"Intelligence officials tell The Observer"

[noise]

It’s been more than eight years since 9/11, but the fallout continues to reverberate throughout today’s New York. The Obama administration’s waffling over how to try Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the attack’s mastermind, and the continuous, embarrassing delay in rebuilding the towers downtown have kept 9/11 more in the headlines than usual.

Now, as those political battles roll on, a new story about the run-up to 9/11 has emerged—a previously undisclosed, covert C.I.A. effort to recruit a spy to penetrate Al Qaeda a year and a half before the planes crashed into the towers.

The development is intriguing in part because the informant they were after was thought to be secretly gay—a fact that gave intelligence agents leverage in their efforts to turn him against his conservative Islamist circle. But the case may also help answer one of the long-standing mysteries of the 9/11 narrative: why a terrorist known to one part of the U.S. government wasn’t captured by other parts before he boarded a plane and helped carry out the most devastating attacks on the country.

The Gay Terrorist

The key point of the article is the fact that Roston's sources explain nothing helpful about the issue. We have this bizarre story about a possible informant and then Roston's three 9/11 Commission sources (Kean, Zelikow and Farmer) pretend they were mere bystanders and not three of the most important member of the 9/11 Commission.

How on earth can Farmer write a book stating that 9/11 failures were attributable to bureaucratic inefficiencies when he states on the record that he doesn't know why the CIA sat on crucial al Qaeda information for 20 months?

[wildbilln864]

1. I have always believed the had penetrated...

Al CIAda and knew about the hijack planes plot. Probably even suggested it to them.
Thanks for the post. :hi:

[zappaman]

3. "AlCIAda"?

What is that?

[wildbilln864]

7. al CIA duh! nt

[SDuderstadt]

2. Farmer and Zelikow were not "members" of the 9/11 Commission.

They were staff.

Why can't the "truth movement" even get basic facts straight?

[noise]

4. That is your response?

Really? Nothing to say about their answers? Nothing to say about their failure to investigate one of the key 9/11 failures?

This post isn't about the "9/11 truth movement." It's about the failure of the 9/11 Commission to do their job. Something that evidently doesn't bother you at all.

[spooked911]

5. that's their typical MO

pick at the details, completely ignore the big picture. They will try to drive you crazy, or at least keep you away from here.

[OnTheOtherHand]

6. three sentences, one of them factually wrong

I think you have a right to be told that that kind of performance destroys credibility. It might be sneakier not to mention it.

[spooked911]

15. It's fine to make a correction

but to make a little correction and then ignore the larger point is typical.

[OnTheOtherHand]

16. amazingly, you missed my point

It isn't as if the OP were five thousand words of close argumentation in which someone found a misspelled word. Once one removes the error, there is very little left, apart from the copy-and-paste.

Shoot the messenger if you like.

[eomer]

26. No, actually, the error was an immaterial detail, very much like a misspelled word.

Once one *corrects* the error (which is obviously more appropriate than *removing* it), there is very little changed; nothing that is material to the points that were made.

Here's a corrected version:

The key point of the article is the fact that Roston's sources explain nothing helpful about the issue. We have this bizarre story about a possible informant and then Roston's three 9/11 Commission sources (Kean, Zelikow and Farmer) pretend they were mere bystanders and not three of the most important member figures of the 9/11 Commission.

How on earth can Farmer write a book stating that 9/11 failures were attributable to bureaucratic inefficiencies when he states on the record that he doesn't know why the CIA sat on crucial al Qaeda information for 20 months?

It was a bit more than misspelled (and it was misspelled); it was also not precisely the right word. But the point is exactly the same when the error is corrected. Kean, Zelikow, and Farmer were, respectively, the Chairman, the Executive Director, and the Senior Counsel and Team Leader of the 9/11 Commission.

[OnTheOtherHand]

32. now I really am surprised, because you missed my point too

The OP is three frigging sentences long. The first sentence is a subjective opinion. The second sentence is an unsupported insinuation ("pretend they were mere bystanders") marred by a factual blunder. The third sentence is a standard-issue rhetorical question.

There's no there there. It's not as if SDuderstadt cherry-picked a minor error in the course of a detailed and finely reasoned argument.

I really don't feel that it is my responsibility to figure out what argument noise might have intended to make, had he respected the subject and the audience enough actually to make an argument.

[noise]

27. As others have stated you missed the point

The point is that Kean (commission member), Zelikow (staff) and Farmer (staff) didn't know the answer to one of the key questions about 9/11. One of the key questions that the 9/11 Commission was tasked with investigating.

You ignored this to fixate on a trivial error. That MO is standard for many debunkers. There doesn't appear to be a mutual interest in the truth but rather the debunkers appear more interested in protecting the status quo.

[OnTheOtherHand]

33. which question was that?

You may think that is "the point," but your OP utterly fails to say that or anything else clearly. Go ahead and shoot the messenger -- I'm used to it -- but it would be more useful for you to write better posts.

[noise]

34. Do you have anything to say about Roston's article?

[OnTheOtherHand]

35. wait, do you?

I honestly, honestly do not understand where you get off expecting more work from me than you did yourself.

OK, you seem to think you have some basis for judging that Kean, Zelikow, and/or Farmer should have pressed for information about Shakir. If so, what basis is that?

[eomer]

36. The question was bolded in the OP (and was the only thing bolded in the OP).

"But the case may also help answer one of the long-standing mysteries of the 9/11 narrative: why a terrorist known to one part of the U.S. government wasn’t captured by other parts before he boarded a plane and helped carry out the most devastating attacks on the country."

And since "mystery" is synonymous with "question" in this context, it was pretty much spelled out (and even spelled correctly) right there in the OP.

[OnTheOtherHand]

37. OK, but I don't really see how that helps the OP

If noise wants to opine that the 9/11 Commission report doesn't, or these three fellows in particular don't, have an adequate explanation of that failure, he doesn't need a newspaper article to do it. (I don't think the report claims to offer an adequate explanation.) And I don't see how Farmer is saying anything different in the article than what I understand him to have said in the book. (I haven't read it, but I heard two detailed interviews when it came out.) And I don't understand the complaint that Farmer and the others portrayed themselves as bystanders.

And I don't understand -- or perhaps I would rather not understand -- why, when I point out that the OP doesn't make much sense, noise seizes the opportunity to smear "debunkers" instead of trying to make more sense.

[noise]

39. Do you have any expectation of Roston or his sources?

Do you not find it odd that Kean, Zelikow or Farmer can't explain one of the key questions of 9/11?

I don't have access to the information. Thus I am unable to post "the evidence." I won't speculate because it is pointless and I don't want to hear the typical debunker bullshit rebuttal.

I guess you are focusing on tangents because you don't have a good explanation for the points I raised. That is understandable as the article is bizarre and the comments by Roston's sources are pathetic.

ETA: This has nothing to do with any conspiracy theories. The 9/11 commission had an obligation to find out what happened in relation to al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar. Every citizen in the country should want to know what happened.

[OnTheOtherHand]

40. I don't think you raised any points

No, I don't find it "odd" that Kean, Zelikow and Farmer can't explain "one of the key questions of 9/11." You may have a good point, but that question wouldn't be it. Nor would a vague assertion that the commission "had an obligation" to answer it.

If you have anything to say about this subject, I might still be interested, but at this point you have pretty well burnt me out.

[eomer]

41. Here's the point, if you ask me.

This sentence is representative of the problem I have with the article:

The 9/11 Commission, in its exhaustive report, never explained why such important intelligence disappeared into the C.I.A.’s black hole.

The contradiction in that sentence is representative of the contradiction in the whole article. Roston says that there is a great mystery and then, on the other hand, goes to lengths to paint the investigation as exhaustive. How could both be true?

[LARED]

42. Why can't both be true?

An exhaustive investigation does not mean every single issue was resolved completely.

[eomer]

43. That's where Roston and his article come in.

It's true that they could theoretically both be true. So an investigative journalist should dig in and see whether they both are in fact true. What, specifically, were the parts of the investigation, if any, that probed into this question, what dead-ends, if any, did they hit, who, if anyone, stonewalled them or lied to them, and so on?

[OnTheOtherHand]

45. good point, but...

maybe it's just a bad idea to debate whether or not the investigation was "exhaustive." I'm pretty sure the investigators feel that they could have done more if given more access and greater resources. That isn't to endorse the view that the investigation was a sham, a whitewash, or whatever.

I don't think it has been mentioned yet on this thread, but it seems to me that when Farmer's book was first mentioned on this board, Bolo Boffin presciently predicted that... umm, I'm in a bad mood and likely to descend to caricature. I'll say: ...that some of the same people who wielded the book promo as a cudgel against the "debunkers" would be among the sharpest critics when the actual book came out.

[OnTheOtherHand]

44. OK, thanks

That particular sentence didn't stick in my craw so much because I just treated it as bad writing: "exhaustive" as a synonym for "really long." But Roston isn't likely to be as tough on his sources as they may deserve because, after all, they're his sources -- so that is a bias to keep in mind.

As for the 9/11 Commission overall, I can't tell whether it had the wherewithal to answer that question, but it certainly had the wherewithal to complain more loudly about its inability to answer. Clearly a decision was made to discuss many of these issues without drawing pointed conclusions, at least about blame. (As Bolo Boffin has pointed out, the commission went to some trouble to document a factual narrative in which Dick Cheney appears to seize presidential authority -- or, as Bolo would put it, "pull a Haig" -- but it doesn't directly call Cheney out.)

I imagine that the principals reasoned or rationalized that it was more important to make good recommendations for the future than to cast blame, and that a report that seemed to search for scapegoats would tend to reinforce the dysfunctional compartmentalization of information that the commission intended to undermine. Something like that. I doubt they got that quite right, but at the same time, it isn't obvious to me what the best approach would be. And of course I have no way of knowing what bombshells they buried.

[rschop]

48. The 9/11 Commison rerport was a complete fraud

The 9/11 Commission had all of the information that was available to the other researchers today who have been able to answer almost all if not all of the questions that the 9/11 Commission did not answer. All of these source for this information are now in the public domain and according to the 9/11 Commission these sources, in particular the minutes from the DOJ investigators of CIA officers and FBI HQ agents who had criminally conspired in hiding information from the FBI Cole bombing investigators, were provided to the 9/11 Commission while they were compiling their report.

Since they had access to all of this information and then deliberately overlooked it, they clearly intentionally and deliberately came up with a report that does not provide the complete picture of what took place prior to the attacks on 9/11 that had allowed these attacks to take place.

In short the 9/11 Commission report is a nothing but complete fraud and sham on the American people and the 9/11 Commissioners are clearly aware of this now even though at the time they may have been (IMHO) fooled by Zelicow, and Felzenberg who blocked critical information from reaching some if not all of the 9/11 Commissioners.

[rschop]

47. RE: How could both be true?

From your post:

"The contradiction in that sentence is representative of the contradiction in the whole article. Roston says that there is a great mystery and then, on the other hand, goes to lengths to paint the investigation as exhaustive. How could both be true?"

To answer your question, Roston's article is pure unadulterated HORSE SHIT.

He clearly is way too lazy to look it this paradox and answer the question "The 9/11 Commission, in its exhaustive report, never explained why such important intelligence disappeared into the C.I.A.’s black hole." he had posed, even though all of this information is now in the public domain and has been uncovered by other authors right from public domain sources.

In fact the answer to this question can now be found and is even summarized on several easy accessible web sites.

Roston was even way too lazy to go out on the internet and find the answer to his question by looking for the web sites that have already provided an answer to the question he posed, even though this would have taken him just a few minutes!

[LARED]

8. I would suggest the it was investigated

You might be aware the CIA is not typically in the habit of making internal investigations public for many years, as divulging operations activity might sort of not be in their best interests.

Basically they have said for quite a while "we screwed up". The 9/11 commission is not going to nor was it ever going to provide details of how the CIA screwed up.

[noise]

9. The 9/11 Commission's job was to find out what happened

Leaving such a key issue unresolved is a failure. No spin justifies this failure.

Is the CIA above the law? Are they subject to oversight? These aren't trivial questions. Citizens have been intimidated into acquiescing to civil liberty restrictions based on CIA counterterrorism determinations.

"Trust us" is not an acceptable standard for a representative democracy.

[LARED]

10. Is the CIA above the law?

I hope not, do you think they broke any laws during the 9/11 commission investigation?

[noise]

11. As you know the 9/11 Commission didn't have prosecutorial power

By law the CIA had no jurisdiction for domestic operations.

There is also the issue of CIA conduct in relation to the FBI's USS Cole investigation. Lawrence Wright noted in his New Yorker article "The Agent" that Soufan didn't get the information he requested until after 9/11. Why didn't the CIA tell the Cole investigators about the Malaysia meeting?

[LARED]

12. Can't you just answer the question? nt

[noise]

13. You tell me

1. Obstruction of the investigation. The commission asked for all relevant materials related to detainee interrogations. Later it was revealed that the CIA had tapes but didn't tell the commission about them.

2. Commission members said that they believed Tenet lied in private interviews (source: Shenon's book).

3. Some of the answers requested by the commission were attained by way of torture.

The point is that the 9/11 Commission failed to conduct a thorough investigation. The CIA's obstruction is one key reason for this failure.

[LARED]

14. I guess that means, yes

you believe the CIA broke the law.

So why is this administration doing nothing? And more importantly what do you think they covered up other than mistakes.

[JackRiddler]

17. Are you using the Obama admin's inaction as evidence of something?

Then I guess Yoo, Bybee and Addington are pure as driven snow, no intel was fabricated to support the WMD lie, and there's no probable cause to think any crimes were committed under the Bush regime. Hooray!

[LARED]

18. Nope

Simply asking why if the CIA broke the law no one seems to being doing anything about. That is not the same as believing inaction establishes innocence

[JackRiddler]

19. Why aren't they doing anything about the more established cases of lawbreaking?

I presume you agree that what is public about the torture complex (including the legal cover provided for it out of OLC and from Addington), and the fabrication of claims that Iraq possessed WMD provide sufficient probable cause for investigations and indictments. So why do you figure that isn't happening?

In another area, on its face the awarding of AAA ratings to junk-based mortgage-backed securities that largely went unexamined by the ratings agencies (who were commissioned by the bond issuers) would seem to constitute either fraud or negligence, and was the key factor in selling these ultimately toxic assets to investors around the world, thus setting up the financial meltdown and the crushing "bailouts". It looks like no one seems to be doing anything about that, either.

Could it be, at a minimum, that these cases are considered too politically controversial to pursue, or are even seen as potentially damaging beyond repair the credibility of the government and the "system"?

[LARED]

20. You and I seem to agree.

This of course is a far cry from 9/11 was an inside job.

[BeFree]

21. They had a spy

""..a previously undisclosed, covert C.I.A. effort to recruit a spy to penetrate Al Qaeda a year and a half before the planes crashed into the towers.""

Of course the CIA had spies in AQ. How do you think the CIA head could tell bush that airplanes were gonna be used? The spy told the CIA!!

The other real problem lies with the facts that FBI agents who passed leads up to administrators being told "not to worry, nothing is going to happen".

And then, had the press been let in on the secret that airplanes were the weapon of choice for terrorists, 9/11 would barely even be remembered.

Just like Bush sitting there for 7 minutes, the whole idea was "Let it happen".

The insiders knew, and they let it happen.

[apocalypsehow]

22. Nice diversionary *kick* from the other failures you currently have going on in multiple threads.

:eyes:

[BeFree]

23. Go away.

[Name removed]

24. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[apocalypsehow]

25. Feel free to avail yourself of the *ignore* button if you can't handle dealing with facts,

as opposed to "Truther" fantasies. And as long as you're going to indulge in the latter, I'm (among others) going to supply you with a steady stream of the former.

It's there and available, that *ignore* button, anytime you wish to invoke it.

[SDuderstadt]

29. Poor BeFree...

keep digging, dude...you're almost there!

[snooper2]

46. Truthy to Power! We will not be Down Defeated Away!

Go crazy fan blade up wind streak around curve!

[noise]

28. "But the case may also help answer one of the long-standing mysteries of the 9/11 narrative"

What?!!!!! You mean mean we still don't know what happened?!!!!

Roston doesn't note the inappropriate responses by Kean, Zelikow and Farmer.

[rschop]

30. RE: The horrific information that was left out of the Observer article

Interesting article but it clearly misses the big picture. It is clear that Roston never followed up on this information and found out why the CIA had this information for 21 months and never gave it to the FBI criminal agents that could have used this information to prevent the attacks on 9/11.

It turns out that the CIA actually working with FBI HQ agents they had subjugated, kept this information on Mihdhar secret from the FBI Agents on the Cole bombing in a wide ranging and massive criminal conspiracy, that involved at least 50-60 people at the CIA, including CIA Director George Tenet and maybe 10-15 people at the FBI, including FBI Director Louis Freeh. Also involved in this criminal conspiracy were the Yemen CAI station, the Pakistan CIA station, the Bin Laden unit at the CIA, perhaps the Thailand CIA station, and the Bin Laden unit at the FBI, most likely the RFU unit and perhaps even the entire ITOS section at the FBI HQ.

While this information went to the FBI HQ Bin Laden unit, these FBI HQ agents kept this information absolutely secret from the FBI Cole bombing investigators even though both the CIA and the FBI HQ knew that both Mihdhar and Hazmi had been at the Kuala Lumpur al Qaeda planning meeting with Walid Bin Attash, Khallad, actually planning the Cole bombing.

When the agents on the FBI Cole bombing accidentally found out that both Mihdhar and Hazmi were inside of the US on August 28, 2001, and knew these terrorists were planning to carry out another horrific al Qaeda attack, the agents at FBI HQ shut down their investigation with the excuse that the information they would need would have to come from the NSA and this information was not allowed to go to FBI criminal investigators, until written permission had been obtained from the NSA.

What the FBI HQ agents failed to mention was that they had already been given written permission the day before by the NSA to give this information to the FBI agents on the Cole bombing investigation.

Because the FBI agents on the Cole bombing wanted to urgently investigate and find both Mihdhar and Hazmi before these two known al Qaeda terrorists could carry out yet another horrific attack, and because the Cole bombing investigators did not see any connection between the NSA information and a FISA warrant, the only legitimate reason NSA information could be withheld temporarily from FBI criminal investigators, the lead Cole bombing investigator Steve Bongardt asked the FBI HQ agents if they would go to the NSLU, the legal people at FBI HQ and get their legal opinion. On August 29, 2001 the FBI HQ agents told the FBI agents in the Cole bombing that the NSLU had ruled that they could have no part in any investigation of Mihdhar.

But 9/11 Commission report page 238 footnote 81 says that the attorney the FBI HQ agents consulted, Sherry Sabol, had ruled that since the NSA information had no connection to any FISA warrant, the Cole bombing investigators could take part in any investigation for Mihdhar and Hazmi. Since this was two week prior to the attacks on 9/11, this would have been more than enough time to located these al Qaeda terrorists and connect them to this upcoming plot especially since the FBI already had all of Mihdhar’s and Hazmi’s credit card information right in their data base and was able to located this information in just a few hours on 9/11 after the attacks.

The FBI HQ agents and the CIA clearly knew, from warnings that they had received since April 2001, that thousands of Americans were going to perish in this massive al Qaeda attack as a direct result of their actions to blocked Bongardt’s investigation of Mihdhar and Hazmi, one of only two FBI criminal investigations that could have stopped these attacks. The other investigation that could have prevented the attacks on 9/11 was inexplicably blocked by FBI supervisors at the FBI RFU unit.

From the information that is now in the public domain, it clearly looks like letting the al Qaeda attacks take place was intentional, and deliberate, on the part of both FBI HQ and the CIA. If it was not intentional and deliberate, why has neither the CIA or FBI HQ ever explained their actions and their criminal conspiracies to block the information on Mihdhar and Hazmi from going to the FBI Cole bombing investigators even after they knew that Mihdhar and Hazmi had taken part in the planning of the Cole bombing and then why did they shut down the very investigation of these known al Qaeda terrorists inside of the US?

Why have they never explained why they did not raise any alarm that could have resulted in the necessary actions to prevent these attacks, and in fact did just the opposite, when they knew both Mihdhar and Hazmi were inside of the US, knew they were long time al Qaeda terrorists who had taken part in the attack in east African bombings that had killed over two hundred people, and the planning of the Cole bombing and even knew they were here only in order to take part in this massive al Qaeda attack?

Maybe someone can explain this?

Why has the FBI never explained why FBI Director Louis Freeh himself blocked the information on Mihdhar and Hazmi from going to FBI Agent Ali Soufan on November 200 when Soufan made an official request for this information and according to 9/11 Commission report p181, and DOJ IG report p238-239, this information had already been given to Louis Freeh by both the NSA and the CIA.

It also looks like this horrific information on Mihdhar and Hazmi, and the fact that the CIA knew these terrorists were inside of the US only in order to take part in a massive al Qaeda attack that the CIA and FBI HQ knew about, also went to President Bush on August 24, 2001, when Tenet just after learning this information on August 23, 2001, flew down to Crawford Texas for a 6 hour long meeting with the Present, a meeting so secret that Tenet lied about this meeting and said that it did not take place at the April 14, 2001 9/11 Commission public hearings.

As I said before in looks like Roston never looked into this information other than just scratch the surface.

[noise]

31. Incredible

The journalist and his sources evidently know nothing about a key issue.

Why didn't Roston call Richard Blee or Rodney Middleton? If he really wanted to know what happened then he should have contacted officials who were there.

Here is what one would expect from a competent journalist:

I tried to find out what happened. Sadly (and strangely) my 9/11 Commission sources didn't know anything. I have no idea why they are presented as credible authorities on 9/11. If were to guess I would say this undeserved credibility derives from authoritarianism and their willingness to defend the political/media establishment consensus at all costs. I tried to contact officials at Alec Station and the UBLU but was told that they are not allowed to talk about what happened for reasons of national security.

[rschop]

38. K&R