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New NSA docs contradict Bush Administration 9-11 claims
New NSA docs contradict 9/11 claims
“I don’t think the Bush administration would want to see these released," an expert tells Salon
By Jordan Michael Smith
Salon.com
Tuesday, Jun 19, 2012 04:24 PM EDT
Over 120 CIA documents concerning 9/11, Osama bin Laden and counterterrorism were published today for the first time, having been newly declassified and released to the National Security Archive. The documents were released after the NSA pored through the footnotes of the 9/11 Commission and sent Freedom of Information Act requests.
The material contains much new information about the hunt before and after 9/11 for bin Laden, the development of the drone campaign in AfPak, and al-Qaida’s relationship with America’s ally, Pakistan. Perhaps most damning are the documents showing that the CIA had bin Laden in its cross hairs a full year before 9/11 — but didn’t get the funding from the Bush administration White House to take him out or even continue monitoring him. The CIA materials directly contradict the many claims of Bush officials that it was aggressively pursuing al-Qaida prior to 9/11, and that nobody could have predicted the attacks. “I don’t think the Bush administration would want to see these released, because they paint a picture of the CIA knowing something would happen before 9/11, but they didn’t get the institutional support they needed,” says Barbara Elias-Sanborn, the NSA fellow who edited the materials.
SNIP...
Former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice has taken credit for the drone program that the Bush administration ignored. “Things like working to get an armed Predator that actually turned out to be extraordinarily important, working to get a strategy that would allow us to get better cooperation from Pakistan and from the Central Asians,” she said in 2006. “We were not left a comprehensive strategy to fight al-Qaida.” Rice claimed that the Bush administration continued the Clinton administration’s counterterrorism policies, a claim the documents disprove. “If the administration wanted to get it done, I’m sure they could have gotten it done,” says Elias-Sanborn.
Many of the documents publicize for the first time what was first made clear in the 9/11 Commission: The White House received a truly remarkable amount of warnings that al-Qaida was trying to attack the United States. From June to September 2001, a full seven CIA Senior Intelligence Briefs detailed that attacks were imminent, an incredible amount of information from one intelligence agency. One from June called “Bin-Ladin and Associates Making Near-Term Threats” writes that “[redacted] expects Usama Bin Laden to launch multiple attacks over the coming days.” The famous August brief called “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike the US” is included. “Al-Qai’da members, including some US citizens, have resided in or travelled to the US for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure here,” it says. During the entire month of August, President Bush was on vacation at his ranch in Texas — which tied with one of Richard Nixon’s as the longest vacation ever taken by a president. CIA Director George Tenet has said he didn’t speak to Bush once that month, describing the president as being “on leave.” Bush did not hold a Principals’ meeting on terrorism until September 4, 2001, having downgraded the meetings to a deputies’ meeting, which then-counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke has repeatedly said slowed down anti-Bin Laden efforts “enormously, by months.”
CONTINUED w LINKS...
http://www.salon.com/2012/06/19/new_nsa_docs_reveal_911_truths/
88 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
One Day-Justice.
EXCERPT...
Cofer Black's role in the United States torture regime was threefold: he ran well-funded secret operations throughout Afghanistan and Pakistan as a CIA warlord; he oversaw our country's early development and implementation of "enhanced interrogation" techniques, renditions, black sites, and disappearances around the world; and he privatized murderous violence with Blackwater USA and other corporate ventures.
Joseph Cofer Black fails at stopping Al Qaeda
Prior to assuming these top-level responsibilities, Black worked under James Pavitt as the CIA official in charge of countering terrorist threats, notably bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Obviously, he failed at this assignment, and was later recommended for possible disciplinary action for refusing to notify the FBI prior to 9/11 that several of bin Laden's henchmen were known to have entered the U.S. He defends his failure as stemming from underfunding and overbureaucratization, obstacles that melted away after 9/11, when, as he notoriously told the 9/11 commision, "the gloves come off."
Black wages secret CIA war "jointly" with public military war, fails again at nabbing bin Laden
Black's proposal for ungloving the CIA, which was approved by George Bush and CIA director George Tenet in a Memorandum of Understanding soon after 9/11, called for Black to lead a private, secret war in Afghanistan against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. He asked his agents to bring him the heads of al Qaida men "on sticks," and insisted publicly that they could only be stopped when "flies are walking on their eyeballs." Among Black's warlord-like responsibilities was "jointness"--cooperation with military officials to extend military operations into extralegal savagery, as when interrogating prisoners inside storage crates at Bagram Air Force Base near Kabul or hunting down bin Laden at Tora Bora. When Cofer Black later blamed the military for the Tora Bora fiasco--planting his accusations via a "deep background" story in the Washington Post--Donald Rumsfeld had him fired.
Black implements SERE tortures, disappearances, renditions, Black Sites
Cofer Black systematized torture by enlisting psychologists Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell in a program to adapt SERE techniques--tortures used by Cold War-era regimes to elicit false confessions for propaganda--for detainee interrogation. Techniques eventually perfected at Guantanamo were evident early on in Black's Afghanistan. He also used CIA resources around the world to conduct disappearances and torturous interrogations at secret Black Sites, and he made liberal use of the practice of rendition, turning prisoners over to foreign governments willing to torture them.
Black privatizes murder and torture and brings it into Republican politics
After being forced out of government, Black's adventures in torture and thuggery continued in the private sector. He helped lead Blackwater USA, a company accused of killing dozens of Iraqi civilians in association with taxpayer-funded security contracts. The company he founded with Blackwater money in 2006, Total Intelligence Solutions, extends his work beyond war zones to domestic venues, providing corporate security on the home front for American corporate leaders who seek information about and protection from enemies of all kinds. Republican presidentical candidate Mitt Romney sought out Black's services and counsel, naming him a national security adviser and attributing to him the notion that waterboarding should not publicly be labeled torture and doing so would hurt America.
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http://tortureaccountability.org/cofer_black
Like crime these days, Blackwater pays very well.
PS: Thanks for the heads-up on the numbers and what they mean, leveymg. Your work stands as a stark reminder of the state of the nation, a place where neither the Congress nor Corporate McPravda are willing to do even their most basic roles under the Constitution.
Former antiterror adviser says Bush ignored 9/11 warnings
CBS, July 29, 2004
The White House's former counterterrorism coordinator blasts President Bush in a television interview and a new book, saying the president ignored warnings about terrorist attacks before 9/11 and has done "a terrible job" battling terrorism since then.
"Frankly, I find it outrageous that the president is running for re-election on the grounds that he's done such great things about terrorism," Richard Clarke told CBS' "60 Minutes" in an interview Sunday night. "He ignored it. He ignored terrorism for months, when maybe we could have done something to stop 9/11. Maybe. We'll never know."
Clarke said he asked for a Cabinet-level meeting in January 2001, shortly after the president took office, to discuss the threat al Qaeda posed to the United States. "That urgent memo wasn't acted on," Clarke told CBS. Instead, he said, administration officials were focused on issues such as missile defense and Iraq.
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http://articles.cnn.com/2004-03-22/politics/clarke.bush_1_qaeda-attack-al-cbs-interview?_s=PM:ALLPOLITICS
Then, the attorney general began flying aboard government charters when flying home to Missouri for his weekend's fishing.
Ashcroft Flying High
CBS News
February 11, 2009 9:23 PM
Fishing rod in hand, Attorney General John Ashcroft left on a weekend trip to Missouri Thursday afternoon aboard a chartered government jet, reports CBS News Correspondent Jim Stewart.
In response to inquiries from CBS News over why Ashcroft was traveling exclusively by leased jet aircraft instead of commercial airlines, the Justice Department cited what it called a "threat assessment" by the FBI, and said Ashcroft has been advised to travel only by private jet for the remainder of his term.
"There was a threat assessment and there are guidelines. He is acting under the guidelines," an FBI spokesman said. Neither the FBI nor the Justice Department, however, would identify what the threat was, when it was detected or who made it.
A senior official at the CIA said he was unaware of specific threats against any Cabinet member, and Ashcroft himself, in a speech in California, seemed unsure of the nature of the threat.
"I don't do threat assessments myself and I rely on those whose responsibility it is in the law enforcement community, particularly the FBI. And I try to stay within the guidelines that they've suggested I should stay within for those purposes," Ashcroft said.
Asked if he knew anything about the threat or who might have made it, the attorney general replied, "Frankly, I don't. That's the answer."
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http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-201_162-303601.html
As absurd as it sounds, Ashcroft's not even the worst of Them.
The way I see it -- and not a single one of the six mainstream press lords has seen fit to agree -- governer
Bush has Killed a Million Innocent People for Their Oil.
Buzzflash maintains an excellent resource on the subject.
You are correct, HopeHoops. So many idiots. And they're everywhere.
For some reason, I blame television and secret government.
His pen and ink social network diagrams tied people, events, and time together in a very understandable way. That was in 2000. Then, just as his career was really taking off, he died from suicide cough murder. The FBI visited his gallery and took pictures of this in 2000.
A pertinent detail...
Obssesive-Generous
http://www.wburg.com/0202/arts/lombardi.html
PS: You are most welcome, Uncle Joe. Thank you for standing up to these traitors.
...like the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, that we used against the Soviets. That worked out well.
I just don't trust very many, if any, people at the highest level of government. In order to attain such heights, it seems one must be willing to check one's conscience at the door.
Post-September 11, NSA ‘enemies’ include us
By JAMES BAMFORD | 9/8/11 9:34 PM EDT
Somewhere between Sept. 11 and today, the enemy morphed from a handful of terrorists to the American population at large, leaving us nowhere to run and no place to hide.
Within weeks of the attacks, the giant ears of the National Security Agency, always pointed outward toward potential enemies, turned inward on the American public itself. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, established 23 years before to ensure that only suspected foreign agents and terrorists were targeted by the NSA, would be bypassed. Telecom companies, required by law to keep the computerized phone records of their customers confidential unless presented with a warrant, would secretly turn them over in bulk to the NSA without ever asking for a warrant.
Around the country, in tall, windowless telecom company buildings known as switches, NSA technicians quietly began installing beam-splitters to redirect duplicate copies of all phone calls and email messages to secret rooms behind electronic cipher locks.
There, NSA software and hardware designed for “deep packet inspection” filtered through the billions of email messages looking for key names, words, phrases and addresses. The equipment also monitored phone conversations and even what pages people view on the Web — the porn sites they visit, the books they buy on Amazon, the social networks they interact with and the text messages they send and receive.
SNIP...
So much intercepted information is now being collected from “enemies” at home and abroad that, in order to store it all, the agency last year began constructing the ultimate monument to eavesdropping. Rising in a remote corner of Utah, the agency’s gargantuan data storage center will be 1 million square feet, cost nearly $2 billion and likely be capable of eventually holding more than a yottabyte of data — equal to about a septillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text.
CONTINUED...
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0911/62999.html
Thanks, Scurrilous, for standing up to these warmongering traitors.
9/11 was one of those ways. It probably could have been prevented, but maybe Bush was too busy eating anchovies and sardines and his baited breath kept people from wanting to be near him, so he didn't hear about OBL's plans.
Just a humorous heads-up to Nadin, since she's working as a reporter. It's a common error.
Doing their primary job, protecting the warmonger's pimply backside.
[font size="1"]Professional Liar by susan m hinckley.[/font size]
Honestly, there should be a media boycott in this country until they start to function as outlined in the First Amendment.
[font size="1"]Professional Liar by susan m hinckley.[/font size]
Honestly, there should be a media boycott in this country until they start to function as outlined in the First Amendment.
Great thread. Thanks Octafish!
TYY
here's a screen shot of a 'google news'
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