THIS IS THE BlackNET Intelligence Channel; where analysis and commentary on today's ever-evolving events is provided by BlackNET Members, and moderated by founder W. Scott Malone, Emmy and Peabody Award winning TV producer and Investigative Author.---WE don't JUST Defend the Constitution, we ENFORCE it
In the words of one soldier: "Alex has done something that most journalists never get to do; to cover Special Forces and Rangers first hand. These organizations are very hard to get any information out of because of the nature of their mission. The trust that these unit's have in Alex speaks for itself."
Horse Soldiers of 9/11
Narrated by award-winning actor Gary Sinise, come along for the ride with the Horse Soldiers of 9/11.
It was the news the world breathlessly waited for immediately after the 9/11 terror attacks: a report of the first American troops on the ground in Afghanistan.
All at once, the world’s attention focused on an iconic photo of small teams of U.S. Special Operations Forces doing something no American military had done in nearly a century: ride horses into combat.
That photo would go on to inspire an artist to sculpt an 18ft tall monument at Ground Zero, ten years later.
The courage of the first into battle is what guarantees the courage of those that follow: “Horse Soldiers Of 9/11”… a film by war reporter Alex Quade.
Attached is press release for the documentary which debuts on Sunday 20 May 6:45pm at GI Film Festival in Washington, DC at the Navy Heritage Center.
This information is provided by PURE PURSUIT INTELLIGENCE CENTER, as a service to Military and Air Defense Communities with the purpose of offering relevant and timely information on (open source) defense, aviation, emergency, law enforcement and terrorism issues. Posts may be forwarded to other individuals, organizations and lists for non-commercial purposes. This list is now closed
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About the Director
War Reporter Alex Quade covers U.S. Special Operations Forces on combat missions downrange. She is the recipient of the Congressional Medal Of Honor Society’s “Tex McCrary Award For Excellence In Journalism” for her war reportage.
The Medal of Honor recipients present the award to individuals who, through their life’s work, have distinguished themselves by service or unbiased coverage of the United States Military through journalism. Prior recipients of this prestigious award include legendary broadcasters Tom Brokaw, Mike Wallace, Tim Russert, Paul Harvey, and author Joe Galloway.
The Congressional Medal of Honor Society recognized Ms.Quade, “for her courageous reporting and honest news coverage”.
Quade worked at Fox News Channel before heading overseas in 1998 to cover war zones and hostile environments as a freelancer, mainly for CNN. Extreme storytelling and silent risk-taking lie at the heart of what she does. As a “one-man-band”, she embeds with elite combat units several months at a time, producing exclusive, long-form, special series and documentaries.
Quade’s commitment to providing viewers “ground truth” behind the world’s conflict zones has kept her “boots on the ground”. For her award-winning “Brothers In Arms” for CNN’s “Paula Zahn Now”, Quade followed an Army National Guard family for 18-months, from Idaho to Iraq, and back. Following the program’s airing on CNN, President George W. Bush publicly recognized the family for their bravery.
Quade’s dedication to giving voice to those in the fight is evident in “Hunting IEDs” for CNN’s “The Situation Room With Wolf Blitzer” and CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360″. Her series gave viewers their first inside look at a dangerous Marine Platoon mission in Fallujah. The U.S. Department of Defense Joint IED Defeat Task Force has used her piece as a case study.
In “Combat Search And Rescue” for CNN’s “The Situation Room With Wolf Blitzer” and “The Glenn Beck Show” on Headline News (HLN), Quade shared high-risk rescue missions from the frontlines of Iraq and Afghanistan with U.S. Special Operations Forces.
Alex Quade has been embedded with every branch of the U.S. military, and serves on the Board of Military Reporters and Editors, the Association of Military Journalists.
[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.]
Thomas Drake, a brilliant intelligence analyst, software engineer, and IT management consultant, worked at the CIA in the 1980s, then as a contractor at the National Security Agency (NSA), and ultimately as an NSA senior executive in 2001. But from 2006 until July 2011, he became the government's and NSA's public enemy.
Why? From his high-level perch at NSA, he saw the failure to act on intelligence that might have prevented the 9/11 attacks, and he saw corruption at the highest levels. So he blew the whistle. Four times, from the fall of 2001 through 2004.
Once to both the House and Senate Permanent Select Committees on Intelligence. Once to two Congressional investigations seeking answers to the intelligence failures surrounding 9/11, including what NSA knew, didn't know, could have known, and did or didn't do. Drake was asked to be a material witness for a Congressional investigation, initially led by then-Rep. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA). He was instructed not to tell NSA that he was cooperating with the investigation.
The fourth time was in September 2002, when Drake submitted a complaint through a Department of Defense Inspector General (DoD IG) "Defense Hotline" that allows whistleblowers to report fraud. The call launched an audit of the way NSA awarded multibillion-dollar contracts and managed some of its programs. This time, Drake first alerted supervisors, who either sat on the information or pulled him off key assignments.
When the DoD IG audit went nowhere, he took what he knew -- none of it classified -- to The Baltimore Sun.
After Drake went to the media, the FBI raided his home in 2007, seizing computers, books, and other material.
Ultimately, he was cast from the intelligence kingdom and charged with 10 felony counts in April 2010, five under the 1917 Espionage Act. "I got in the way of the power structure," he explains.
Some of his story appeared in newspapers, The New Yorker, blogs, and a 60 Minutes segment, describing how the FBI raided his home and dug for documents to prove he'd passed information to two New York Times' reporters about the White House illegal wiretapping program and other offenses. Although the FBI never found such evidence, the Justice Department indicted him.
I asked Drake if there was more the public had to know. "Definitely," he said, but under the government-initiated plea negotiations, he couldn't say anything new until after his sentencing date last July. Otherwise, the government could have used it against him at the trial.
Once the case against him collapsed, prosecutors agreed to drop all 10 counts against Drake; he plead guilty to a minor misdemeanor for "exceeding authorized use of a computer [!]," with no jail time or fines.
The result, however, was a life severelBaray wrecked. Drake has worked at an Apple store since August 2009.
This is what he told us.
Barbara Koeppel: What did you tell the Saxby Chambliss Congressional subcommittee and the Congressional Joint Inquiry?
Thomas Drake: I can't say fully, because it's classified. But I showed that NSA knew a great deal about the 9/11 threats and Al Qaeda, electronically tracking various people and organizations for years -- since its role is to collect intelligence. The problem is, it wasn't sharing all of the data. If it had, other parts of government could have acted on it, and more than likely, NSA could have stopped, I say stopped 9/11. Later, it could have located Al Qaeda -- at the very time the U.S. was scouring Afghanistan.
It's true that there were systemic failures throughout the intelligence system, but NSA was a critical piece of it. I gave both committees prima facie evidence, with documents. One was an early 2001 NSA internal, detailed multi-year study of Al Qaeda and sympathetic groups' movements that revealed what NSA knew, could have done, and should have done. It was astonishingly well-analyzed current intelligence. Soon after 9/11, some NSA analysts called me about it. Why? Because they were pulling their hair out, knowing they had this information and they couldn't get NSA leadership to share the report with the rest of the intelligence community -- even though it's mandatory! It was actionable information. Remember the time period--we were in the early part of the war in Afghanistan. People needed to act on it, to unravel Al Qaeda networks.
But NSA leaders deliberately decided not to disseminate it. So the analysis -- about what it knew before and after 9/11 -- got buried very deeply, because it would really have made them look bad.
In fact, after the analysts called me to complain, I told my superior, Maureen Baginski, Director of Signals Intelligence (called SIGINT), who was the number-three person at NSA. But instead of acting on it, she got mad at me. She said, "Tom, I wish you'd never brought this to my attention."
BK: Why?
TD: Because she no longer had plausible deniability. BK: And then?
TD: I said, Mo (that's what we called her), I'm bringing it to your attention because it's information we need to share. This is key to Al Qaeda's position. But she folded. She was going to protect the institution. Screw national security.
BK: Talk more about the Congressional investigations.
TD: The Saxby Chambliss subcommittee began its hearings in February and March 2002. It had subpoena power and contacted me off the record, because it was investigating NSA. I gave both the subcommittee and the subsequent, much larger Joint Inquiry voluminous amounts of information.
BK: What did they do with it?
TD: I don't know. There's a report, but it's classified. I never saw it. And the public got just a small version of the data I gave them. In fact, there's very little oversight in Congress anymore. When there is, it's essentially just talk.
BK: How did NSA react to the investigations?
TD: It did everything it could to obstruct them so it could hide what it knew. I remember hearing from Lt. General Michael Hayden, NSA's director, while the investigations were under way, saying how "convenient" it was for CIA and FBI to be taking the heat, while we remained in the shadows. I'm paraphrasing, but NSA knew a lot.
BK: How did NSA obstruct them?
TD: First, it asked the committee investigators to set up their office at NSA, where the agency could put minders, NSA people who would sit and take notes. But the committee refused.
BK: Other ways?
TD: NSA set up what we called the "war room," to figure out how to respond to the Saxby Chambliss investigation. The joke was, 'Who are we at war with? Congress or terrorists?'
Then in February, Mo asked me to lead an NSA team, to go around the agency pulling together information about what NSA knew that it could give to the subcommittee as its official classified statement, for the record.
So I wrote the statement, which went through multiple drafts. Later, I was in England on another assignment, and I got a frantic call from one of my staff, saying, "Tom, they pulled us off the effort and re-assigned it to someone else." I asked why. "Well, it's confusing, you'll have to ask Mo." When I got back, the first thing I did was ask her why we were taken off. She said, "Data integrity." This was a euphemism.
BK: A euphemism for what?
TD: That there was a problem with the data. But there wasn't a problem. They just didn't want it out there. Congress was asking us to take our clothes off, come clean, say we screwed up, and how we would fix it.
But NSA chose not to do that. Instead, it persisted in the cover-up and didn't tell about the staggering amounts of information it had in its data banks and didn't share. When it's being investigated, it closes ranks. To say they were not cooperating with the 9/11 investigations is an understatement.
NSA created a secret team that reported to Bill Black, the Agency's deputy director, whose task was to find the agency's 9/11 skeletons. Why? In case you're put on the stand, you want to know where you're vulnerable so you have an answer, or can create one to serve as a cover. The idea is, NSA only tells Congress what it wants them to hear, and Congress will just have to figure out what it really knows. The problem is, how will Congress find something unless it knows what it's looking for and where to find it? And if NSA can keep it hidden, Congress' chances of finding it are slim to none.
BK: Are there other ways it obstructed?
TD: A dramatic one. It happened in early 2002, when Mo warned me, "Be careful, they're looking for leakers." What she meant was, "Back off! Don't say anything more to Congress than you need to." But I wasn't leaking to the press, or outside of channels. I was a material witness in official investigations of NSA!
BK: Then why call it "leaking"?
TD: They were calling it that. For NSA's purpose, it's leaking. Me, I'm serving as a material witness to Congress, which called me to do that. I didn't go to them.
BK: If it wanted to, could NSA follow your trail?
TD: Easily. Bread and butter. That's what they do. In fact, during this whole time, NSA was doing everything it could to figure out and track who was cooperating with the investigators or called as material witnesses.
BK: Why was it so important for NSA to hide what it knew?
TD: Because NSA is a closed, secret culture. Its primary focus is collecting data, even within the intelligence community.
The coin of the realm is what you know. If I share something with you, then I don't have power any more. So why would I give my power away? Because we collect the data, we own it. If we own it, we control it. If we control it, we can say what it means.
We tell you what we want to, or not. I used to hear that in executive sessions, post-9/11. Other agencies were clamoring for the raw or nearly raw data, to do their own analyses. And NSA was balking because "we don't know what they're going to do with it."
BK: But wouldn't NSA want to prevent a 9/11 or track Al Qaeda?
TD: That's logical thinking. You have to remember, NSA is an institution, and it preserves its integrity before anything else. Rule number one. It's pathological. It's what I call the deep, dark side of this culture, one that has rarely been discussed. Everything is secret. Over decades, people work, communicate, and engage in secret. Obviously, certain state secrets are legitimate, but this goes way beyond that. The agency thinks, if it gives away information, it's fragmenting its identity. In fact, even before 9/11, NSA reprimanded people for cooperating with other parts of the intelligence community.
BK: Do other intelligence agencies operate the same way?
TD: Yes. When I was at CIA, I worked in the Science and Technology directorate on the issue of weapons of mass destruction. I was asked by people at its National Photographic Interpretation Center to look at pictures of WMD targets. I agreed, but I couldn't tell from the photos who was talking to whom without knowing more about the target. So I called my buddies at NSA -- because they have electronic and signals intelligence -- to find out, and they told me what they knew. But the people I worked with at CIA said, "Why did you call them? You have everything you need right here." Well, I didn't. It's so arrogant, to say you can't learn from others. But this is the culture. And it's even worse at NSA.
Barbara Koeppel is a Washington-based investigative reporter. This article has been slightly edited for space; subscribe to The Washington Spectator to read the second part of this report, addressing evidence of corruption that Thomas Drake turned over to investigators.
[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.]
As details of the foiled al Qaeda plot to blow up a U.S.-bound airline became public, the world learned not only about a daring operation to stop terrorists, but also about the new reality of how U.S. intelligence works.
American and foreign intelligence partners working hand in hand to rid the world of the scourge of terror. You didn't see much of that 10 years ago, but it's exactly what happened recently.
The Saudis infiltrate an al Qaeda terrorist group in Yemen with their own mole, and the CIA and others are brought into the mix to help run an operation that eventually foils a possible bomb attack against an airliner destined for America.
"I'm not at all surprised that the press accounts of this have liaison services, particularly the Saudis, playing such a prominent role," said former CIA Director Michael Hayden. "That's the way I would have expected it to go."
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, changed everything in the American intelligence community. It drove home the point that the Cold War was over. The battlefield looked quite different and the United States wasn't quite prepared.
It no longer sufficed to have satellites stare down at a static enemy behind the Iron Curtain, with tens of thousands of troops separating the Soviet Union from Western Europe.
The enemy became terrorist groups that for the most part hid in safe havens and operated from ungoverned territories seemingly out of the reach of traditional intelligence and military responses.
"The ability to penetrate a terrorist organization is an incredibly difficult task that we were poorly positioned to do in the 1990s and even a few years after 9/11," said Amy Zegart, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and an expert on the intelligence community.
It has been an arduous task and it is far from complete, but Zegart believes U.S. efforts to bolster human intelligence capability and work much more closely with foreign intelligence counterparts are paying off.
Former FBI agent Ali Soufan told CNN the joint intelligence operation was as good as it gets.
"You have a place like Yemen. You have al Qaeda, CIA, you have other friendly intelligence agencies. You have a source inside. It doesn't get any better than that," he said.
And the operation turned out to be a twofer - that is, the mole not only secured the new generation bomb and helped get it out of Yemen, but he also helped identify the location of a senior al Qaeda operative in Yemen, enabling the CIA to use one of its other more recent tools, the armed drone.
Just about everyone CNN has spoken with within the intelligence community touts the value of the drone missile strikes. The program began in the Bush administration to target al Qaeda leaders in the tribal regions of Pakistan and has expanded extensively under President Obama. Terrorism experts including CNN's Peter Bergen agree the program has been extremely effective.
"The drone strikes are not just important in terms of eliminating the leadership of al Qaeda," Bergen said. "They are also important in terms of preventing people from training in the tribal region and making that very difficult because you are always looking over your shoulder for a drone attack."
Now drone strikes are being used far more extensively in Yemen, particularly in southern areas of the country where al Qaeda forces have taken control.
Setting aside the debate over whether the attacks represent extrajudicial killing, Zegart said opportunities to learn about al Qaeda's strategies are lost when the military simply kills terrorists rather than take them captive.
"That's a challenge," she said, "finding the right balance of using these drones and actually harvesting intelligence from people who are caught."
Cooperation and coordination between the intelligence community and the military has become a critical component of the counterterrorism campaign. While he was CIA director, Hayden said, the intelligence community worked closely with Gen. Stanley McChrystal, then commander of U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan.
"All things Stan McChrystal did - for example, the night raids, the sensitive site exploitation and the follow-on raids within hours and so on - that was based on intimate teamwork between JSOC and the American intelligence community."
The crown jewel of that type of cooperation was the successful Navy SEALs raid last year on the bin Laden compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, which lead to the death of the al Qaeda founder.
But Zegart maintains that operation was the "poster child" for the influence of a greatly enhanced analytic community.
"The real breakthrough there was thinking through a different lens," she said. "It's not how can we find bin Laden. It's what are the threads that could lead us to him. So you start to think about who are the couriers. That's then the critical piece in putting information together to track him down ultimately. We tend to focus on the operational success of the mission, but this was an analytical success first."
And those analysts came from a wide range of agencies within the intelligence community.
Inside the CIA command center the day of the bin Laden raid, it wasn't just Director Leon Panetta and his support staff anxiously monitoring developments during the operation. Senior officials from the Defense Department, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and others were in the room. All played a unique role in what was a community-wide effort.
NGA Director Tish Long, whose agency analyzes imagery and who was in the ops center that day, said, "We were working very closely with NSA and CIA ,with the SIGINT and the HUMINT, our GEOINT - (it) truly was an integrated operation to understand what was happening at that Abbottabad complex."
U.S. officials and experts consistently point to the creation of the National Counterterrorism Center as a success story in the effort to remove the roadblocks within the intelligence community that inhibited the sharing of information. Hayden said the establishment of NCTC has led to deeper integration and cooperation among the 16 members of the intelligence community. That help NCTC analysts run down leads and connect the dots.
But the center faces hurdles. One of the reforms implemented at NCTC, after a failed attempt to blow up a Northwest Airlines commercial flight to Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, was to create pursuit teams to follow up on leads. The center was criticized at the time for not putting together a variety of clues that might have prevented suspect Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab from getting on the plane. People with specialized expertise are now brought in to analyze the data.
One of the pre-9/11 weaknesses the U.S. intelligence community has tried to address is increasing its pool of officers who are native speakers and have lived in cultures around the world. Although the numbers are significantly up, it's no match for what a foreign intelligence partner brings to the table.
"A partner brings focus, a partner brings linguistic agility, a partner brings cultural agility, which is very hard for us to come by," Hayden said.
But in the dangerous, unpredictable spy world, relying on a foreign partner can be risky. That was nowhere more evident than when a group of CIA officers planned a meeting with a trusted asset of the Jordanian intelligence service. The asset was, in fact, a double agent who came to the 2009 meeting in Khost, Afghanistan, wearing a suicide bomb vest that he detonated, killing seven CIA employees.
There could also be a downside to focusing almost exclusively on terrorism issues with some foreign partners. A former U.S. intelligence officer wondered if it comes at the expense of other issues.
"Would we have known more about the coming Arab awakening if our relationship with the Egyptian intelligence service had not been so much defined by our (counterterrorism) problem?" the official asked.
And even with the apparent success of the recent joint effort to stop the potential airline bombing, the one thing the intelligence community did not anticipate was that details of the operation would leak to the press.
The revelation might have al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula scrambling to find other infiltrators, and administration and congressional officials maintain this will make it more difficult to infiltrate AQAP. That would be a problem.
As Zegart put it, "There is no substitute for that human intelligence on the ground."
[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.]
Outside of a commercial storage locker discovered last year filled with Arlington National Cemetery remains, this 'Dr.' PHIL early onset of tiradal dementia has to be the second greatest secular heresy I’ve heard since the bleak weeks following 9/11.
All three left me speechless....
(Inside of a storage locker, it is just not quite dark enough to hang some of those responsible for my developing speech impediment...) – US/1
PTSD: civilians just love to paint veterans as riddled with this disease, causing them to become violent, unhinged lunatics who will explode at the slightest provocation. Look at just about any news story where a violent crime is committed by a veteran, and PTSD is almost immediately floated as the reason. In the media narrative, violence and PTSD go hand-in-hand. At the same time, troops are criticized for not coming forward and admitting they have a problem, and seeking help for it. (Gee, could it possibly be because we paint veterans with PTSD as homicidal lunatics?)
Dr. Phil, arguably one of the most popular talk show hosts on the planet, decided to feature this issue on his show this week. And while he could have taken a reasonable approach, he went straight for the gut instead. Titling the show “From Heroes To Monsters”, he painted a picture of vets with PTSD as ticking time bombs of violence, describing them as damaged goods who “destroy families” and “dismantle marriages”.
One of Dr. Phil’s guests, Matt, is a former Marine who struggles with PTSD. He speaks about how, while deployed to Afghanistan, he repeatedly stabbed an enemy combatant in the face, even after he was dead, to get his anger out. He also claims he saw “lots” of innocent people killed, including women and children. (His last name isn’t given, so it’s impossible to verify his claims of killing women and children while deployed to Afghanistan.)
After Matt, Dr. Phil featured Mark and Heather. Mark is another veteran with PTSD who admits he has violent rages, says his life has been destroyed, and is afraid of what he will do to his family. Heather’s husband, Duane, had PTSD. He beat her and set her on fire.
The common thread between all of these stories: violence. Did Dr. Phil ever stop to point out that most veterans with PTSD don’t end up setting their wives on fire or stabbing people repeatedly in the face? Of course not. Indeed, recent research has found that the link between PTSD and violent behavior is actually weak.
Another dirty little secret Dr. Phil didn’t feel was necessary to point out: civilians get PTSD, too. In fact, anyone can get it — anyone who has been through a trauma. According to the VA, about 7-8% of the general population will get PTSD at some point in their lives. For veterans, the risk is slightly higher, although not by much at 11-20%. And, believe it or not, the symptoms of PTSD do not include sudden violence such as setting your wife on fire or stabbing people in the face.
Common symptoms include reliving the event, avoiding situations that remind you of it, feeling numb, feeling jittery, suddenly being angry or irritable, having trouble sleeping, etc. Setting your wife on fire? Not so much a normal occurrence. While relationship problems and violence may occur, acting as if it is a foregone conclusion (as Dr. Phil did) and saying that vets with PTSD are “monsters” is ridiculous and offensive.
It has been noted time and again, including here at You Served, that there is a stigma associated with veterans who have PTSD. While things may slowly be getting better, we still have a long way to go. And clearly, that goes for civilians as well. When the leading daytime talk show host runs a show calling veterans with PTSD “monsters” and “damaged goods”, it’s no wonder that there is a stigma attached to PTSD. The media gleefully paints vets who struggle with it as ticking time bombs, as stereotypes of lunatics about to snap at any given moment. The narrative isn’t new… but I don’t ever recall seeing veterans being so blatantly insulted by being called “monsters” and “damaged goods”.
I’m curious if Dr. Phil honestly thinks it’s helpful to paint such a negative, violent picture of veterans struggling with PTSD. I would wager he doesn’t care at all about how this affects our military. Because if he did, this show wouldn’t have existed. What he has done is continue to spread a false and harmful narrative about our troops, which spreads the stigma associated with PTSD even further. And what does that do? It encourages veterans who are struggling with symptoms of PTSD to become even more reluctant to come forward and seek help. Why would they? They’re being told that they’re monsters, damaged goods, violent abusive lunatics. While Dr. Phil is by no means the only perpetrator, this is by far the worst example I have seen in the media.
Having PTSD does not make you “damaged goods”. Does having cancer make someone damaged? What about depression, or bipolar disorder, or any number of other diseases? Telling someone who has PTSD that they are a monster and therefore need to get help makes about as much sense as telling a woman who has breast cancer that she’s damaged goods and therefore needs chemotherapy. It’s not going to encourage anyone to actually seek help. What it will surely do for vets, though, is reinforce the idea that they are somehow broken, that they’ll be judged and punished for having PTSD, and make them think that they are right to not tell anyone and to not get help. None of our troops who are afflicted with PTSD are monsters, they are not damaged, and 99% of them are not violent, homicidal maniacs about to snap at any moment.
The men and women who serve in our Armed Forces give up so much. They sacrifice their time with their families, their bodies, and their lives. For some, they sacrifice their mental health. This does not make them broken, or crazy, or violent, and it especially does not make them monsters. Meanwhile, here is Dr. Phil, taking the sacrifice and exploiting it, calling our troops — who have already given up so much for us — monsters. He should be ashamed of himself.
If he has any honor at all, any gratitude for the service of our veterans, he’ll issue an apology and a retraction. You can contact the Dr. Phil Show at:
Glam Media Corporate
1.650.244.4000
@Blisscommunity
US Headquarters
Glam Media, Inc.
2000 Sierra Point Parkway
Suite 1000,
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Phone: (650) 244-4000
American Express @americanexpress
Joanna Lambert
Vice President, Public Affairs and Communications — Corporate and Financial Communications
212.640.9668
212.640.9238 (fax) joanna.g.lambert@aexp.com
Sarah Meron
Vice President, Public Affairs and Communications — Corporate and Marketing Communications
212.640.5503
212.640.9238 (fax) sarah.b.meron@aexp.com
Judy Tenzer
Vice President, Department of Corporate Social Responsibility 212.640.0555
212.640.9238 (fax) judy.g.tenzer@aexp.com
[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.]
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.
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.”
-OPEN SOURCE
Many congratulations to Alex for this film! 
It was the news the world breathlessly waited for immediately after the 9/11 terror attacks: a report of the first American troops on the ground in Afghanistan.
