Report: Intelligence Unit Told Before 9/11 to Stop Tracking Bin Laden

According to the narrative in the IG report, a previous JFIC deputy director of intelligence said that the JFIC commander, identified elsewhere in the report as Capt. Janice Dundas, US Navy, "directed him to stop tracking Usama Bin Ladin. The Commanding Officer stated that the tracking of Usama Bin Ladin did not fall within JFIC's mission." At the same time, JFIC analysis of purported Afghanistan "terrorist training camps" was also curtailed, with an explanation that such activities were outside the agency's Area of Operations and "that the issues where not in JFIC's swim lane."

According to the report, the Asymmetric Threats Division was "realigned" in summer 2001 under the "Intelligence Watch Center." The Intelligence Watch Center may be the Combined Intelligence Watch Center associated with NORAD, which is an "indications and warning center for worldwide threats from space, missile and strategic air activity, as well as geopolitical unrest that could affect North America and US forces/interests abroad." This would be consistent with the work DO5 did with the JTF-CS.

In addition, IRON MAN's allegations also included charges that the JFIC and specifically DO5, had developed information that the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were the most likely domestic targets of an al-Qaeda attack. The IG report disputes this and claims, with less than definitive assurance, "Evidence indicated that the JFIC did not have knowledge regarding imminent domestic targets prior to 9/11 or specific 9/11 hijacker operations."

The IG report indicated that IG investigators spoke with a number of key ranking JFIC personnel, as well as the previous USJFCOM director of intelligence, the JFIC Commanding Officer and personnel from the Asymmetric Threat Division.

Earlier this year, a blogger, Susie Dow, who has been following the story of Kirk von Ackermann , a US Army contractor in Iraq who disappeared on the road between Tikrit and Kirkuk in October 2003, asserted that von Ackermann had earlier belonged to JFIC's Asymmetric Threat Division. Von Ackermann's vehicle was found by the side of the road with a computer and a briefcase containing $40,000 in cash. An Army Criminal Investigative Division investigation later concluded that he was the victim of a probable kidnapping, while rumors persisted that he was possibly going to blow the whistle on DoD corruption.

An associate of von Ackermann, Ryan Manelick, a former Air Force Intelligence officer, was shot and killed outside a US military base near Baghdad two months later. Manelick had earlier told various people that he was in fear for his life. Both von Ackermann and Manelick worked for the contractor Ultra Services, based in Turkey. No particular link between von Ackermann or Manelick and the IRON MAN allegations has ever been proposed.

DoD Inspector General: Intel Agency Ordered to Stop Pre-9/11 Tracking of Bin Laden

By: Jeff Kaye

The whole story is over at Truthout, but I wanted to highlight the main points, and explain why this has any importance right now.

I wrote the story because the information came across my desk, so to speak, and while the 2008 Defense Department Inspector General report has been in the public domain for over a year now (see this page at Secrecy News), it was never really closely analyzed, and hardly ever noted in the press. Not one major paper has ever mentioned it. But since it involves charges regarding intelligence agencies and Osama bin Laden, much in the news as regards what was known and not known about his location and movements, I thought it worth reporting.

snip

Okay… so why am I hashing over this 9/11 and Bin Laden business? It’s really quite simple. Here we are almost ten years out from 9/11, and you are just reading for the first time about a military intelligence unit that was pulled off from tracking a major terrorist wanted by the United States, and a whistleblower — who ended up writing to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence when the DoD IG wouldn’t move on his complaint for over a year — from within the IC (IRON MAN is apparently now at DIA, his career apparently not suffering for his whistleblowing) who is saying DoD components of the IC withheld information on Al Qaeda from Congress and the 9/11 Commission.

I don’t think the implications of this story are only about 9/11. I write primarily about the torture scandal, trying to uncover what I can about the actual parameters of the torture program. What strikes me is this: how very, very little we actually know — how much we are limited by access, secrecy, lies, and normative obeisance to a mainstream narrative (of which I’m as guilty as anybody) such that it’s not even clear that our investigations are headed in the right direction or not.

snip

It’s not just 9/11, or torture, or investigating BP, the Koch brothers, the mysterious deaths at Guantanamo, or any particular one thing: the public’s need-to-know groans under a burden of ignorance and over-reliance on leaks from governmental officials who themselves are sworn to secrecy, or are invested with spinning history in a particular fashion. I can’t know the ultimate significance of the JFIC/DO5/Bin Laden story. It might be important, or merely a small side note. But we literally don’t know enough. The Obama administration promised to be open and transparent, but it has erected a wall of “state secrets” to cover up the crimes of previous administrations, and intimidate those who would try to ferret out the truth.

http://my.firedoglake.com/valtin/2011/05/24/dod-inspector-general-intel-agency-ordered-to-stop-pre-911-tracking-of-bin-laden/

Daniel Ellsberg: “Secrets ... Can Be Kept Reliably ... For Decades … Even Though They Are Known to THOUSANDS of Insiders”


Proving a claim of conspiracy is no different from proving any other legal claim, and the mere label "conspiracy" is taken no less seriously by judges.

Indeed, even Obama's information tzar - who advocates using the power of the state to shut down talk of conspiracies - admits:

Some conspiracy theories, under our definition, have turned out to be true ... The Watergate hotel room used by Democratic National Committee was, in fact, bugged by Republican officials, operating at the behest of the White House. In the 1950s, the CIA did, in fact, administer LSD and related drugs under Project MKULTRA, in an effort to investigate the possibility of 'mind control.'”

Can't Hide It

Those accusing Goldman Sachs, Dick Cheney or some other powerful people of conspiring to enrich their interests are often met with the argument that "someone would have spilled the beans" if there had really been a conspiracy.

But famed whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg explains:

It is a commonplace that "you can't keep secrets in Washington" or "in a democracy, no matter how sensitive the secret, you're likely to read it the next day in the New York Times." These truisms are flatly false. They are in fact cover stories, ways of flattering and misleading journalists and their readers, part of the process of keeping secrets well. Of course eventually many secrets do get out that wouldn't in a fully totalitarian society. But the fact is that the overwhelming majority of secrets do not leak to the American public. This is true even when the information withheld is well known to an enemy and when it is clearly essential to the functioning of the congressional war power and to any democratic control of foreign policy. The reality unknown to the public and to most members of Congress and the press is that secrets that would be of the greatest import to many of them can be kept from them reliably for decades by the executive branch, even though they are known to thousands of insiders.

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/05/daniel-ellsberg-secrets-can-be-kept.html
(and more embedded links in the original)