi and a fellow home-grown militant from Queens pleaded guilty to terror charges and testified for the government, a third alleged conspirator, Adis Medunjanin, denied guilt.
The testimony against him was an unsettling reminder that the war on terror, or Al Qaeda, or whatever else the administration calls it remains decidedly unfinished business.
That, too, was the message from John Brennan, President Obama's senior counter-terrorism adviser, who visited New York City as the trial was getting underway.
Brennan warned in a speech to the NYPD that Al Qaeda and other violent jihadis still threatened America. If America wanted to avoid "another devastating attack," it could not afford to drop its guard, he said. While hundreds of key Al Qaeda operatives had been killed and its abilities severely degraded, Al Qaeda still had "several hundred" members in Pakistan and another "hundred" or so in Afghanistan. Washington remained alarmed not only about Al Qaeda "core" but also about its metastasized affiliates and adherents – first among them, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula or AQAP.
AQAP, Al Qaeda's "most active operational franchise," now had over a thousand members in Yemen, he said. Al Qaeda branches and affiliates and like-minded militants might also develop international agendas and capabilities. Noting the formal merger between the Somali militant group al Shabaab and Al Qaeda only two months ago, he said that Al Shabaab was now committed to Al Qaeda's campaign of international terrorism. Another Al-Qaeda affiliate in North Africa was now operating in Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, Niger, Burkina Faso, Mauritania, and Mali.
[AQIM, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Mahgreeb]
There was no shortage of counter-terrorism frustrations, he added -- the millions of dollars that European states have paid to ransom nationals held hostage; concern that terrorists might acquire Libyan weapons from unsecured stockpiles: stopping terrorists from gravitating towards lawless areas in Egypt's Sinai near Israel; the possibility that Al Qaeda might fill a political vacuum in Syria.
Preventing Al Qaeda from capitalizing on the chaos of the Arab Spring would require "one, two, three years" of intense focus, Brennan warned.
At home, he worried about the proliferation of homegrown militant loners, inherently more difficult to detect and stop than radical groups. The growing sophistication of AQ bombs, the result of a generation of militants schooled in Iraq and Afghanistan, could also threaten Americans in the coming decade.
In a press conference after his speech, Brennan praised the NYPD's counter-terrorism work, asserting that New York's finest had struck an "appropriate" balance between protecting the city and its citizens' civil liberties.
The apparent endorsement meant much to the NYPD. The cops have been under fire from the AP, civil libertarians, and assorted Muslim activists over their aggressive Muslim surveillance program which has helped foil 14 plots against the city since Sept. 11. Critics say the department's efforts to understand the communities in which terrorists are likely to recruit or hide constitute racial profiling and violate civil liberties guarantees. The police insist that the program is legal and essential. Brennan's speech and subsequent remarks were widely seen as an endorsement of the NYPD's actions.
But Brennan had barely finished speakingwhen White House officials once again clarified his remarks by asserting that Brennan wasn't defending the NYPD's controversial Muslim surveillance program at all. "John never approved of described press accounts of alleged NYPD surveillance," a senior official said.Rather, Brennan was noting that "everyone in the counterterrorism and law enforcement community must make sure we are doing things consistent with the law."
I was standing next to Brennan when he was asked for his view of the NYPD's surveillance effort. Saying that he had known and worked with Police Commissioner Ray Kelly for years, Brennan said he did not think that Kelly would violate the law. "I have full confidence that the NYPD is doing things within the law, and has been responsible for keeping this city safe for the past decade," he said. The Muslim community was "part of the solution to the terrorist threat," he said, and needed to be "part of that effort."
On Sunday, the White House further clarified its earlier clarification. Brennan was indeed a "very strong supporter of the tremendous work done by NYPD on a daily basis keeping New York City safe," National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor wrote. But because the Justice Department has been "reviewing requests" that the NYPD surveillance program be investigated, Brennan "did not" and would not comment, "much less pass judgment, on any of those allegations or the Justice Department's pending review."
This is silly. For the administration's unwillingness to openly back the NYPD – or permit Brennan to do so – is not only at odds with Obama's own actions, it undercuts his impressive anti-terrorism accomplishments as "warrior in chief," as Peter Bergen, the author of a new book, "Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden — From 9/11 to Abbottabad," calls him.
Obama's counter-terrorism achievements cannot be denied. Thanks to his gutsy call, Usama bin Laden is dead. Ditto Anwar al-Awlaki, the de facto chief of AQAP. [go USA…]
Al Qaeda's "core" has been decimated due to increased American drone strikes in Yemen, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Guantanamo is still open, despite his vow on his first day in office to close it.
Obama now asserts the right not only to target American citizens for assassination without judicial review if intelligence suggests they are involved in plotting terror, but to hold some terror suspects in jail indefinitely without trial.
This year, he revised guidelines to permit law enforcement to store records on people not suspected of terror from five months to 5 years.
I don't recall hearing demands for judicial review of such actions, however troubling to civil libertarians (including me) some of them, especially those affecting American citizens, may be.
In fact, despite his campaign pledges, Obama's counter-terrorism policy bears a striking resemblance to President Bush's, minus the waterboarding. That, I suspect, is precisely what troubles Obama's liberal base and some of the officials around him.
The administration seems to want to have things both ways – to bask in the glow of its counter-terrorism achievements, while downplaying the rhetoric, mind-set, and actions that a war on terror involves.
On one hand, his spokesmen try to placate his left-wing base – by initially calling the war on Al Qaeda "overseas contingency operations," (pathetic bureaucratic blather), by rejecting talk of a broader "war" on terror while waging one, and by trying to distance Obama from the NYPD's aggressive, successful tactics by calling for a judicial review of the cops' surveillance program.
On the other hand, they tout Obama's counter-terrorism victories in ads and interviews to combat assertions from the right that Obama is weak.
Such mixed signals, however, have often angered both left and right. And Mr. Obama has been able to sustain this cognitive dissonance only because his liberal base has resisted calling him on the contradictions between his pledges and his policies.
But in an election year, voters are demanding that Obama clarify where he stands on such issues as the balance between freedom and national security.
On Monday in a speech in Washington, Brennan outlined in detail the legal, strategic and ethical rationale for using drones to target and kill suspected terrorists – foreign and American –abroad, despite the fact that innocent civilians would continue to die.
It was an impressive, and to my mind, persuasive argument. -- Voters should demand more such genuine clarifications from the president and his team.
Former Counterterrorism Czar Accuses Tenet, Other CIA Officials of Cover-Up
Thursday 11 August 2011
by: Jason Leopold, Truthout | Report
With the tenth anniversary of 9/11 just a month away, the intelligence failures leading up to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have started to attract fresh scrutiny from former counterterrorism officials, who have called into question the veracity of the various government probes that concluded who knew what and when.
Indeed, an exclusive report recently published by Truthout based on documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and an interview with a former high-ranking counterterrorism official showed how a little-known military intelligence unit, unbeknownst to the various investigative bodies probing the terrorist attacks, was ordered by senior government officials to stop tracking Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda's movements prior to 9/11.
And now, in a stunning new interview scheduled to air on a local PBS affiliate in Colorado tonight, former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, for the first time, levels explosive allegations against three former top CIA officials - George Tenet, Cofer Black and Richard Blee - accusing them of knowingly withholding intelligence from the Bush and Clinton White House, the FBI, Immigration and the State and Defense Departments about two of the 9/11 hijackers who had entered the United States more than a year before the attacks.
Clarke also accused the former CIA officials of engaging in a cover-up failing to disclose to Congress and the 9/11 Commission key details about the two hijackers.
Tenet, Black and Blee have "been able to get through a joint House investigation committee and get through the 9/11 Commission and this has never come out," Clarke said in the interview, an advance copy of which was provided to Truthout. "They got away with it."
Clarke, who now runs the security firm Good Harbor Consulting, was the chief counterterrorism adviser for the Clinton and Bush administrations. He famously testified before the 9/11 Commission probing the terrorist attacks that "your government failed you."
In October 2009, Clarke spoke to John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski, who have been working on a documentary about Blee and the secrecy surrounding his role in the intelligence failures leading up to 9/11, which is set to air on the tenth anniversary of the attacks.
Duffy and Nowosielski, whose previous film, "Press For Truth," followed four 9/11 widows as they lobbied the Bush White House to convene an independent commission to probe the attacks, have also launched a new transparency web site,
SecrecyKills.com, set to go live this evening with a campaign aimed at further unmasking Blee.
Clarke acknowledges that he does not have any evidence to back up his claims about the former CIA officials. He did not respond to questions about whether he still stood behind the comments he made about Tenet, Black, and Blee nearly two years ago. But Nowosielski told Truthout he spoke to Clarke last week to inform him that Tenet, Black and Blee had issued a joint statement that was harshly critical of his charges, and Clarke told Nowosielski he has not changed his position.
Clarke asserts in the 13-minute interview that Tenet, the former CIA director; Black, who headed the agency's Counterterrorist Center; and Blee, a top aide to Tenet who led the CIA's Bin Laden Issues Station, also known as Alec Station, whose true identity was revealed for the first time two years ago, are responsible for the government's failure to capture 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.
"George Tenet followed all of the information about al-Qaeda in microscopic detail," Clarke told Duffy and Nowosielski. "He read raw intelligence reports before analysts in the counterterrorism center did and he would pick up the phone and call me at 7:30 in the morning and talk about them."
But Tenet, who was awarded the Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush in 2004, did not share what Clarke says he knew about the al-Hazmi and the al-Mihdhar case.
In early January 2000, CIA analysts were informed by the National Security Agency that al-Hamzi and al-Mihdhar were heading to a meeting of other al-Qaeda associates in Malaysia, their travel arranged by Osama bin Laden's Yemen operations center. The CIA surveilled the meeting and obtained photographs of the men from Malaysian intelligence.
From Malaysia, al-Hazmi, al-Mihdhar and Khallad bin Attash, the alleged mastermind behind the USS Cole bombing, traveled to Thailand, which the CIA reported in a cable sent to Alec Station. The CIA had claimed, according to the 9/11 Commission report, that they lost track of all three men after they arrived at an airport in Thailand.
Al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar then boarded a flight bound for Los Angeles, arriving in the city on January 15, 2000, and later met up with retired English professor Abdussattar Shaikh, who was secretly working as an FBI informant.
Still, despite being aware that al-Mihdhar held a multiple-entry US visa, the CIA failed to notify the FBI and State Department for inclusion on the latter's terrorist watch list.
Remarkably, Mihdhar left Southern California for Yemen in late 2000 and, using a new passport, returned to the US undetected on July 4, 2001.
Clarke suggests that if the CIA had shared intelligence about al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar with him, the FBI, and others, then perhaps the attack on the Pentagon could have been thwarted.
"As jaded and cynical as I am about government failures, I still find this one mind-boggling and inexplicable," Clarke wrote. "The 9/11 Commission report does not tell us very much about how or why it happened and their explanations, while they could be correct, strain credulity and leave many questions unanswered."
But the FBI also bears some responsibility for the intelligence breakdown. An agent assigned to Alec Station discovered in January 2000 al-Mihdhar had a US visa and drafted a memo intended to alert the FBI's Bin Laden Unit. But a CIA officer prohibited the agent from sending it. Moreover, Shaikh's FBI case agent was aware that two Saudi Arabian men had moved into his San Diego apartment in 2000, but never bothered to inquire about the identities of the individuals. Had the case agent done so, he would have discovered that his informant's houseguests were al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar.
"Failure to Communicate"
One of the CIA officials who had been monitoring the Malaysia meeting was a young al-Qaeda analyst named Jennifer Matthews, who had been working with the Bin Laden Issues Station since its inception in 1996. Another analyst, who worked closely with Matthews, was a red-headed woman who, in recent years, has been at the center of a scandal involving the torture and wrongful rendition of at least one detainee. She has since been promoted and continues to work for the CIA on al-Qaeda-related issues. An agency spokesman requested that Truthout not print her name because her identity is classified.
In his recently published book, "Triple Agent," Washington Post reporter Joby Warrick wrote that former CIA Inspector General John Helgerson probed "CIA missteps that had allowed" al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar "to enter the United States undetected."
"Helgerson concluded that the CIA's Counterterrorism Center had failed to respond to a series of cabled warnings in 2000 about" al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar "who later became part of the September 11 plot ...," Warrick wrote. "The cables were seen by as many as sixty CIA employees, yet the two operatives' names were never passed along to the FBI, which might have assigned agents to track them down or shared with the State Department, which could have flagged their named on its watch list. In theory, the arrest of the either man could have led investigators to the other hijackers and the eventual unraveling of the 9/11 plot.
"Helgerson's report named individual managers who it said bore the greatest responsibility for failing to ensure that vital information was passed to the FBI. The report, never released in full, also recommended that some of the managers be reviewed for possible disciplinary action ... Jennifer Matthews was on that list."
Matthews, who Warrick also says led the agency's search for the first high-value detainee, Abu Zubaydah, and who was also present at the CIA black site prison in Thailand when Zubaydah was waterboarded after he was captured in March 2002, was among seven CIA officers killed in Khost, Afghanistan, in a December 2009 suicide bombing at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Afghanistan, which Matthews was chief of.
"A High-Level Decision"
Although Helgerson's report recommended Matthews be disciplined, Clarke does not believe she or the dozens of other CIA analysts bear the ultimate responsibility for failing to inform the US government for 18 months that al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar were in the US.
"It's not as I originally thought, which was that one lonely CIA analyst got this information and didn't somehow recognize the significance of it," Clarke said during the interview. "No, fifty, 5-0, CIA personnel knew about this. Among the fifty people in CIA who knew these guys were in the country was the CIA director."
Still, Clarke said his position as National Coordinator for Security and Information meant he should have received a briefing from CIA about al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar, explaining "unless somebody intervened to stop the normal automatic distribution I would automatically get it."
"For me to this day, it is inexplicable why 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 ... We therefore conclude that there was a high-level decision inside CIA ordering people not to share that information," Clarke said.
How high level?
"I would think it would have to be made by the director," Clarke said. "You gotta understand my relationship with [Tenet], we were close friends, he called me several times a day, we shared the most trivial of information with each other, there was not a lack of information sharing, [CIA] told us everything except this."
CIA Tried to "Flip" Hijackers?
So, what happened? Why did the CIA fail to share its intelligence about al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar with Clarke and other government officials? Clarke believes the CIA may have attempted to "flip" al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar, but ultimately failed.
That's an allegation that surfaced in Lawrence Wright's groundbreaking book, "The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and The Road to 9/11." Wright, who interviewed Clarke for his book, said a team of FBI investigators and federal prosecutors known as Squad I-49 came to believe that the CIA "was shielding Mihdhar and Hazmi because it hoped to recruit them"
"The CIA was desperate for a source inside al-Qaeda; it had completely failed to penetrate the inner circle or even to place a willing partner in the training camps, which were largely open to anyone who showed up," Wright wrote. "Mihdhar and Hazmi must have seemed like attractive opportunities however, once they entered the United States they were the province of the FBI. The CIA had no legal authority to operate inside the country ... It is also possible, as some FBI investigators suspect, the CIA was running a joint venture with Saudi intelligence in order to get around that restriction ... These are only theories about the CIA's failures to communicate vital information to the bureau ... Perhaps the agency decided that Saudi intelligence would have a better chance of recruiting these men than the Americans. That would leave no CIA fingerprints on the operation as well."
"This is the view of some very bitter FBI investigators, who wonder why they were never informed of the existence of al-Qaeda operatives inside America. Mihdhar and Hazmi arrived nineteen months before 9/11. The FBI had all the authority it needed to investigate these men and learn what they were up to, but because the CIA had failed to divulge the presence of two active members of al-Qaeda, the hijackers were free to develop their plot until it was too late to stop them."
The 9/11 Commission was unable to substantiate claims that the CIA tried to recruit al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar and Clarke never disclosed this theory to the panel during his testimony as it was a conclusion he said he reached years later.
"Reckless and Profoundly Wrong"
In response to Clarke's charges, Tenet, Black and Blee issued a joint statement to Duffy and Nowosielski last week upon learning that Clarke's interview was scheduled for broadcast. The former CIA officials admonished their former colleague, stating his comments were "reckless and profoundly wrong." Blee's inclusion in the joint statement marks the first time he has spoken publicly about the events leading up to 9/11.
"Clarke starts with the presumption that important information on the travel of future hijackers to the United States was intentionally withheld from him in early 2000," the former CIA officials said. "It was not. He wildly speculates that it must have been the CIA Director who could have ordered the information withheld. There was no such order. In fact, the record shows that the Director and other senior CIA officials were unaware of the information until after 9/11."
"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 ... Building on his false notion that information was intentionally withheld, Mr. Clarke went on to speculate - which he admits is based on nothing other than his imagination - that the CIA might have been trying to recruit these two future hijackers as agents. This, like much of what Mr. Clarke said in his interview, is utterly without foundation. We testified under oath about what we did, what we knew and what we didn't know. We stand by that testimony."
"We Would Have Found Those Assholes"
But Clarke says even as early as July 2001 - two months before the terrorist attacks - when Tenet and Blee called an urgent meeting with President Bush at the White House, they had an opportunity to disclose the fact that al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar were somewhere in the US, but failed to disclose what they knew.
The CIA waited until late August to inform lower-level FBI agents that al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar were in the US and were likely planning an attack inside the US. Yet, the CIA continued to conceal the intelligence from senior FBI and Bush administration officials a week prior to the attacks.
Clarke said there's a "very obvious answer" as to why the CIA continued, as early as September 4, 2001, in a meeting attended by Clarke and other senior Bush administration officials, to withhold intelligence about the two hijackers: to protect the agency from scrutiny.
"I know how all this stuff works I've been working it for 30 years," Clarke said. "You can't snowball me on this stuff. If they announce on September 4 in the Principals meeting that these guys are in the United States and they told the FBI a few weeks ago I'm going to say 'wait, time out. How long have you known this? Why haven't you reported it at the daily threat meetings? Why isn't it in the daily threat matrix?' We would have begun an investigation that day into CIA malfeasance and misfeasance that's why we're not informed."
Clarke added that even if the CIA had disclosed what it knew about al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar as late as September 4, 2001, he believes the FBI could have captured the men and dismantled their plans to attack the Pentagon.
"We would have conducted a massive sweep," Clarke said. "We would have conducted publicly. We would have found those assholes. There's no doubt in my mind. Even with only a week left."
Truthout contributor Jeffrey Kaye contributed to this report.
In a new documentary, former national-security aide Richard Clarke suggests the CIA tried to recruit 9/11 hijackers—then covered it up.
Philip Shenon on George Tenet’s denial.
With the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks only a month away, former CIA Director George Tenet and two former top aides are fighting back hard against allegations that they engaged in a massive cover-up in 2000 and 2001 to hide intelligence from the White House and the FBI that might have prevented the attacks.
The source of the explosive, unproved allegations is a man who once considered Tenet a close friend: former White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, who makes the charges against Tenet and the CIA in an interview for a radio documentary timed to the 10th anniversary next month. Portions of the Clarke interview were made available to The Daily Beast by the producers of the documentary.
In the interview for the documentary, Clarke offers an incendiary theory that, if true, would rewrite the history of the 9/11 attacks, suggesting that the CIA intentionally withheld information from the White House and FBI in 2000 and 2001 that two Saudi-born terrorists were on U.S. soil—terrorists who went on to become suicide hijackers on 9/11.
Clarke speculates—and readily admits he cannot prove—that the CIA withheld the information because the agency had been trying to recruit the terrorists, while they were living in Southern California under their own names, to work as CIA agents inside Al Qaeda. After the recruitment effort went sour, senior CIA officers continued to withhold the information from the White House for fear they would be accused of “malfeasance and misfeasance,” Clarke suggests.
Clarke says it is fair to conclude “there was a high-level decision in the CIA ordering people not to share information.” Asked who would have made the order, Clarke replies, “I would think it would have been made by the director,” referring to Tenet. Clarke said that if his theory is correct, Tenet and others would never admit to the truth today “even if you waterboarded them.”
Clarke’s theory addresses a central, enduring mystery about the 9/11 attacks— why the CIA failed for so long to tell the White House and senior officials at the FBI that the agency was aware that two Al Qaeda terrorists had arrived in the United States in January 2000, just days after attending a terrorist summit meeting in Malaysia that the CIA had secretly monitored.
In a written response prepared last week in advance of the broadcast, Tenet says that Clarke, who famously went public in 2004 to blow the whistle on the Bush White House over intelligence failures before 9/11, has “suddenly invented baseless allegations which are belied by the record and unworthy of serious consideration.”
The CIA insisted to the 9/11 Commission and other government investigations that the agency never knew the exact whereabouts of the two hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, inside the U.S.—let alone try to recruit them as spies.
Agency officials said the CIA's delay in sharing information about the two terrorists was a grave failure, but maintained there was no suggestion of deception by CIA brass. Tenet has said he was not informed before 9/11 about Hazmi and Mihdhar's travel to the U.S., although the intelligence was widely shared at lower levels of the CIA.
The 9/11 Commission investigated widespread rumors in the intelligence community that the CIA tried to recruit the two terrorists—Clarke was not the first to suggest it—but the investigation revealed no evidence to support the rumors. The commission said in its final report that "it appears that no one informed higher levels of management in either the FBI or CIA" about the two terrorists.
But in his interview, Clarke said his seemingly unlikely, even wild scenario—a bungled CIA terrorist-recruitment effort and a subsequent cover-up—was “the only conceivable reason that I’ve been able to come up with” to explain why he and others at the White House were told nothing about the two terrorists until the day of the attacks.
“I’ve thought a lot about this,” Clarke says in the interview, which was conducted in October 2009. He said it was fair to conclude “there was a high-level decision in the CIA ordering people not to share information.” Asked who would have made the order, Clarke replies, “I would think it would have been made by the director,” referring to Tenet.
Clarke, now a security consultant and bestselling author, has hinted in his writings in the past that there may have been a CIA cover-up involving Hazmi and Mihdhar, although he has never made such direct attacks on Tenet and others at the CIA by name.
He did not reply to requests from The Daily Beast to expand on his comments or to explain why he has not repeated them publicly since the 2009 interview. The documentary’s producers, FF4 Films, said they had been in contact with Clarke this month and that he stood by his remarks in the broadcast.
The producers, John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski, had previously made a well-reviewed film documentary, Press for Truth (www.911pressfortruth.com), on the struggle of a group of 9/11 victims' families to force the government to investigate the attacks.
In finishing the radio documentary, they recently supplied a copy of Clarke's comments to Tenet, who joined with two of former top CIA deputies—Cofer Black, who was head of the agency's counterterrorism center, and Richard Blee, former head of the agency's Osama Bin Laden unit—in a statement denouncing Clarke.
“Richard Clarke was an able public servant who served his country well for many years,” the statement says. “But his recently released comments about the run-up to 9/11 are reckless and profoundly wrong.”
“Clarke starts with the presumption that important information on the travel of future hijackers to the United States was intentionally withheld from him in early 2000. It was not.”
The statement continued. “Building on his false notion that information was intentionally withheld, Mr. Clarke went on to speculate—which he admits is based on nothing other than his imagination—that the CIA might have been trying to recruit these two future hijackers as agents. This, like much of what Mr. Clarke said in his interview, is utterly without foundation.”
Clarke, who led governmentwide counterterrorism efforts from the White House during the Bush and Clinton administration, has said in the past that he was astonished to learn after 9/11 that the CIA had long known about the presence of Hazmi and Mihdhar inside the United States.
“To this day, it is inexplicable why, 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,” Clarke said in the interview for the documentary, referring to Tenet and Cofer Black. “They told us everything—except this.”
He said that if he had known anything about Hazmi and Mihdhar even days before 9/11, he would have ordered an immediate manhunt to find them—and that it would have succeeded, possibly disrupting the 9/11 plot.
“We would have conducted a massive sweep,” he said. “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. They were using credit cards in their own names. They were staying in the Charles Hotel in Harvard Square, for heaven’s sake.” He said that “those guys would have been arrested within 24 hours.”
Philip Shenon is an investigative reporter based in Washington, D.C. Almost all of his career was spent at The New York Times, where he was a reporter from 1981 until 2008. He is the bestselling author of The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation. He has reported from several war zones and was one of two reporters from the Times embedded with American ground troops during the invasion of Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War.
While America has been busy playing games with the nation's and the world's financial stability by threatening to default on its debt, the Middle East has been exploding.
It's time to explore how the once-hopeful Arab Spring has turned ominous.
Syria. In an obscene repetition of history, President Bashar Assad ordered his military and security forces to attack unarmed civilian protesters in Hama and other restive cities and towns on Sunday, killing at least 100 people - a sickening reprise of his father's slaughter of between 10,000 and 30,000 residents of Hama who rose up against his repressive rule 29 years ago. The world shrugged back then as Hafez Assad imposed a new dictum for governing the region through fear and intimidation - "Hama Rules," as columnist Tom Friedman called them.
Those rules are apparently returning, albeit on a smaller scale. In addition to the 1,600 total dead, one global activist group says nearly 3,000 people - one an hour - have "disappeared" since the crackdown began in March.
Turkey. In neighboring Turkey, normally a bastion of stability, there's also fresh unrest. The top leaders of the country's military resigned last Friday. Some commentators called the resignations a victory for civilian over military rule - but it is the Turkish Army that has guaranteed stability and secularism in Turkey ever since Mustafa Kemal Ataturk founded the modern Turkish Republic more than 80 years ago and began transforming the former Ottoman Empire into a modern, Westernized and secular nation-state. The last straw for the army was apparently the arrest by the Islamic government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan of more than 40 top generals on what the military's defenders call the flimsiest of charges.
Libya. In the oil-rich North African dictatorship, where the Obama administration has demanded that Col. Moammar Khadafy step down but let NATO lead the West's support effort, rival factions of rebel fighters conducted an eight-hour gun battle against one another over the weekend in Benghazi. The ruling rebel body, the Transitional National Council, was unable to explain coherently why and how a top rebel general was murdered, or why the rebels were using their newly purchased arms against one another rather than against Khadafy.
Egypt. This is where the Arab Spring took off - and it, too, is showing troubling signs of sliding backward. Tens of thousands of Muslim Brotherhood supporters and other Islamists rallied in Tahrir Square last Friday, flaunting their numerical strength and political muscle and demanding the creation of an Islamic government. Meanwhile, Egypt's terrified ruling armed forces council is proceeding with plans this week to conduct a "speedy" trial of the ailing, former President Hosni Mubarak.
Iran. The regime of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has apparently developed new technologies to enrich even more uranium, another indication it seems determined to continue developing a nuclear bomb, all the while denying such intentions. Plus, the U.S. government is warning of an Iran-Al Qaeda alliance - a very worrying development, no matter how weakened Al Qaeda may be after Osama Bin Laden's death.
Iraq. Even as the U.S. continues to wind down its military engagement in Iraq, Iranianweapons and training have resulted in the deadliest weeks in recent memory, while newly minted Pentagon chief Leon Panetta pleads with Baghdad to make a "damn" decision about whether it wants at least some American forces scheduled to leave the country at year's end to stay.
And where is President Obama while what passes for his strategies in the region are shredded by such developments and the Mideast drifts dangerously away from American interests? He has been mostly silent. Oh, yes, he managed to condemn the Syrian slaughter in Hama as "horrifying." But he did not demand that Assad leave power. His administration has also remained silent about what seems destined to be a show trial of the former Egyptian president, who kept the peace with Israel and supported America's war against the Taliban in Afghanistan.
A distracted American President, a lack of coherence in his foreign policy and a constellation of forces taking advantage of our nation's weakness are posing profound threats to our interests and security.
Miller is a City Journal contributing editor. Schoen, a pollster and strategist, is author of "The Power of the Vote."
[Information contained in BKNT E-mail is considered Attorney-Client and Attorney Work Product privileged, copyrighted and confidential. Views that may be expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of any government, agency, or news organization.]
President Obama's decision on the size and timing of the troop withdrawals from Afghanistan – bringing home 10,000 by the end of this year and 20,000 more by the end of the summer of 2012 – is pure politics.
Why should that surprise us?
His initial decision 18 months ago to "surge" American forces in Afghanistan by 30,000 – the amount he is now withdrawing -- was also inherently political.
During the election, Obama never stopped touting the war in Afghanistan as the "essential" conflict that President Bush had ignored to wage his war of "choice" in Iraq. So after taking office and a tortuous eight-month review, he finally fulfilled his campaign pledge to give higher priority to destroying Al Qaeda and its Taliban allies by agreeing to send an additional 30,000 forces to Afghanistan. But when he announced his surge decision in a speech at West Point in late 2009, Obama gave himself an out: he pledged to begin withdrawing the surge forces, in effect, "de-surging" at the end of 18 months.
The time had come. The president had to decide how quickly to implement his pledge. The decision, initially disclosed almost three weeks ago in a Daily Beast column by the well-connected foreign affairs guru, Leslie H. Gelb, was to withdraw all of the surge forces, but slowly over the next 18 months. The call was vintage Obama. The president tried to compromise, splitting the difference.
As a result, everyone got something he wanted and had to live with something he opposed. Those Democrats and Republicans who wanted to withdraw most of the American forces in Afghanistan ASAP – the "quick exiters," as Gelb called them –got the big withdrawal they wanted. The "die harders," or those opposed to pulling the extra capacity out of Afghanistan, got 18 more months and two more summer fighting seasons, minus one fall, to weaken the Taliban further. "Ain't democracy grand?" Mr. Gelb declared.
The center ground seems to have few supporters. Obama's 12-minute speech was soon denounced not only by Republicans, who have suddenly rediscovered their isolationist roots, but also by Democrats who believe that nation-building in Afghanistan is a waste of precious American blood and toil and resources that are badly needed at home.
Least unhappy with the president's call were those like Vice President Joe Biden who have long argued that destroying Al Qaeda and keeping the Taliban from returning to power in Kabul can best be accomplished by deploying special forces and by targeted raids and drone attacks on militant havens in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan.
Echoing this view, Ann Marlowe, an Afghan expert and frequent visitor there, noted that the surge had actually increased the levels of violence in Afghanistan and hence, potential support for the Taliban. There has been a direct correlation between the surge in forces and growth in IED attacks. In 2010, she reported, Afghan insurgents planted 14,661 IEDs, a 62 percent increase over 2009's 7,228, which was a 120 percent increase over 2008. "More troops means more IEDs, period,' and hence, more injuries and death for American fighters. But while Marlowe applauded what she called the "excellent idea" of reversing the Afghan surge, she, too, lambasted Obama for not saying "we were wrong, I was wrong, we have learned something."
Also bordering on the openly critical was the U.S military's top brass. Testifying before a House committee, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that the President's decision was hastier and creating "more risk" than he had advised. Ouch. He had counseled what he called a less "aggressive" approach, the same phrase, interestingly, that Gen. David Petraeus used to describe his assessment of the president's decision in his confirmation hearings before a Senate committee for his new post of CIA director. But whatever General Petraeus' reservations of the decision may be, he was quick to add that he would salute the president's decision and head back to Afghanistan to begin implementing it immediately.
Usually, the desires to compromise and split differences are highly regarded in politics. Indeed, Les Gelb ultimately supported Obama's call and said those who accuse him of abandoning Afghanistan – with 70,000 U.S. forces still on the ground – should "seek psychiatric help."
But our politics and policy have become so polarized that the president is no longer given the benefit of the doubt by many Americans. When seen through the lens of the next presidential campaign and his determination to be elected, skepticism about his underlying motives and cynicism about tough foreign policy and national security calls will inevitably grow.
Mr. Obama could defuse some of this if he were more honest with the American people, if just occasionally, he acknowledged having made mistakes, or if he ever credited his predecessor with having made a wise call instead of repeatedly bashing him and blaming him for all of the challenges he now confronts. There is one unmistakable irony in the course the president has chosen. The strategy as espoused by Mr. Obama Thursday this week is not that different from the one initially embraced by former President George W. Bush. "After a decade of war, half a trillion dollars, and innumerable strategies," wrote Jessica Tuchman Mathews, the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, President Obama's decision "brings the United States back nearly full circle to the limited 'no boots on the ground/special forces/air power' approach of the Bush presidency in 2002-03."
[Information contained in BKNT E-mail is considered Attorney-Client and Attorney Work Product privileged, copyrighted and confidential. Views that may be expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of any government, agency, or news organization.]
In 1991, [the late former Secretary of State Lawrence 'Just call me George'] Eagleburger explained to The Post why all of his sons were named Lawrence.
“First of all, it was ego,” he said. “And secondly, I wanted to screw up the Social Security system.”
-FLASH- OPEN SOURCE
