Did anyone see Ali Soufan's interviews?

[undeterred]

He was on Sixty Minutes and parts of a BBC interview were on Frontline last night.

Former FBI Agent Ali Soufan has just released his memoir called "The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against Al Qaeda" It has been heavily edited by the CIA. He was an American Arabic speaking counterterrorism agent involved in tracking down al quaeda from 1997-2005. He said that if the communication had been better between the CIA and FBI they could have stopped some of the terrorists involved in 9/11 and arrested them... he knew who they were. He was in Yemen when 9/11 happened.

He had interviewed radical Islamicists hundreds of times without using torture - at Gitmo, in Yemen, In Afghanistan, and in Iraq. He opposes the techniques used on Abu Zubaydah and others not on moral grounds but because he believes they were totally ineffective. They get the prisoner to tell you whatever he thinks you want to hear. He has already told this to congress and resigned from the FBI because of it.

Watching this guy sent chills down my spine. Apparently knows a lot more than he can tell.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-14891439

[truebrit71]

1. Chilling indeed....interesting that the CIA hasn't bothered to attack him..

..but rather what he's saying with non-denial denials...I always worry that these whistle-blowers might just be glory-seekers, or have an inflated view of their role in things, but the FBI and CIA haven't given us the standard "disgruntled former-employee" line so I think that adds further weight to his comments...

[undeterred]

2. His role appears to have been really central.

He was recruited because he was Lebanese American- a native Arabic speaker who came to the US as a teenager and was quite smart. Recruited to the FBI right out of college and went right to counter-terrorism. He was working on solving the USS Cole bombing in Yemen when 9/11 happened. He's doesn't come off as political or disgruntled, just annoyed that the powers in control did inefficient things that cost so many lives.

[hack89]

3. So he supports the incompetence theory of 911? nt

[undeterred]

4. Incompetence theory?

Didn't exacty hear him spell out a theory but he did say that on 9/13 he got a file in Yemen from the CIA with the pictures of 2 of the hijackers. He had been assigned to look for them in Yemen before this, but the CIA already knew they were in California. Massive lack of communication between FBI and CIA at the very least.

Said he became physically sick when he saw what happened on 9.11 because they were all over these guys but didn't stop it, and if they had, it would have changed history. Terrible sense of futility about not having prevented the attacks.

He wasn't going to blame the CIA, but you could walk in his shoes and get there.

He was totally against "enhanced interrogation techniques"- not on a moral basis, but because they are ineffective. He said if they were effective and would save lives, it would be worth doing them. But if you have to do something 183 times, its obvious that it doesn't work.

[hack89]

5. Do you think he believes that 911 was carried out by the US government? nt

[undeterred]

6. No, I couldn't say he believes that based on what he said in the interviews.

He speaks very carefully. I don't think anyone is even calling him a "whistle-blower".

But apparently much of his book was censored by the CIA, and he did leave the FBI because he was upset with the US government, so you have to wonder what he knows that he can't say or publish.

[OnTheOtherHand]

7. I haven't heard any of Soufan's interviews yet

My impression is that Soufan thinks that the CIA withheld crucial information, and (as far as I know) hasn't expressed an opinion about why.

In that respect, he may not know more than he can say or publish, although I assume he does know many things that are classified. But regardless of just how bad the CIA's role in this is, it's not surprising that it censored the bejesus out of his book.

[noise]

9. The CIA intentionally withheld the information about

al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar several times. What Soufan doesn't mention in any of his interviews is the fact that the FBI withheld the same information. The FBI UBLU received the information in late August and falsely claimed that the criminal/intel wall prevented the Cole investigators from being in the loop. To date nobody in the US government has seen fit to explain why. A key person involved in the withholding on the FBI side was recently noted in an FBI article:

“In collection, we’re not evaluating the why of the case or even the threat—we’re telling you how we’re positioned to collect against it and what capabilities we have—or need—to fill the gaps,” said Dina Corsi, chief of the Domain Collection Operations Support Section in the Directorate of Intelligence.

The goal, Corsi said, is to build collection and reporting capabilities and make the results available to all programs across the Bureau. “So if you are working in counterintelligence and the Criminal Division might have assets you could use, you would be aware of that and be able to leverage it. Our job is to streamline the intelligence process.”

Intelligence Analysts Part 2: The Subject Matter Experts

Corsi failed to leverage the Criminal Division in 2001 and instead decided that a rookie intel agent could look for al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar. Unbelievably Corsi assigned a routine priority to the intel side search. That conduct evidently didn't affect her career track as she is now a section chief.

Has Corsi ever explained why she protected al Qaeda operatives linked to the Cole attack and to the high threat warnings in the Summer of '01? No. She has never been interviewed by the US media in regard to the pre-9/11 conduct of the UBLU. Nor has Rod Middleton, the chief of the UBLU at the time.

[Poll_Blind]

8. Yeah, EFerarri posted about it a few days ago and I was lucky enough to catch it live on...

...BookTV on C-Span. Really incredible stuff, actually. I thought what was especially nice was that most of the callers calling in to question him had some really probing questions and the details in his answers, at least to me, did not disappoint.

PB

[rschop]

10. Soufan's investigation of the Cole bombing

Unfortunately while Soufan knew much about his own investigation on the Cole bombing, he was completely unaware of the criminal conspiracy that had kept the information on Mihdhar and Hazmi from him, FBI Agent Steve Bongardt his assistant, and the rest of his FBIO Cole bombing investigators. He is now aware that this conspiracy had taken place, but it appears that he is still unaware of the details of this huge criminal conspiracy.

But his investigation and the reason 9/11 was allowed to take place by the CIA and FBI HQ has now already been completely documented at this time in official US government documents, although this account is totally different from what the 9/11 Commission gave us.

This official account documents that fact that the CIA, using FBI HQ agents that the CIA had subjugated, deliberately and intentionally allowed the al Qaeda terrorists to carry out the attacks on 9/11.

The CIA thought if Soufan and the FBI Cole bombing investigators started any investigation of Mihdhar and Hazmi, it would expose the CIA criminal culpability in allowing the attack on the USS Cole to take place. To keep Soufan off of the case the CIA desperately tried to hide the fact that Mihdhar and Hazmi had been at the January 6-8, 2000 al Qaeda planning meeting in Kuala Lumpur with Walid Bin Attash, the mastermind of the attack on the USS Cole, actually planning the Cole bombing.

On August 28, 2001, these FBI HQ agents, secretly working under the control of an CIA officer, Tom Wilshire, who had been moved into the management of their unit, in mid-May 2011, shut down FBI Agent Steve Bongardt’s investigation of Mihdhar and Hazmi knowing this would block the one FBI investigation that could have prevented the huge al Qaeda attack that the FBI HQ and CIA had been warned about since April 2001.

We also know that the high level CIA managers who were controlling Wilshire were Richard Blee, Cofer Black, and George Tenet, the same people recently named by Richard Clarke as the CIA managers who had deliberately withheld the information on Mihdhar and Hazmi from him and the FBI Cole bombing investigators.

The CIA and FBI HQ shut down Bongardt’s investigation of Mihdhar and Hazmi to keep themselves out of prison, for having criminally obstructed by this time, the FBI Cole bombing investigation numerous times.

See my Journal and/or www.eventson911.com for all of the detailed information on this, including almost all of the US government documents that prove this.

[undeterred]

11. Thank you very much.

:thumbsup:

Some of this is well known to people who have followed the truth movement but it is not often that a story raising questions about the cover story makes it into mainstream media, and this one did.