Accountability: The CIA's Secret - Democratic Underground

understandinglife

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Thu Aug-11-05 12:47 PM
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Accountability: The CIA's Secret

Edited on Thu Aug-11-05 01:28 PM by understandinglife

Accountability: The CIA's Secret

by Michael Isikoff

Nov. 1 (2004) issue - The CIA is keeping the lid on a hard-hitting report about agency officials who might be held accountable for 9/11 intel failures. The report identifies a host of current and former officials who could be candidates for possible disciplinary procedures imposed by a special CIA Accountability Board, sources familiar with the document tell NEWSWEEK. u]The report by the agency's inspector general's office was completed last June -- (2004). But it has not been made public or sent to the two congressional oversight committees, which first asked for the review more than two years ago. Officially, the agency's position is that more work needs to be done. In a recent private letter to CIA Director Porter Goss, House intelligence committee chairman Peter Hoekstra and ranking Democrat Jane Harman contrasted the CIA's failure to turn over the report with the Pentagon's ability to provide an exhaustive investigative report on the far more recent Abu Ghraib scandal. But Goss shows no inclination to release the document any time soon.

More at the link:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6314736/site/newsweek

It's not as if folk didn't get the significance of the report being blocked, for instance Robert Scheer wrote in the Los Angeles Times:

The 9/11 Secret in the CIA's Back Pocket

By Robert Scheer

The Los Angeles Times

Tuesday 19 October 2004

The agency is withholding a damning report that points at senior officials.

It is shocking: The Bush administration is suppressing a CIA report on 9/11 until after the election, and this one names names. Although the report by the inspector general's office of the CIA was completed in June, it has not been made available to the congressional intelligence committees that mandated the study almost two years ago.

"It is infuriating that a report which shows that high-level people were not doing their jobs in a satisfactory manner before 9/11 is being suppressed," an intelligence official who has read the report told me, adding that "the report is potentially very embarrassing for the administration, because it makes it look like they weren't interested in terrorism before 9/11, or in holding people in the government responsible afterward."

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According to the intelligence official, who spoke to me on condition of anonymity, release of the report, which represents an exhaustive 17-month investigation by an 11-member team within the agency, has been "stalled." First by acting CIA Director John McLaughlin and now by Porter J. Goss, the former Republican House member (and chairman of the Intelligence Committee) who recently was appointed CIA chief by President Bush. .... "What all the other reports on 9/11 did not do is point the finger at individuals, and give the how and what of their responsibility. This report does that," said the intelligence official. "The report found very senior-level officials responsible."

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More at the link:

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/102004V.shtml

Well, it's now more than a year after the CIA Report was supposedly completed. In June of 2005, Mr Isikoff reports:

9/11: No CIA Report Yet

by Michael Isikoff

June 20 (2005) issue - The Justice Department last week released a highly critical inspector general's report identifying missed opportunities by the FBI to catch two hijackers before the 9/11 attacks. But one of the most serious lapses was laid at the doorstep of the CIA Counterterrorist Center, which, the report states, blocked a key cable (reporting that one of the two hijackers, Khalid Almihdhar, had obtained a visa to enter the United States) from being forwarded to the FBI in January 2000. The report says the Justice I.G. was "unable to determine" why the cable was not sent and who should be held responsible; that is the job of the CIA's inspector general, which has been conducting its own congressionally mandated "accountability" review of 9/11 matters for more than two years. In a new disclosure, the report also states that a copy of the potentially critical Almihdhar visa cable was not turned over to any 9/11 investigators until February 2004 — when it was belatedly discovered in the files of the CIA by Justice I.G. investigators.

More at the link:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8185337/site/newsweek

And, now we have the flap generated by Congressman Weldon -- but, in all the noise generated in the past two days has anyone mentioned the still shrouded CIA IG report that Porter Goss, doing Bush and the neoconsters bidding, is still suppressing.

Mr. Weldon and a former defense intelligence official who was interviewed on Monday have said that the Able Danger team sought but failed in the summer of 2000 to persuade the military's Special Operations Command, in Tampa, Fla., to pass on to the Federal Bureau of Investigation the information they had gathered about Mr. Atta and the three other men. The Pentagon and the Special Operations Command have declined to comment, saying they are still trying to learn more about what may have happened.

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Mr. Felzenberg said staff investigators had become wary of the officer because he argued that Able Danger had identified Mr. Atta, an Egyptian, as having been in the United States in late 1999 or early 2000. The investigators knew this was impossible, Mr. Felzenberg said, since travel records confirmed that he had not entered the United States until June 2000.

"There was no way that Atta could have been in the United States at that time, which is why the staff didn't give this tremendous weight when they were writing the report," Mr. Felzenberg said. "This information was not meshing with the other information that we had."

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Mr. Felzenberg confirmed an account by Mr. Weldon's staff that the briefing, at the commission's offices in Washington, had been conducted by Dietrich L. Snell, one of the panel's lead investigators, and had been attended by a Pentagon employee acting as an observer for the Defense Department; over the commission's protests, the Bush administration had insisted that an administration "minder" attend all the panel's major interviews with executive branch employees. Mr. Snell referred questions to Mr. Felzenberg.

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From 9/11 Commission's Staff Rejected Report on Early Identification of Chief Hijacker by DOUGLAS JEHL and PHILIP SHENON on August 11, 2005

More at the link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/11/politics/11intel.html?pagewanted=print

Someone needs to get the CIA IG who did the report under oath and have him testify to the contents of his report and to the fact that none of the contents have been altered since its completion in June of 2004.

Urging Congresswoman Pelosi and Congresswoman Harman to act on this matter is now even more urgent than before.

Peace.