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9/11 and the NSA (4 posts)

1. mark
   Member

   www.oilempire.us/nsa911.html

   https://www.cato.org/events/nsa-road-911-lessons-l...

   The NSA and the Road to 9/11: Lessons Learned and Unlearned

   Policy Forum September 4, 2018 10:00AM to 12:00PM EDT Hayek Auditorium, Cato Institute

   Featuring William Binney, Former Crypto-Mathematician, NSA; Kirk Wiebe, Former Senior Analyst, NSA; Edward Loomis, Former Computer Systems Analyst, NSA; Thomas Drake, Former Senior Executive Service Member, NSA; and Diane Roark, Former Professional Staff Member, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence; moderated by Patrick Eddington, Policy Analyst in Homeland Security and Civil Liberties, Cato Institute.

   Almost 17 years after al Qaeda’s attacks on America, many key questions remain unanswered. Chief among them: why did America’s National Security Agency (NSA) fail to detect and thwart the attacks? Has the NSA as an institution learned the right lessons from this national tragedy and changed accordingly? What has Congress done—or failed to do—since the attacks to improve intelligence collection while still protecting American’s constitutional rights? “The NSA and the Road to 9/11: Lessons Learned and Unlearned” brings together five former federal officials who were key players in the effort inside the NSA and on Capitol Hill to prevent the 9/11 disaster and to reform NSA’s approach to surveillance in the years after.

   If you can’t make it to the event, you can watch it live online at www.cato.org/live and join the conversation on Twitter using #CatoNSA. Follow @CatoEvents on Twitter to get future event updates, live streams, and videos from the Cato Institute.

   https://www.newsweek.com/cia-and-saudi-arabia-cons...

   CIA and Saudi Arabia Conspired To Keep 9/11 Details Secret, New Book Says

   By Jeff Stein On 8/28/18 at 6:00 AM

   It’s easier to bury uncomfortable facts than to confront them. So this September 11, the ceremonies marking the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., will simply honor the dead. In Manhattan, tourists and mourners will gather where the World Trade Center Towers once stood, lowering their heads in memory of the 2,606 who perished there. The services won't reflect the view that the attacks might well have been prevented.

   But for hundreds of families and a growing number of former FBI agents, the grief of another 9/11 ceremony will be laced with barely muted rage: There remains a conspiracy of silence among high former U.S. and Saudi officials about the attacks.

   “It’s horrible. We still don’t know what happened,” said Ali Soufan, one of the lead FBI counterterrorism agents whom the CIA kept in the dark about the movements of the future Al-Qaeda hijackers. To Soufan and many other former national security officials, the unanswered questions about the events leading up to the September 11, 2001, attacks dwarf those about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, because “9/11 changed the whole world.” It not only led to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the fracturing of the Middle East and the global growth of Islamic militantism but also pushed the U.S. closer to being a virtual homeland-security police state.

   “I am sad and depressed about it,” said Mark Rossini, one of two FBI agents assigned to the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit, who says agency managers mysteriously blocked them from informing their headquarters about future Al-Qaeda plotters present in the United States in 2000 and again in the summer of 2001. “It is patently evident the attacks did not need to happen and there has been no justice,” he said.

   The authors of a new book on 9/11 hope to refocus public attention on the cover-up. Thoroughly mining the multiple official investigations into the event, John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski find huge holes and contradictions in the official story that 9/11 was merely “a failure to connect the dots.”

   Duffy, a left-leaning writer and environmental activist, and Nowosielski, a documentary filmmaker, have nowhere near the prominence of other journalists who have poked holes in the official story, in particular Lawrence Wright, author of The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, the Pulitzer Prize–winning book that was turned into a gripping multi-part docudrama on Hulu earlier this year.

   But Duffy and Nowosielski come to the story with a noteworthy credential: In 2009 they scored an astounding video interview with Richard Clarke, a White House counterterrorism adviser during the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. In it, Clarke raged that top CIA officials, including director George Tenet, had withheld crucial information from him about Al-Qaeda’s plotting and movements, including the arrival in the U.S. of future hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. In The Watchdogs Didn’t Bark: How the NSA Failed to Protect America From the 9/11 Attacks, the authors assemble a compelling case of a government-wide cover-up of Saudi complicity in the affair.

   Keep up with this story and more by subscribing now

   In 2002, Tenet swore to Congress that he wasn’t aware of the imminent threat because it came in a cable that wasn’t marked urgent—and “no one read it.” But his story was shredded five years later when Senators Ron Wyden and Kit Bond forced loose an executive summary of the CIA’s own internal investigation of 9/11, which stated that “some 50 to 60 individuals read one or more of the six Agency cables containing travel information related to these terrorists.”

   Clarke went ballistic. Until then, he had trusted Tenet, a close colleague and friend, to tell the truth. In 2009, despairing at the lack of media traction on the astounding disclosure, he wrote a book about the duplicity, Your Government Failed You, which was largely ignored. So when Duffy and Nowosielski came calling, he welcomed them.

   “I believed, for the longest time, that this was one or two low-level desk officers who got this [information about Hazmi and Mihdhar] and somehow didn’t realize the significance,” he told them. But “50—five oh—50 CIA officers knew this, and they included [Tenet and] all kinds of people who were regularly talking to me? Saying I’m pissed doesn’t begin to describe it.”

   All these years later, it’s still unclear why the CIA would keep such crucial details about Al-Qaeda movements from the FBI. Clarke and other insiders suspect that the spy agency had a deeply compartmented plan in the works to recruit Hazmi, Mihdhar and perhaps other Al-Qaeda operatives as double agents. If the FBI discovered they were in California, the theory goes, it would have demanded their arrest. When the CIA’s recruitment ploy fizzled, Tenet and company hid the details from Clarke lest they be accused of “malfeasance and misfeasance,” he said.

   It’s the only logical explanation for why the presence of Hazmi and Mihdhar was kept from him until after the attacks, Clarke said. “They told us everything—except this,” he says in the video.

   Tenet and two of his counterterrorism deputies, Rich Blee and Cofer Black, issued a statement calling Clarke’s theory “reckless and profoundly wrong.” But now Clarke has company. Duffy and Nowosielski found other key former FBI counterterrorism agents and officials who have developed deep doubts about Tenet’s story. The only element they disagree on is which officials were responsible for the alleged subterfuge.

   “I think if there were some conscious effort” not to tell the bureau what was going on, Dale Watson, a former FBI deputy chief of counterterrorism told them, “it was probably” carried out below Tenet, Blee and Black, by managers of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit.

   But Pat D’Amuro, an even more senior former FBI counterterrorism official, told them, “There’s no doubt in my mind that [withholding the information] went up further in the agency” than those managers. “And why they didn’t send it over, to this day, I don’t know why.”

   And then there’s the continuing mystery of Saudi complicity with the hijackers. Duffy and Nowosielski offer a tightly focused update on what’s been learned about Saudi support for Al-Qaeda in recent years. Back in 2004, the official 9/11 Commission said it found no evidence that the “Saudi government as an institution, or senior Saudi officials individually funded” Al-Qaeda.

   A year later, the highly redacted CIA inspector general’s report cracked open another window, saying that some agency officers had “speculated” that “dissident sympathizers within the government” (i.e., religious extremists) may have supported bin Laden. Subsequent investigations have revealed that officials from the kingdom’s Islamic affairs ministry were actively helping the hijackers get settled in California.

   Such information spurred several hundred families of the 9/11 attack victims to file suit against the Saudi government in federal court in New York last year, seeking unspecified monetary damages.

   “Saudi intelligence has admitted that they knew who these two guys were,” Andrew Maloney, an attorney for families, told Newsweek last week. “They knew they were Al-Qaeda the day they arrived in Los Angeles. So any notion from the Saudi government saying, ‘Oh, we just help out all Saudis here’ is false. They knew. And the CIA knew.”

   The kingdom has turned over some 6,800 pages of documents, “mostly in Arabic,” that Maloney’s team is in the process of translating. “There’s some interesting things in there,” he said, “and some clear gaps.” He said he’ll return to court in October to press for more documents.

   He also wants to depose Saudi officials, particularly Fahad al-Thumairy, a former Los Angeles consular official and imam of a Culver City, California, mosque attended by the hijackers. In 2003, Thumairy was intercepted after he landed in Los Angeles on a flight from Germany and deported from the U.S. “because of suspected terrorist links.” But he still works for the government in Riyadh, Maloney said. “Can you believe that?”

   In April, Maloney subpoenaed the FBI for documents on Thumairy and Omar al-Bayoumi, a suspected Saudi spy in the U.S. who was also in contact with the hijackers. The bureau has not responded, so on September 11 he plans to file “a formal motion to compel the FBI” to produce the documents. His motion follows a sworn statement by Steven Moore, the FBI agent who headed the bureau’s investigation into the hijacking of the plane that flew into the Pentagon, charging the 9/11 Commission with misleading the public when it said it “had not found evidence” of Saudi assistance to Hazmi and Mihdhar.

   “There was clearly evidence that Thumairy provided assistance to Hazmi and Mihdhar,” Moore wrote. And “based on the proof in our investigation,” he added, “Bayoumi himself was a clandestine agent and associated with radical extremists, including Thumairy.”

   Moore’s statement was first reported by the Florida Bulldog, a Fort Lauderdale news site that has been investigating the hijackers’ contacts with flight schools. “To my knowledge,” Moore stated, “Thumairy has never been the subject of a genuine law enforcement interview conducted by the actual agents who investigated him.”

   Maloney’s additional targets are other FBI, CIA, State Department and Treasury Department personnel and documents. “There are a lot of people, former agents—I won't identify who or what agencies—who have talked to us,” he said, but others, especially in the CIA’s bin Laden unit, “will never talk to us or will only talk to us if they are given some kind of blanket immunity.”

   Getting access to them, he said, would probably require an executive order from President Donald Trump—an unlikely outcome given his administration’s strong backing for the Saudi monarchy.

   There may be public support for Maloney’s endeavors. A 2016 poll found a slight majority of Americans (54.3 percent) believe that the government is hiding something about the 9/11 attacks. Then again, a considerable number of 9/11 "truthers" embrace conspiracy theories positing that the attacks were “an inside job” by the Bush administration and/or Israel and abetted by explosives planted in one of the World Trade Center towers.

   GettyImages-924605998 The September 11 memorial in lower Manhattan. Spencer Platt/Getty Images

   But they are right about Saudi resistance to fully disclosing its relations with the hijackers. Last year, agents of the monarchy were discovered surreptitiously funding a PR effort to derail a congressional bill permitting a 9/11 families group to sue the kingdom for damages. Last September, the family group filed a 17-page complaint with the Justice Department.

   Terry Strada, a leader of the group 9/11 Families & Survivors United for Justice Against Terrorism, will mourn again this year, but not at the site where the towers once stood and her husband died. She plans to attend “a private service” at the Shrine of St. Joseph in Stirling, New Jersey, which she said has “a beautiful and solemn space” dedicated to all who died in the 9/11 attacks.

   But she is also full of fury at the government’s refusal to release all it knows about the run-up to the attacks. “It’s very sad that we’re still being kept in the dark about it. It’s frustrating. It angers me,” she told Newsweek. “It’s a slap in the face. They think they’re above the law and don’t have to respond to the families—and the world. It’s disgusting.”

   But she evinces even more disdain for the Saudis. Responding to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s August 20 message “wishing Muslims around the world a blessed Eid al-Adha,” she tweeted, “Seriously???

   “The Saudis promote & finance the most virulent hatred toward Americans than any other nation. Murdered 3,000 on Sept 11.” The “9/11 families,” she wrote, “will #NEVERFORGET. #FreeTheTruth”

   https://www.skyhorsepublishing.com/9781510721364/t...

   The Watchdogs Didn't Bark The CIA, NSA, and the Crimes of the War on Terror Ray Nowosielski, John Duffy

   328 Pages August 28, 2018 ISBN: 9781510721364

   “The authors lay bare… an intelligence failure of historic proportions.” —JOHN KIRIAKOU, Former CIA officer and author of The Convenient Terrorist

   In 2009, documentarians Duffy and Nowosielski arrived at the offices of Richard Clarke, the former counter-terror adviser to Presidents Clinton and Bush. There, for the first time, Clarke boldly accused his friend and one-time Central Intelligence Agency director George Tenet of “malfeasance and misfeasance” in the pre-war on terrorism. Thus began an incredible—never-before-told—investigative journey of intrigue into how the fall-out from a covert decision within America’s intelligence community about two future September 11th hijackers may have come to secretly define the terror wars and launched a “war on whistleblowers.”

   The Watchdogs Didn’t Bark details that story, unearthed over a ten-year investigation. Following the careers of a dozen counterterror employees of the US government from the late 1980s to the present, the book puts the government’s systems of accountability under a microscope. How did current CIA director Gina Haspel manage to climb her agency’s ladder with such speed? The authors examine the merits of decades of serious accusations made against some of her key allies. What can explain how two key Al Qaeda plotters—operating inside the United States for nearly two years before the 9/11 tragedy—could fall onto the radars of so many US agencies without any of them succeeding in stopping the attacks? The authors find unexpected answers and a system all-too-easily manipulated against the best interests of the American people. Taking readers on a character-driven account of how the true lessons of the September 11th attacks were cynically inverted to empower the state, an alarm is raised which is more pertinent today than ever before.

   Ray Nowosielski is a documentary filmmaker and journalist who has written for Salon and Truthout and contributed to investigations by Newsweek, The Daily Beast, and The Intercept. He has directed several documentaries, including 2006’s critically acclaimed Press For Truth, and has produced for HBO, Amazon, Discovery Impact, and Morgan Spurlock. He lives in New York City.

   John Duffy is a writer and activist. He produced the documentary Press for Truth as well as the investigative podcast Who Is Rich Blee? He has worked extensively in the environmental movement to fight tar sand extraction, fracking, and logging on public lands. His anonymous essays critiquing the contradictions of big systems and their fallout on ecology and society appear regularly in a variety of media. He currently lives in a quiet cabin in the Midwest with his family.

   “The authors lay bare… an intelligence failure of historic proportions.”

   —JOHN KIRIAKOU, Former CIA Officer and author of The Convenient Terrorist

   “Stories of characters in the dark corners of the bureaucracies, where the secrets are kept… Duffy and Nowosielski name names and hold people to account. If only our government had the courage to do the same.”

   —ALEX GIBNEY, Co-creator, Hulu’s The Looming Tower

   “A devastating portrait of an agency that is almost singularly committed to its own impunity… Has any government agency, anywhere, been as successful as the modern CIA in avoiding accountability for its grotesque failures and abuses, including grave violations of human rights?”

   —BEN WIZNER, Legal adviser to Edward Snowden, ACLU

   “Compelling, informative, and authoritative.”

   —MARK ROSSINI, Former FBI Agent

   “A detailed, comprehensive indictment for prosecution of these unpunished masters of elaborate deception, wielding secrecy as the main weapon.”

   —JOHN YOUNG, Co-creator, Cryptome.org

   “Snapshot of the much larger blueprint of malfeasance that ran rampant across the US government… Having been personally affected and engaged on these issues for the past seventeen years, even we learned new pieces of disturbing and damning information… A must read.”

   —PATTY CASAZZA, MONICA GABRIELLE, MINDY KLEINBERG, LORIE VAN AUKEN, “The Jersey Widows”

   Posted 6 years ago #
2. truthmod
   Administrator

   Thanks Mark, this is actually a book about 9/11 that I plan to read.

   Posted 6 years ago #
3. mark
   Member

   https://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/conspirac...

   Conspiracy Anyone? The NSA's 9/11 Cover-Up General Hayden told a lie, and it's a whopper. By Bill Blunden / AlterNet July 26, 2015, 7:44 AM GMT

   "All tricksters, other than magicians, depend to a great extent upon the fact that they are not known to be, or even suspected of being, tricksters. Therein lies their great advantage." — John Mulholland

   Magicians wield secrecy on the theater stage in the service of illusions. Spies likewise wield illusion on the world stage in the service of secrecy. So it is with the events behind the attacks of 9/11 where those who question the official story are derided as conspiracy theorists. Thanks to the investigative digging of reporter James Bamford, with the assistance of NSA whistleblowers like Thomas Drake and Kirk Wiebe, the 9/11 crowd can now point to a conspiracy fact: an incredible cover-up that goes all the way to the top of the American intelligence community.

   In a recent piece published by Foreign Policy Bamford examines a phone call to a clandestine operations center run by Osama bin Laden in Yemen during March of 2000. The phone call was dialed by one of the 9/11 hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar, from his apartment in San Diego. In fact, there were a number of such phone calls made by 9/11 hijackers living in San Diego. Why didn't our security services immediately launch investigations?

   According to then director of the NSA, Michael Hayden, the NSA was unable to determine the geographic origin of these calls despite the fact that the phone line in Yemen (967-1-200-578) was under intense scrutiny by NSA. The Yemen number was tracked using a form of surveillance known as "cast-iron" coverage where dedicated resources were allocated to continuously monitor the line 24/7.

   Years later, in 2014, Hayden claimed that technical difficulties prevented exact geolocation. By the way, this is the same justification that he relied on post-9/11 to help institute the bulk collection program for phone metadata. Hayden told interviewers from Frontline: "Two guys, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, living in San Diego… come to the United States, call home, call Yemen, call a safe house in Yemen seven times. We intercepted every one of the calls, right?

   Nothing in the physics of the intercept, nothing in the content of the call told us they were in San Diego. If we'd have had the metadata program, OK, if we'd have had that basket of stuff and that phone number of that safe house in Yemen, which we knew, and we would have walked up to that metadata and said, "Hey, any of you guys talked to this number in Yemen?" those numbers in San Diego would have popped up."

   James Bamford, himself a former NSA whistleblower, digs into Hayden's assertions. Leveraging the technical expertise of former NSA insiders he unearths an unsettling find. The narrative spun by Hayden is "an absolute lie." The NSA knew damn well that these calls were coming from San Diego. According to former NSA senior executive Thomas Drake: "Every number that comes into that switchboard, if you're cast-iron coverage on that switchboard, you know exactly what that number is and where it comes from.… You know exactly—otherwise it can't get there."

   Former NSA senior analyst Kirk Wiebe expounds on Drake's counterpoint, noting that telephone communiques are bundled with the bits of information necessary to bill the correct phone company: "You know the phone numbers involved, who's making the phone call, and who it's going to because the billing system has to have that metadata to charge you."

   So Drake, Wiebe and other NSA veterans charge that Hayden is full of it. That the NSA was aware of terrorists in San Diego phoning home to Yemen. This raises some important questions. For example, how on earth could an intelligence agency with billions in resources neglect to follow up on these calls? From people whom they knew to be associated with bin Laden? How could internal security services not request court authorization for wiretaps and launch an inquiry? It's a given that any investigator worth their salt would've linked and correlated the San Diego callers to other 9/11 terrorists in the United States and almost certainly put a halt to the operation.

   There may be those who point to incompetence and embarrassment as a possible explanation. Such people would argue that the NSA is an agency like other agencies made up of people and that people are fallible; the San Diego call was somehow overlooked or was accidentally lost in the commotion of the NSA's monolithic bureaucracy.

   Your author questions this account, as it would indicate an organization that's way beyond dysfunctional. Recent disclosures by WikiLeaks describe economic espionage by the United States which depict an NSA that's more than capable of performing SIGINT missions. Other Snowden-era documents also indicate that the NSA runs a world class spy outfit. Consider also that foreign countries like Germany are just itching to be brought into the Five Eyes fold. No keystone cops here, no sir!

   Precluding ineptitude leaves us with a more disturbing scenario. That the calls from San Diego were intentionally ignored. In other words certain people didn't want them investigated. Thus raising even more disturbing questions. And from this point we must reluctantly travel down the rabbit hole. An entrance to a wilderness of mirrors, a place defined by secrecy and illusion traveled heavily by the tricksters of the American Deep State.

   Don't let big tech control what news you see. Get more stories like this in your inbox, every day.

   Bill Blunden is the author of several books, including "The Rootkit Arsenal" and "Behold a Pale Farce: Cyberwar, Threat Inflation, and the Malware-Industrial Complex." He is the lead investigator at Below Gotham Labs.

   www.salon.com/2016/05/12/the_nsas_stunning_911_fai...

   The NSA's stunning 9/11 failure: How big-money contractors made us more vulnerable to attack Bill Binney developed a system that might have prevented 9/11. But it was canceled in the weeks before

   MARCY WHEELER

   MAY 12, 2016 1:10PM (UTC)

   On September 12, 2001, Bill Binney snuck back into work at the NSA dressed like cleaning staff so he could try to help understand who had attacked the United States. A top NSA mathematician, Binney had rolled out a sophisticated metadata analysis system called ThinThread, only to have it canceled less than a month before 9/11. Top executives at the agency had decided a clunky program called Trailblazer, contracted out to the intelligence contractor giant SAIC, would be NSA's future, not the cheaper, more effective and privacy-protective ThinThread.

   While NSA Director General Michael Hayden had sent most NSA staffers home on 9/11 and the day after —hence Binney's disguise — the contractors were hard at work. As Binney describes in "A Good American" -- a documentary about Binney due for wider release in September -- some contractors working in his unit had gotten a warning. "While I was in there trying to look at the material on my computer, the president of the contracting group that I had working on ThinThread came over to me and said that he'd just been in a contractor meeting" with a former top SAIC official who moved back to NSA, supporting Trailblazer. The contractors, it turns out, were warned not to embarrass companies like SAIC, which (the implication is) had just failed to warn about the biggest attack on the United States since Pearl Harbor. "Do not embarrass large companies," the former SAIC manager, according to Binney, said to the other contractor. "You do your part, you'll get your share, there's plenty for everybody." Stay quiet about the failures that led to 9/11, and you'll be financially rewarded.

   It turns out there was plenty for SAIC and the NSA executives who had backed them to be embarrassed about. Binney and a bunch of close associates quit NSA when the Administration rolled out a new, illegal wiretap program called Stellar Wind in the weeks after 9/11. But another senior NSA official, Thomas Drake -- an ally of Binney's -- decided to run the data already in NSA's possession against ThinThread some months later to see whether ThinThread could reveal anything about the attack. Let's "find out if there's any information of the 9/11 attack that we should have known about but didn't," in Drake's words.

   There was.

   As Drake describes in the film, "We discovered critical intelligence, al Qaeda and associated movement intelligence that had never been discovered by NSA. They didn't even know that they had it in their databases." There were details about people not otherwise identified fleeing after the attack, about subplots that hadn't succeeded.

   The NSA's clunky systems not only didn't prevent the attack, as Drake's test of ThinThread suggests Binney's program might have, but it couldn't identify relevant data about the attack in NSA's possession even after the attack.

   The outlines of this story -- like another story of missed details about 9/11, the 28 pages from the Joint Congressional Inquiry into the attack, which are finally being declassified -- have been known for years. Binney, his associates, and Drake complained to the Defense Department's Inspector General. The IG completed his investigation in 2004 and largely confirmed the NSA whistleblowers' complaints. Trailblazer got shut down as a tremendous waste. The government attempted, but failed, to prosecute Drake in conjunction with leaks to the New York Times about the illegal wiretap program.

   We've gotten hints of the ominous details of missed intelligence, too. Drake has alluded to what he found in his review of the data and how he tried to tell the committees investigating the response. He has hinted that that evidence, like those suppressed 28 pages, involves information the intelligence community should have known -- and shared. But that has all been, largely papered over, and the Trailblazer IG report remains almost as redacted as those 28 pages implicating one of our closest allies.

   After 15 years, apparently, it's finally okay to talk about how closely implicated our friends the Saudis are in the 9/11 attack. If we can handle those details, perhaps maybe we're finally also adult enough to learn how big contractor graft prevented us from learning the details in the first place? While the Executive prepares those 28 pages on Saudi involvement in 9/11, it should also prepare that IG report showing how graft made NSA less effective and more intrusive for public release.

   MARCY WHEELER Marcy Wheeler writes at EmptyWheel.net and is the author of "Anatomy of Deceit."

   Posted 6 years ago #
4. BrianG
   Member

   Also note the new book by Duffy and Nowosielski, "The Watchdogs Didn't Bark".

   Very well-written. I'm just a few chapters in, and will report when I'm done.

   Posted 6 years ago #

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