The Road to 9/11 and Beyond

[Bronco_Beerslug]

This sounds like an accurate read on who bin laden and al-Zawahiri really are and why we (the U.S. government) screwed this up.

-----------------------------------------------------------

The road to 9/11 and beyond

In a riveting new book that ranges from ancient Mecca to the corridors of the FBI, Lawrence Wright brings to life the fanatics behind 9/11 -- and the turf wars that caused U.S. intelligence to miss it.

Editor's note: This article continues a Salon series exploring the impact of 9/11 five years after the attacks.

By Mark Follman

Aug. 30, 2006 | Five years later we are still sifting through the rubble. Newly released recordings of frantic phone calls from those trapped inside the Twin Towers remind us the wounds are still raw. The airline terror plot foiled in London reminds us we are still vulnerable. With national security again the central fault line for approaching elections, a familiar rhetoric of fear keeps us mired in the politics of a war with no apparent end. And the long discussion goes on -- not only about the origins and lessons of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, but about the U.S. military ventures and global spasms of violence that have followed.

Lawrence Wright's remarkable new book, "The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11," illuminates that discussion like no volume before it. Wright synthesizes an array of figures and events into a riveting tableau. He traces al-Qaida's strategic conception and ideological evolution, born of smoldering dissident movements from Egypt to Pakistan. He casts aside the cartoonish mug shot of a madman who provoked a global war to reveal Osama bin Laden in his many achievements, failures and contradictions. And he uncovers an intricate and astonishing tale of how myopia and infighting among U.S. intelligence agencies almost certainly blinded them to the plot that would plunge hijacked planes into the Twin Towers, Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania. The book is a feat of exhaustive reporting and research, yet reads like a novel, thanks to Wright's vivid prose and instinct for dramatic detail.

There is already a library's worth of books available on how the 9/11 attacks were conceived and carried out, and on the scattered attempts by U.S. officials to stop them. But Wright delves deeper, stitching together the key personalities of the epic event. Along with bin Laden, they include Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian medical doctor turned fanatic who would become a deeply influential and indispensable second-in-command to bin Laden; and John O'Neill, a conflicted FBI counterterrorism chief obsessed with the Islamic terrorist threat, who would leave the bureau in August 2001 only to perish in the attacks as the head of private security for the World Trade Center.

Wright, a longtime staff writer at the New Yorker, builds his tale of these men on hundreds of interviews with their family members, childhood friends and professional associates; extensive travel through the Middle East, Asia and Europe; and a library-sized bibliography of his own, including key primary source materials translated from the Arabic. In scrutinizing these figures, he humanizes them, showing us their quirks, strengths and flaws. We see how distant adversaries mirror each other, their respective organizations at times reeling from vicious infighting, at others galvanized by renegade leadership. The illumination of these men in their complexity clarifies our sense of the people and politics that detonated the seminal event of our time.

At the heart of Wright's wide-ranging narrative is America's arch nemesis. "One can ask whether 9/11 or some similar tragedy might have happened without bin Laden to steer it," he says. "The answer is certainly not." Wright argues that by the close of the millennium, after a string of al-Qaida attacks against U.S. and allied interests abroad, "the tectonic plates of history were certainly shifting, promoting a period of conflict between the West and the Arab Muslim world; however, the charisma and vision of a few individuals shaped the nature of this contest." While there were provincial militant Islamist movements blooming across the Middle East, Wright emphasizes that it was bin Laden's vision to create an internationalist jihadi corps.

It would be easy enough to look at the victories and defeats of bin Laden's career, and his evolving worldview, and see the specter of a madman behind 9/11. "But there was also artistry involved," Wright declares with a hint of admiration, "not only to achieve the spectacular effect but also to enlist the imagination of the men whose lives bin Laden required."

By exposing al-Qaida's clash with America, Wright also helps us see the road beyond it. His work reminds us that the consequences of the Iraq war, massive deficit spending on security and the military, and the degradation of America's moral standing fit bin Laden's goals. Indeed, when his terrorist organization officially trained its mass-murderous sights on the United States in the early 1990s, Wright explains, "al-Qaeda's duty was to awaken the Islamic nation to the threat posed by the secular, modernizing West. In order to do that, bin Laden told his men, al-Qaeda would drag the United States into a war with Islam -- 'a large-scale front which it cannot control.'"

Five years after the attacks, the United States may still be unable to track down bin Laden, but Wright helps us continue to track down who he really is. His portrait of the elusive Kalashnikov-toting terrorist builds on an already well-documented background. As a young man, bin Laden held a post in his family's Saudi Arabian construction empire. He later enjoyed high-level contacts in the CIA and Saudi royal family as a jihadi leader in Afghanistan's war against the Soviets. By the early 1990s, living in exile in Sudan, he ran a sizable farming operation while cultivating followers for his nascent war on the West.

Though bin Laden had a piece of the family fortune, Wright explains that he was a lousy businessman. In his early years as a jihadi, "he was not politically sophisticated," but he was generous and tireless. Even so, "bin Laden did not make much of an impression as a charismatic leader," Wright says. "He was shy and serious, and he struck many as naive."

That would seem to belie the savvy and vision of a man who had long shaped aspects of his life after the prophet Mohammed's -- a man who, in Wright's view, would come to use political and religious mythmaking "brilliantly" in the service of his ominous cause.

Next page: The rise of al-Qaida -- and its high-tech headquarters in a cave (http://www.salon.com/books/review/2006/08/30/looming_tower/index1.html)
Pages 1 2 (http://www.salon.com/books/review/2006/08/30/looming_tower/index1.html) 3 (http://www.salon.com/books/review/2006/08/30/looming_tower/index2.html)

[Bronco_Beerslug]

Over the last several years, through captured al-Qaida documents, court proceedings and various news investigations, a clearer picture has emerged of the complex organization bin Laden and his top lieutenant, Zawahiri, nurtured in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Wright pulls the many fascinating details together. Al-Qaida lieutenants had advanced educational and professional backgrounds -- they were university graduates, teachers, engineers, soldiers. On arrival at the training camps, new recruits filled out forms in triplicate and signed an oath of loyalty. They received a monthly salary, vacation time and health benefits.

Al-Qaida also developed a constitution and bylaws, including a recommendation that its leader have "at least seven years of jihad experience and preferably a college degree." There was an advisory council and a budget plan. "One can appreciate the ambition of al-Qaeda by looking at the bureaucratic structure, which included committees devoted to military affairs, politics, information, administration, security and surveillance," Wright says. "The military committee had subsections devoted to training, operations, research, and nuclear weapons."

The organization arose from the rubble of the Afghan-Soviet war, where bin Laden had made his name among the fighting faithful. Wright traces al-Qaida's inception back to a 1988 meeting in Peshawar, Pakistan, attended by a consortium of jihad heavyweights who shared Afghanistan experience more than they did ideological views. Citing court documents and two men he communicated with who allegedly attended the meeting, Wright reports that "a vote was taken to form a new organization aimed at keeping jihad alive after the Soviets were gone."

Although bin Laden and Zawahiri had been rivals seeking control of a broader Islamist movement, they joined forces for good in Pakistan by the mid-1990s. Wright argues al-Qaida could not have emerged without their union. "Each man filled a need in the other," he says. "Zawahiri wanted money and contacts, which bin Laden had in abundance. Bin Laden, an idealist given to causes, sought direction; Zawahiri, a seasoned propagandist, supplied it." Zawahiri had wanted to ignite a revolution in Egypt, while bin Laden was focused on expelling foreign infidels from Muslim lands. "The dynamic of the two men's relationship made Zawahiri and bin Laden into people they would never have been individually," Wright argues. "Moreover, the organization they would create, al-Qaeda, would be a vector of these two forces, one Egyptian and one Saudi. Each would have to compromise in order to accommodate the goals of the other; as a result, al-Qaeda would take a unique path, that of global jihad."

While bin Laden had been banished from Saudi Arabia, kicked out of his sanctuary in Sudan, and had few places left to go, Wright suggests that his final migration to the caves of Afghanistan in 1996 was as much a stroke of propagandistic brilliance as a move of necessity. By then bin Laden was on the run and had been stripped of most of his wealth. The cave, Wright says, became the primary symbol of his hijira, or retreat, likening bin Laden's plight to that of the prophet Mohammed, who, centuries before, had been ostracized and expelled from Mecca. In the year 622, the prophet fled to Medina, where he took refuge in a cave. It was a historic turning point, Wright observes: Within a few years Islam "burst out of Medina and spread from Spain to China in a blinding flash of conversion and conquest."

Bin Laden's move, Wright says, was emblematic of his "public-relations genius." Only by retreating from modernity and the corruption of society could bin Laden presume to speak for "the true Islam" and those who longed to restore its purity and dominion. "Inside the chrysalis of myth that he had spun about himself," Wright says, "he was becoming a representative of all persecuted and humiliated Muslims."

Bin Laden forged that myth despite some stark contradictions. Never mind that the former construction magnate had built the Tora Bora cave complex with heavy modern machinery, or that he had outfitted it with computers, telecommunications gear and an archive of press clippings. His ascetic trappings and bitter diatribes were convincing enough to the world's subjugated and demoralized Muslims. As Wright says of bin Laden in his cave, "the mind that understood such symbolism and how it could be manipulated, was sophisticated and modern in the extreme."

Today, from Bush and Cheney speeches to the nation's Op-Ed pages, we continue to be bombarded with declarations about whether the al-Qaida faithful hate America for its freedoms or for its policies. Wright's work reveals that the answer, clearly, is both.

Bin Laden often emphasized his objection to the presence of U.S. troops on the Arabian peninsula, beginning with the Gulf War. He regularly demonized Israel and the United States as its prime benefactor. Nor were Arab allies of the United States exempt; he excoriated the corrupt Saudi regime, whose members continued their legendary indulgence in Western extravagance -- yachts, booze, women, gambling -- despite the acute inflation and unemployment ravaging the kingdom after the Gulf War. "How can you ask people to save power when everyone can see your enchanting palaces lit up night and day?" he demanded of King Fahd in August 1995. "Do we not have the right to ask you, O King, where has all the money gone? Never mind answering -- one knows how many bribes and commissions ended in your pocket."

Bin Laden knew how to further sow a crop of young, enraged jihadis in Saudi Arabia and other bankrupt societies of the Middle East. Increasingly, his fiery political dissent burned on a perversion of Islamic ideology, one obsessed with religious purification rather than any kind of governance.

Bin Laden had long harbored strict religious views of his own. But by the mid-1990s, Zawahiri -- who became both the operational and ideological mastermind of the organization, according to Wright -- was responsible for securing takfir, a doctrine of violent excommunication from Islam, at al-Qaida's visionary core. All those who did not adhere to their extremist conception of Sharia law were regarded as infidels punishable by death. Offenses included such Western behaviors as registering to vote. Despite some moral dissent in the ranks, Zawahiri apparently found bin Laden in agreement and successfully hard-wired the radical ideology into al-Qaida's strategy -- and with it the religious justification for a ghastly tactic: suicide bombing.

Wright describes the doctrine of takfir as a dark "mirror image of Islam, reversing its fundamental principles but maintaining the semblance of orthodoxy." Wiping out all offenders was no less than a religious obligation, and collateral damage, including women and children, was a non-issue. "The new takfiris believed that they were entitled to kill practically anyone and everyone who stood in their way," he says. "Indeed, they saw it as a divine duty."

Ultimately, that duty would lead to the indiscriminate slaughter of thousands in New York, who represented more than 60 nationalities and dozens of ethnicities and religions. "This battle is not between al-Qaeda and the U.S.," bin Laden declared in October 2001, lower Manhattan still smoldering. "This is a battle of Muslims against the global Crusaders." He also renewed his call for recruits: "These events have divided the whole world into two sides -- the side of believers and the side of infidels. Every Muslim has to rush to make his religion victorious."

This was indeed a theological war, Wright explains, and in bin Laden's eyes "the redemption of humanity was at stake."

Next page: "If this guy's in the country, it's not because he's going to f***ing Disneyland!" (http://www.salon.com/books/review/2006/08/30/looming_tower/index2.html)

[Bronco_Beerslug]

The title of Wright's book conjures an obvious image for Americans, but it is drawn from the other side of the divide. In a taped speech by bin Laden found on one of the 9/11 hijacker's computers, the terrorist leader's call to martyrdom included a quotation from the fourth sura of the Koran: "Wherever you are, death will find you, even in the looming tower."

What enabled the terrorists to fulfill their twisted religious mission -- on the American side -- is the other groundbreaking focus of the book.

The full story of how America's intelligence agencies failed to stop 19 men from turning four commercial jetliners into precision missiles may never be known. But enough details have surfaced to prompt the largest overhaul of the intelligence business since the United States first made it an institution during World War II. The turf wars among the CIA, FBI and NSA, long legendary to insiders, increasingly have come into public view over the last few years. The documented examples of bureaucratic infighting and politicization that allowed the 9/11 attacks to barrel forward are multiple and gut-wrenching. Wright adds to what's known of the tragedy largely from the perspective of the FBI.

Despite the bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and bin Laden's full-throated declarations of war on the United States, precious few FBI resources were devoted to the Islamic terror threat. Then, in October 2000, when suicide bombers killed 17 American sailors, wounded 39 others and nearly sank the U.S.S. Cole off the coast of Yemen, John O'Neill, head of the FBI's National Security Division, dispatched dozens of agents. Led by O'Neill's star protégé, a young Lebanese-American agent named Ali Soufan (whose story was first excerpted in the New Yorker in July), the FBI soon linked the bombing to al-Qaida.

Soufan, who Wright describes as "a highly caffeinated talker, with a hint of Lebanon," was one of only eight Arabic-speaking investigators working for the FBI in late 2000. He had earned a master's degree in international relations before signing up. As Wright tells it, Soufan's expert interrogation of suspects in Yemen -- using empathy, smarts and knowledge of the Koran, rather than any kind of harsh physical abuse -- is alone a powerful argument for targeting terrorists with the traditional tactics of American law enforcement. Not only did Soufan crack open the Cole case, he was also closing in on at least two of the future 9/11 hijackers -- though he would come up excruciatingly short. It may have stood as America's best chance, Wright concludes, to stop the attacks on New York and Washington.

The failure was not for lack of effort by Soufan; he and other FBI investigators could sense they were on to an operation that reached beyond Yemen. Wright attributes the failure in part to the infamous "wall," the mandate that blocked the sharing of information between U.S. intelligence gatherers and criminal investigators, pinning the agencies in a state of dangerous disharmony.

In Wright's telling, the wall led to fatal duplicity on the part of the CIA, which jealously guarded its sources and methods from the by-the-book FBI. In Yemen, Soufan was on the trail of an al-Qaida figure closely connected with Nawaf al-Hamzi and Khaled al-Mihdhar, two Saudi-born al-Qaida operatives who would later help seize planes on 9/11. The CIA had surveillance photos of all three men together from an al-Qaida summit in Malaysia the previous January, but when Soufan came knocking for information, the CIA slammed the door shut. It was part of what Wright calls "a bizarre trend in the U.S. government to hide information from the people who most needed it."

The highly secretive National Security Agency, which was monitoring a pivotal al-Qaida phone number in Yemen that could have helped track Hamzi and Mihdhar, was as possessive of its information as the CIA, and equally unhelpful. Ironically, FBI agents investigating the 1998 embassy bombings had found the pivotal phone number in the first place. "This Yemeni telephone number would prove to be one of the most important pieces of information the FBI would ever discover," Wright says, "allowing investigators to map the links of the al-Qaeda network all across the globe."

Nevertheless, monitoring international calls was the NSA's turf. Even more bizarre than the lack of cooperation was the FBI's efforts to circumvent the NSA to get what it sensed was under its nose. Seeking signals intelligence of their own, the frustrated FBI agents constructed a satellite telephone booth in Kandahar, Afghanistan, hoping to lure in international jihadis looking to call home. In Madagascar, they erected an antenna to intercept the calls of Khaled Sheik Mohammed, who would serve as the tactical chief of the 9/11 plot. As Wright explains, "Millions of dollars and thousands of hours of labor were consumed in replicating information that the U.S. government already had but refused to share."

Still more astonishing, the CIA chose not to inform FBI investigators once they knew, by summer 2001, that Hamzi and Mihdhar had entered the United States. The FBI had an intelligence liaison with the CIA's "Alec Station" devoted to hunting bin Laden, but "the wall" still stood in the way. Even though another FBI analyst, Dina Corsi, was made aware of the information, she wasn't allowed to share it with the criminal investigators in her own agency.

By late August 2001, it did reach one of them, an FBI agent working with Soufan named Steve Bongardt -- when an urgent e-mail from Corsi was accidentally copied to him. Bongardt, one of several FBI sources Wright interviewed, called Corsi on the phone, incredulous. "Dina, you got to be kidding me! Mihdhar is in the country?" Following orders from on high, Corsi told him he had to delete the e-mail.

The next day, in a phone call with Corsi and a CIA supervisor from Alec Station, Bongardt was again told to "stand down" from any effort to track Mihdhar. Bongardt insisted that the intelligence should be shared, and that the wall was a misguided bureaucratic construction that was hurting the agents' mission. "If this guy's in the country, it's not because he's going to ****ing Disneyland!" he said. In a follow-up e-mail to Corsi, he said, "someday somebody will die -- and wall or not, the public will not understand why we were not more effective."

Wright reports that several of his FBI sources strongly believed that the CIA shut them out because the CIA was interested in recruiting Mihdhar and Hamzi, having never been able to penetrate al-Qaida with an agent. If the FBI collared the two as terrorist suspects, the opportunity to recruit them as agents would have been lost to the more transparent criminal investigative process. The nearly 3,000 lives lost on 9/11, Wright suggests, was the net result of the CIA's strategy.

Perhaps. In his notes at the end of the book, Wright cautions that a story drawn from even the most exhaustive reporting in the realm of terrorism and espionage -- including opaque documents subject to translation, and interviews with spooks, ex-jihadis, politicians and international businessmen -- must be carefully digested. We know the FBI had other opportunities to thwart the plot, and surely there were other pivotal moments in the catacombs of U.S. agencies on which light may never shine.

The same must be true about the men and machinations of al-Qaida. A number of its key members are reportedly still being held in secret by the U.S. government. A complete history of al-Qaida and the global war it helped unleash, Wright proposes, cannot be told until they are allowed to talk. In the meantime, he has given us a touchstone for mapping the road to 9/11, and the one that continues beyond.

http://www.salon.com/books/review/2006/08/30/looming_tower/index.html

[W*GS]

I'm disappointed.

Where's all the information showing how OBL is actually a CIA stooge, and where's the copy of the memo signed by Bush authorizing this "new Pearl Harbor" operation to be activated?

At the least, I wanna see the receipt for the thermite purchased to help implode the WTC towers - all three of 'em.

Sarcasm aside, looks like a good book.

[The Lone Bolt]

This sounds like an accurate read on who bin laden and al-Zawahiri really are and why we (the U.S. government) screwed this up.

-----------------------------------------------------------
And he uncovers an intricate and astonishing tale of how myopia and infighting among U.S. intelligence agencies almost certainly blinded them to the plot that would plunge hijacked planes into the Twin Towers, Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania.


But . . . but . . . but . . . didn't you hear? It was all a conspiracy! The 9-11 attacks were orchestrated by the federal government! A handfull of conspiracy theorists proved it!

The author of this book is PART OF THE CONSPIRACY! That's the only logical expanation for what he is saying!!

And if you don't believe this you're just NAIVE!!


;)



:rofl: Hilarious! ROFL! :rofl: Hilarious! ROFL!

[mhgaffney]

The full story of how America's intelligence agencies failed to stop 19 men from turning four commercial jetliners into precision missiles may never be known. But enough details have surfaced to prompt the largest overhaul of the intelligence business since the United States first made it an institution during World War II. The turf wars among the CIA, FBI and NSA, long legendary to insiders, increasingly have come into public view over the last few years. The documented examples of bureaucratic infighting and politicization that allowed the 9/11 attacks to barrel forward are multiple and gut-wrenching.

Despite the bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and bin Laden's full-throated declarations of war on the United States, precious few FBI resources were devoted to the Islamic terror threat. Then, in October 2000, when suicide bombers killed 17 American sailors, wounded 39 others and nearly sank the U.S.S. Cole off the coast of Yemen, John O'Neill, head of the FBI's National Security Division, dispatched dozens of agents. Led by O'Neill's star protégé, a young Lebanese-American agent named Ali Soufan (whose story was first excerpted in the New Yorker in July), the FBI soon linked the bombing to al-Qaida.

Wright attributes the failure in part to the infamous "wall," the mandate that blocked the sharing of information between U.S. intelligence gatherers and criminal investigators, pinning the agencies in a state of dangerous disharmony.

It was part of what Wright calls "a bizarre trend in the U.S. government to hide information from the people who most needed it."

As Wright explains, "Millions of dollars and thousands of hours of labor were consumed in replicating information that the U.S. government already had but refused to share."

Still more astonishing, the CIA chose not to inform FBI investigators once they knew, by summer 2001, that Hamzi and Mihdhar had entered the United States.


Some times a partial truth is worse than a falsehood.

We've all heard about the turf wars, the lack of funding, the "bizarre" diysfunctionality of the intelligence agencies, but these are canards and serve only to cover up the fundamental reality.

911 was not caused by the failure of the US security agencies. It was caused by political directives and interference from above.

Bush's first official act regarding national security was taken on Feb 13, 2001 when the prez issued a national security directive that essentially dissolved the previously existing channels of cooperation between CIA, NSA, FBI etc. The directive declared that hereafter the responsibility for interagency cooperatioon/coordination would be assumed by the White House, in particular, the office of Condi Rice.

The key sentence in the directive reads as follows: "The existing system of interagency working groups is abolished"

I will elaborate this in more detail in an upcoming thread. MG

source: THE WA

[mhgaffney]

source: THE WAR ON TRUTH by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed

[W*GS]

Thanks for chiming in, mhgaffney. Too bad I already beat you to it:

http://www.orangemane.com/BB/showpost.php?p=1248750&postcount=4

[Rohirrim]

source: THE WAR ON TRUTH by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed

If you like Oliver Stone, you'll love this book.

[The Lone Bolt]

Some times a partial truth is worse than a falsehood.

We've all heard about the turf wars, the lack of funding, the "bizarre" diysfunctionality of the intelligence agencies, but these are canards and serve only to cover up the fundamental reality.

911 was not caused by the failure of the US security agencies. It was caused by political directives and interference from above.

Bush's first official act regarding national security was taken on Feb 13, 2001 when the prez issued a national security directive that essentially dissolved the previously existing channels of cooperation between CIA, NSA, FBI etc. The directive declared that hereafter the responsibility for interagency cooperatioon/coordination would be assumed by the White House, in particular, the office of Condi Rice.

The key sentence in the directive reads as follows: "The existing system of interagency working groups is abolished"

I will elaborate this in more detail in an upcoming thread. MG

source: THE WA

Here's what I found:

Context of 'February 13, 2001'
This page shows all events that either reference, or are referenced by, the event 'February 13, 2001'.


February 13, 2001: Interagency Counterterrorism Communications Now Channeled Through Rice President Bush issues a little-noticed directive that dramatically changes the way information flows among top Bush administration officials. It states that attendees of National Security Council (NSC) meetings shall continue to include the president, vice president, secretary of state, treasury secretary, defense secretary, CIA director, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, and assistant to the president for national security affairs. However, other officials, including the “heads of other executive departments and agencies, as well as other senior officials” are excluded from the automatic right to attend NSC meetings. Instead, they “shall be invited to attend meetings of the NSC when appropriate.” National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice is given a pivotal position. In addition to attending all NSC meetings, she is responsible for determining the agenda of all the meetings. The directive also states, “The existing system of Interagency Working Groups is abolished.” Instead, Rice will coordinate a series of eleven new interagency coordination committees within the NSC. She is designated the executive secretary of all eleven committees, meaning that she will schedule the meetings and determine agendas. She is made chairperson of six of the committees, including “Counter-Terrorism and National Preparedness,” “Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence,” and “Records Access and Information Security.” Professor Margie Burns will later ask rhetorically, “How could the White House ever have thought that abolishing the interagency work groups was a good idea, if security was the objective? Why was so much responsibility placed on the shoulders of one person, Condoleezza Rice, whose [only] previous experience had been at Stanford University and Chevron?”

http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a021301ricechannel

Does seem like a dumb move in retrospect. Obviously this reorganization wasn't effective. But perhaps this is covered in Mr Wright's book? You seem to be sure that it isn't without actually reading it.

[The Lone Bolt]

Found a link to the actual directive:

http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nspd/nspd-1.htm

Here's the complete quote from what you quoted above mhgaffney:

The existing system of Interagency Working Groups is abolished.


The oversight of ongoing operations assigned in PDD/NSC-56 to Executive Committees of the Deputies Committee will be performed by the appropriate regional NSC/PCCs, which may create subordinate working groups to provide coordination for ongoing operations.

The Counter-Terrorism Security Group, Critical Infrastructure Coordination Group, Weapons of Mass Destruction Preparedness, Consequences Management and Protection Group, and the interagency working group on Enduring Constitutional Government are reconstituted as various forms of the NSC/PCC on Counter-Terrorism and National Preparedness.

The duties assigned in PDD/NSC-75 to the National Counterintelligence Policy Group will be performed in the NSC/PCC on Intelligence and Counterintelligence, meeting with appropriate attendees.

The duties assigned to the Security Policy Board and other entities established in PDD/NSC-29 will be transferred to various NSC/PCCs, depending on the particular security problem being addressed.

The duties assigned in PDD/NSC-41 to the Standing Committee on Nonproliferation will be transferred to the PCC on Proliferation, Counterproliferation, and Homeland Defense.

The duties assigned in PDD/NSC-35 to the Interagency Working Group for Intelligence Priorities will be transferred to the PCC on Intelligence and Counterintelligence.

The duties of the Human Rights Treaties Interagency Working Group established in E.O. 13107 are transferred to the PCC on Democracy, Human Rights, and International Operations.

The Nazi War Criminal Records Interagency Working Group established in E.O. 13110 shall be reconstituted, under the terms of that order and until its work ends in January 2002, as a Working Group of the NSC/PCC for Records Access and Information Security.

Except for those established by statute, other existing NSC interagency groups, ad hoc bodies, and executive committees are also abolished as of March 1, 2001, unless they are specifically reestablished as subordinate working groups within the new NSC system as of that date. Cabinet officers, the heads of other executive agencies, and the directors of offices within the Executive Office of the President shall advise the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs of those specific NSC interagency groups chaired by their respective departments or agencies that are either mandated by statute or are otherwise of sufficient importance and vitality as to warrant being reestablished. In each case the Cabinet officer, agency head, or office director should describe the scope of the activities proposed for or now carried out by the interagency group, the relevant statutory mandate if any, and the particular NSC/PCC that should coordinate this work. The Trade Promotion Coordinating Committee established in E.O. 12870 shall continue its work, however, in the manner specified in that order. As to those committees expressly established in the National Security Act, the NSC/PC and/or NSC/DC shall serve as those committees and perform the functions assigned to those committees by the Act.

Looks like a reorganizing, not necessarily an attempt to handicap intelligence services.

Do you have any evidence that handicapping intelligence was the goal of this reorganization?

[alkemical]

http://www.prisonplanet.com/omar_al_faruq_recruited_by_the_cia.htm

Omar Al-Faruq Recruited by The CIA
19 Sep 2002 20:19:19 WIB

TEMPO Interactive, Jakarta:Former State Intelligence Coordinating Board (BAKIN) chief A.C. Manulang has said that Kuwaitd citizen Omar Al-Faruq, a terrorist suspect who was arrested in Bogor, West Java, on June 5, 2002 and handed over to the US three days later, is a CIA-recruited agent.



http://www.vancourier.com/issues06/084206/opinion/084206op2.html

Doubt about official version of 9/11 widespread

By Geoff Olson

With the fifth anniversary of Sept 11 on the way, there will undoubtedly be a flood of television specials, terror-alert updates, and newspaper editorials. Yet a sizable portion of the public will likely remain dubious of the authorized version of 9/11.


http://www.nashuatelegraph.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060824/NEWS01/108240131/-1/business

GOP candidate says 9/11 attacks were a hoax

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

Twenty things we now know five years after 9/11

The imminent fifth anniversary of 9/11 provides the proper moment for a good, ol'-fashioned sum-up of the past half-decade under CheneyBush, especially because so much has happened in the past 12-months:

The Bush Administration's Katrina debacle, Iraq being sucked deeper into the civil-war vortex, Afghanistan turning once again into a major war theater, more and more military leaders speaking out about the disaster that is CheneyBush foreign policy, the defection of so many moderate conservatives from their GOP home, the plummeting of Bush's popularity to not much more than his fundamentalist base, the revelation that Bush&Co. have been spying on citizens' phone calls and emails without court warrants, the indictment of CheneyBush's chief aide Scooter Libby for obstruction of justice in the case of the White House's outing of a covert CIA agent, the "rendering" of detainees abroad for extreme torturing, etc. etc.

I'll get to the annual list in a moment. But first let's step back and take a deeper overview. Buckle your seat belts, here we go.

WHAT 9/11 PERMITTED BUSH TO DO

Whatever you may think of 9/11, and the extent of involvement of Bush&Co., it's crystal-clear that the events of that tragic day were and continue to be used as an excuse for a wide variety of immoral and illegal actions by the CheneyBush Administration. The radical agenda that was barely on the public's horizon five years ago has since become all too evident, both domestically and in terms of foreign/military policy, which is why so many traditional conservatives are abandoning the extremism of the Republican Party.

Launching a war against, and then occupying, Iraq is the most obvious foreign result of the 9/11 tragedy -- even though Bush has admitted several times that there was no connection between Iraq and 9/11, and no WMD either. In one of the worst strategic mistakes in modern American foreign policy, the war against the al-Qaida terrorists in Afghanistan was precipitously abandoned and U.S. troops were dispatched to Iraq, a country of no real threat to the U.S.

Domestically, the near-3000 deaths of 9/11 -- and, let us not forget, the spreading of deadly anthrax spores around the halls of Congress by someone still unknown -- led to the passage of the so-called "Patriot" Act. This collection of martial provisions gave the federal government and its agents unprecedented police power to violate the Constitution and Bill of Rights in its supposed hunt for terrorists. All this while very little has been done to actually make the country more secure, such as checking containers entering ports, improving security at nuclear and chemical plants, x-raying all air freight, and so on.

In short, Bush&Co. used and then grossly abused the awful events of 9/11 -- and continues to do so -- in order to expand and maintain power, to move aggressively in the world, to pay off corporate and wealthy-individual supporters through huge tax breaks (in the middle of a war!), to create a one-party system of government, to neuter the legislative and judicial branches and thus violate our time-honored checks-and-balances system that provides a brake on executive excesses, to amass more and more police powers in federal hands, to effectively control the mass-media and the vote-counting system in this country, etc. etc.

9/11 also gave Karl Rove the fear-tools with which to manipulate the populace whenever he wished. Rove knows he has a lock on about 1/3 of the electorate, the GOP's fundamentalist "base." In several elections since 9/11, he has revved up the fear machine by rolling out the required buzzwords (abortion, terrorists, gay marriage, the flag, illegal immigrants, Muslims, et al.) to cobble together enough support to "win" the elections, even if by the slimmest of margins. (In reference to those margins, election experts have found that there is enough statistical and experiential evidence to say with some confidence that in key states and regions, those balloting-results were fraudulently obtained.)

We'll talk some about what can be done to change the situation toward the end of this essay; right now, let's take a look at this year's compilation of what we now know five years after 9/11.

THE 9/11 LIST

1. The Facts of 9/11. We know that the Bush Administration didn't want the public to learn much, if anything, about the events of that day five years ago. Bush&Co. had to be dragged kicking and screaming into agreeing to the appointment of the official 9/11 Commission, and they named the executive director, one of their made men (now an Administration official).

As it turned out, the Administration wasn't all that cooperative in furnishing documents, Bush would not testify under oath and would deign to appear only with Cheney by his side (here's my imagined transcript of that testimony), and just recently we learned that the commission was so angered by the constantly-shifting stories told by the Pentagon/NORAD that they were ready to urge that legal charges be filed.

* We know that a growing number of academics and scientists hhave raised serious questions about the official government explanation of the 9/11 events, especially about whether the Twin Towers fell straight down on their own or were guided in that free-fall-speed path by pre-set explosives. Behind all these and other conspiracy theories rests a nagging suspicion among many Americans -- heightened by the admission that the Pentagon lied outright to the 9/11 Commission -- that the Bush Administration may have been complicit in helping orchestrate the 9/11 tragedies. (I do not accept much of that surmising, but until the Administration comes clean on a number of troublesome questions, Bush&Co. will always be, and justifiably so, under a cloud of suspicion for complicity. These questions include why the Secret Service didn't immediately grab Bush at that Florida school and get him on a plane, why NORAD fighter-jets were MIA on that fateful morning, why airline stocks were "shorted" just prior to the attacks. Click here for more info on 9/11 skeptic groups.


* We now know -- no matter what one believes about the Bush Administration's level of complicity in 9/11 -- that at the very least the inner Bush circle knew that a huge al-Qaida attack was coming in late-Summer/early-Fall, but they did absolutely nothing to prevent it or prepare the public for its consequences. They knew because fairly detailed, red-hot warnings about planes being used as weapons were supplied to the CheneyBush inner circle by numerous countries' intelligence services around the world. But CheneyBush didn't even call a meeting of involved advisors and counter-terrorism honchos to move on the intel they were getting. In short, Bush&Co. had advance word that something "spectacular" was about to go down, and, for their own reasons, did nothing. Indeed, when the CIA sent a briefer to Crawford, Texas, to go over the ominously-titled August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." -- which talked about N.Y. buildings being cased, preparations for hijacking of planes, terrorists in the U.S. with explosives, etc. -- Bush barely listened and then insultingly dismissed the briefer, saying "All right. You've covered your ass, now."


* We know that Bush&Co. saw, in Condi Rice's apt term at the time, the "opportunity" offered by the 9/11 attacks to move quickly and forcefully with the Administration's foreign and domestic agenda. PNAC talked about its Pax Americana plan for global "benevolent hegemony" taking forever to implement unless a "new Pearl Harbor" changed the equation in the public mind. 9/11 came along and served as that "new Pearl Harbor." (See "How We Got Into This Imperial Pickle: A PNAC Primer.)

2. PNAC & the Neo-Cons. We know that a FarRight segment of the conservative movement was dedicated to using America's sole superpower status to move aggressively in the world while no other country or international force could put up much resistance. The key neo-con leaders in charge of U.S. foreign/military policy (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Bolton, Perle, Khalilzad, et al.) were founders of, and affiliated with, The Project for The New American Century (PNAC).

The neo-cons realized that presidents enjoy enormous patriotic support during wartime, but when the war ends, those leaders lose their compelling luster, as was the case with Bush#1. Ergo, Bush#2 would become a PERMANENT wartime president, and those who opposed him could then be tarred forever with the "unpatriotic" brush, and their political opposition marginalized. And it worked: the Democrats cowered and gave Bush virtually everything he wanted, up until relatively recently, when occasionally they remember they have spines in their bodies and stand up and fight as an opposition party should.

3. Oil & the Politics of PNAC. We know that after 9/11, Bush seemed to bring the entire country along with him when he launched an attack on al-Qaida and its Taliban-government supporters in Afghanistan. But there's no oil in that destitute country -- and, as Rumsfeld reminded us, not much worth bombing -- and thus no lessons could be drawn by Middle East leaders from the U.S. attack. But, as Cheney's secret energy panel was aware, there was another country in the region that did have oil, and lots of it, and which could be taken easily by U.S. forces. Thus Iraq became the object-lesson to other autocratic leaders in the Middle East, especially in Syria and Iran: If you do not do our bidding, prepare to accept a massive dose of "shock&awe": You will be removed, replaced by democratic-looking governments as arranged by the U.S.

The neo-cons -- most of whom were members of PNAC and similar organizations, such as the American Enterprise Institute and Foundation for the Defense of Democracies -- had urged Clinton to depose Saddam Hussein in 1998, but he demurred, seeing a mostly contained dictator there, whereas Osama bin Laden, and those terrorists like him, actually were successfully attacking U.S. assets inside the country and abroad.

But the PNAC crowd had larger ambitions than simply toppling a brutal dictator. Among their other recommendations: "pre-emptively" attacking countries devoid of imminent danger to the U.S., abrogating agreed-upon treaties when they conflict with U.S. goals, making sure no other nation (or organization, such as the United Nations) can ever achieve power-parity with the U.S., installing U.S.-friendly governments to do America's will, expressing a willingness to use tactical nuclear weapons, and so on. All of these extreme PNAC suggestions, once regarded as lunatic, were enshrined in 2002 as official U.S. policy in the National Security Strategy of the United States of America and were renewed in Bush's 2004's National Security Strategy.

4. Sexing Up the Intel. We know that given the extreme nature of the neo-con agenda, the Bush Administration had their work cut out for them in fomenting support for an invasion and occupation of Iraq. Therefore, among the first moves by Rumsfeld following 9/11 was to somehow try to connect Saddam to the terror attacks. The various intelligence agencies reported to Rumsfeld that there was no Iraq connection to 9/11, that it was an al-Qaida operation, but those finds were merely bothersome impediments. Since the CIA and the other intelligence agencies would not, or could not, supply the intelligence needed to justify a war on Iraq, Rumsfeld set up his own rump "intelligence" agency, the Office of Special Plans, stocked it with political appointees of the PNAC persuasion and soon was stovepiping cherry-picked raw intel, much of it untrue from self-interested Iraqi exiles, straight to Cheney and others in the White House. Shortly thereafter, the White House Iraq Group -- the in-house marketing cabal, with such major players as Libby, Rove, Card, Rice, Hadley, Hughes, Matalin, et al. -- went big-time with the WMD and mushroom-cloud scares and the suspect melding of Saddam Hussein with the events of 9/11.

Based on this sexed-up and phony intelligence, Cheney, Bush, Rice, Rumsfeld and the others began warning about mushroom clouds over the U.S., drone planes dropping biological agents over the East Coast, huge stockpiles of chemical weapons in Iraq, etc. Secretary of State Colin Powell, regarded as the most believable of the bunch, was dispatched to the United Nations to make the case, which he did, reluctantly, by presenting an embarrassingly weak litany of surmise and concocted facts. While the U.S. mainstream media was unanimous in its opinion that Powell had cinched the case, the world didn't buy it (Powell, who resigned in 2004, has since lamented his role in this charade), and the opposition to the U.S. war plan was palpable and huge: 10 million citizens throughout the world hit the streets to protest, former allies publicly criticized Bush. Only Tony Blair in England eagerly hitched his wagon to the Bush war-plan with large numbers of troops dispatched, as it turned out over the objections of many of his closest aides and advisers.

5. The Downing Street Revelations. We know that those advisers warned Blair that he was about to involve the U.K. in an illegal, immoral and probably unwinnable war that would put U.K. and U.S. troops in great danger from potential insurgent forces. How do we know about these inner workings of the Blair government? Because someone from inside that body leaked the top-secret minutes from those war-Cabinet meetings, the so-called Downing Street Memos.

We also learned from those minutes that Bush & Blair agreed to make war on Iraq as early as the Spring of 2002. The intelligence, they decided, would be "fixed around the policy" to go to war, despite their telling their legislative bodies and their citizens that no decisions had been made. In fact, the Bush Administration had decided to go to war a year before the invasion. "**** Saddam," Bush told three U.S. Senators in March of 2002. "We're taking him out."

We know that many of Blair's most senior advisors thought the WMD argument rested on shaky ground, and that the legality of the war was in question without specific authorization from the United Nations Security Council. But the Bush Administration rushed to war anyway, in haste because the U.N. inspectors on the ground in Iraq were not finding any WMD stockpiles; the rush to war was accomplished without proper planning and with no workable plan to secure the peace and reconstruct the country after the major fighting. Some weeks later, Bush prematurely declared, under a "Mission Accomplished" banner, that the U.S. had "prevailed" in the Iraq war.

6. The Big Lie Technique & WMD. We know (again, thanks to the Downing Street Memos) that both the U.S. and U.K. were well aware that Iraq was a paper tiger, with no significant WMD stockpiles or link to Al-Qaida and the 9/11 attacks. Nevertheless, the major thrust of Bush&Co.'s justification for going to war was based on these non-existent weapons and 9/11 links. The Big Lie Technique, repeating the same falsehoods over and over and over, drummed those lies into our heads day after day, month after month, with little if any skeptical analysis by the corporate mainstream media, which marched mostly in lockstep with Bush policy and thinking. Wolfowitz admitted later that they chose WMD as the primary reason for making war because they couldn't agree on anything else the citizenry would accept. But frightening people with talk of nuclear weapons, mushroom clouds, toxins delivered by drone airplanes and the like would work like a charm. And so they did, convincing the American people and Congress that an attack was justified. It wasn't.

7. Iran Is Beneficiary of U.S. Policy. We know that the real reasons for invading Iraq had precious little to do with WMD, with Islamist terrorists inside that country, with installing democracy, and the like. There were no WMD to speak of, and Saddam, an especially vicious dictator, did not tolerate religious or political zealots of any stripe. No, the reasons had more to do with American geopolitical goals in the region involving oil, control, support for its ally Israel, hardened military bases and keeping Iran from having free rein in the region.

However, as it turned out, by invading and occupying Iraq, it removed the one buffer against the expansion of Iran's political and military power in the region; in addition, because the U.S. Occupation was so incompetently carried out, it pushed Iraq and Iran into a far closer religious and political alliance than would have been the case if Saddam had been permitted to remain in power. CheneyBush may have sacrificed thousands of American dead, tens of thousands of American wounded, and more than 100,000 Iraqis as "collateral damage" -- and now the Administration is quietly willing to accept an Islamist government that may well turn out to be more attuned to Teheran than to Washington.

8. Iraq As a Disaster Zone. We know that Bush's war has been a thorough disaster, built on a foundation of lies, and bunglingly managed from the start. As a result, the Occupation has provided a magnet for jihadists from other countries, billions have been wasted or lost in the corrupt system of organized corporate looting that ostensibly is designed to speed up Iraq's "reconstruction," etc. etc. Indeed, so much has Bush's war been botched that the "realists" in the Administration know the U.S. must get out as quickly as possible if they are to have any hope of exercising their considerable muscle elsewhere in the Middle East. But, so far, the neo-con strategy still rules, and "stay-the-course" remains the operating principle.

9. The Stretched-Thin Military Needs Bodies. We know that Bush's Middle East agenda also is suffering because the U.S. military is spread way thin in Afghanistan and Iraq, the desertion rates are high, soldiers are not re-enlisting at the usual clip, recruitment isn't working and illegal scams are being used to lure youngsters into signing up. In short, there are no forces to spare on the ground. Either a military draft will be instituted -- and the recent call up of thousands of ready-reserve Marines is a draft by a different name -- or all future attacks will have to come from air power or from missiles, which will merely deliver a message. The air attacks will result in making the citizens of those countries even angrier at America, and with little likelihood of success in forging U.S.-friendly "democratic" governments in Iran, Syria, et al., since the bombed populations will support their existing governments. In short, America's and Israel's failures in Iraq and Lebanon demonstrate the limits of highly-armed powers in the modern, nationalist-guerrillas world.

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

(Continued)

10. Hiding the Facts from the Public. We know that Bush&Co. made sure that there would be no full-scale, independent probes of their role in using and abusing the intelligence that led to war on Iraq. This is the most secretive Administration in American history, and they want no investigations of any of their mistakes or corruptions of the democratic process.

The Senate Intelligence Committee, led by Republican Pat Roberts, held hearings on the failures lower down the chain, namely at the CIA and FBI level, and promised there would be followup hearings on any White House manipulation of intelligence. But, following the 2004 election, Roberts said no purpose would be served in launching such an investigation. Likewise, the 9/11 Commission did not delve deeply into how the Bush Administration misused its pre-9/11 knowledge. In short, this secretive administration made sure that everything was done to head off at the pass any investigations whatsoever.

11. Perilously Close to Dictatorship. We know that Bush has no great love for legitimate democratic processes, certainly not inside the United States. (On at least three occasions, he has "jokingly" expressed his preference for dictatorship, as long, he said, as he can be the dictator.) He much prefers to rule as an oligarch, but to do that, he had to invent legal justifications that he could claim granted him the requisite power. So he had his longtime lawyer-toady, Alberto Gonzales, devise a legal philosophy that permits Bush to do pretty much what he wants -- ignore laws on the books, disappear U.S. citizens into military prisons, authorize torture, spy on citizens' phone calls and emails, etc. -- whenever Bush says he's acting as "commander-in-chief" during "wartime."

And, since "wartime" is the amorphous "war on terror," from which there is no end, Bush is home free. There always will be terrorists trying to do anti-U.S. damage somewhere around the globe, or inside America, and the "commander-in-chief" will need to respond. Ergo, goes this logic, Bush is above the law, untouchable, in perpetuity. Bush&Co. also made sure that U.S. officials and military troops would not be subject to indictment by any international court or war-crimes tribunal.

Neither Gonzales, nor Bush, has disavowed this legal philosophy of a dictator-like President being beyond the reach of the law. No doubt the issue ultimately will be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court, to which Bush has appointed ultra-conservative Judges John Roberts and Samuel Alito. In a chilling decision, the appeals panel, of which Roberts was a member prior to his ascension to the Supremes, ruled that the Commander-in-Chief's arbitrarily-designated "enemies" are non-persons, with no legal rights. Bush now feels free to subject anyone he likes to the "military tribunal" system he has concocted; even the Court's recent objections to the tribunal system has had little effect on day-to-day violations of detainees' rights, as Bush&Co. always manage to postpone and delay implementation or find ways around the court rulings.

12. Torture As Official U.S. Policy. We know that Gonzales, then Bush's White House Counsel, and Pentagon lawyers beholden to Rumsfeld, devised legal rationales that make torture of suspects official state policy. These Bush-loyalist lawyers also greatly widened the definition of what is acceptable interrogation practice -- basically anything this side of death or terminally abusing internal organs. They also authorized the "rendering" of key suspects to countries specializing in extreme torture. After all this, Bush and Rumsfeld professed shock, shock!, that those under their command would wind up torturing, abusing and humiliating prisoners in U.S. care. But the Administration made sure to stop all inquiries into higher-up responsibility for the endemic torture. The buck never stops on Bush's desk -- if something goes wrong (and he never will admit to mistakes), it's always someone else's fault.

13. The Bill of Rights Goes "Quaint." We know that the Bush Administration has been able to obtain whatever legislation it needs in its self-proclaimed "war on terror" by utilizing, and hyping, the understandable fright of the American people. John Ashcroft and Tom Ridge emerged periodically to manipulate the public's fright by announcing yet another "terror" threat, based on "credible but unverified" evidence. As he departed his directorate of the Homeland Security Department, Ridge admitted that he was required to issue many of those "terror" warnings when there was no justifiable reason for doing so; it has been demonstrated that those warnings were activated usually when the Administration was facing an election or when they were having an especially bad-news day -- a new scandal, especially discouraging reports from Iraq, etc. Meanwhile, Congress (shame on you, Democrats!) recently made most of the Patriot Act laws permanent. Unless those can be repealed, that vote will be a nail into the coffin housing the remains of the Bill of Rights.

14. Outing CIA Agents for Political Reasons. The Bush Administration, for its own crass political reasons, compromised American national security by revealing the identity of two key intelligence operatives -- one, CIA agent Valerie Plame, who had important contacts in the shadowy world of weapons of mass destruction, especially in dealing with Iran's nuclear capabilities. It is possible that the first of "senior Administration officials" to reveal her identity was from the State Department (Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage), but wherever the leak originated, it is clear that Cheney (through Libby) and Rove deliberately piled on the Plame story in an attempt to punish her husband for telling the world that Bush's Iraq war was based on phony intelligence. Revealing the identity of a covert CIA agent, not incidentally, is a felony. The other outing of a CIA operative, by Condi Rice, apparently to show off how successful the Administration was in its anti-terrorism hunt, was that a high-ranking mole close to bin Laden's inner circle. This operative could have kept the U.S. informed as to ongoing and future plans of al-Qaida. That's our war-on-terrorism government at work.

15. Do You Know If Your Vote Is Counted? We know that America's voting system and, more importantly, the vote-counting system are corrupted. Sophisticated statistical analysis along with wide-scale exit-polling, suggests strongly that the 2004 election results were fiddled with by the private companies that tally the votes. These companies are owned by far-right Republican supporters, but the same objection would be lodged if Democrats owned the companies. There are no good reasons to "outsource" vote-counting to private corporations. These are the same companies who make and program the voting machines, who refuse to permit inspection of their software, and whose technicians have behaved suspiciously on election nights in 2000 in Florida, in 2002 in Georgia, and in Ohio and Florida in 2004. And we haven't even mentioned Rove's dirty-tricks department whose function has been, by hook or by crook, to lower the number of potential Democrat voters, especially minority voters; a favorite tactic is to knock hundreds of thousands of likely Democratic voters off the voting rolls in advance in key states such as Florida and Ohio. Unless the vote-counting system can be changed soon -- and the vote-tallying scandal will not be adequately dealt with voter-verified receipts -- the integrity of our elections will be suspect into the far future. Even if all the other reforms were implemented, they would mean nothing without the guarantee of honest elections.

16. There Is No Real Economic Plan. We know that the Bush Administration paid off its backers (and itself) by giving humongous tax breaks, for 10 years out, to the already wealthy and to large corporations. In addition, corporate tax-evasion was made easier via offshore listings and by laying off thousands of IRS auditors of high-end returns. All this was done at a time when the U.S. economy was in a sorry state and when the treasury deficit from those tax-breaks was growing even larger from Iraq/Afghanistan/"war-on-terror" costs. (Those war costs are now closing in on half a TRILLION dollars!) So far as we know, the Bush Administration has no plans for how to retire that debt and no real plan (other than the discredited "trickle-down" theory) for restarting the economy and creating well-paying jobs for skilled workers, many of whom have had their positions outsourced to foreign lands.


17. Drowning Government In a Bathtub. We know that the HardRight conservatives who control Bush policy don't really care what kind of debt and deficits their policies cause; in some ways, the more the better, since as GOP honcho Grover Norquist has admitted, they want to shrink government "down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." They want to decimate and starve popular social programs from the New Deal/Great Society eras, including, most visibly, Head Start, Social Security, Medicare (and real drug coverage for seniors), student loans, welfare assistance, public education, etc. (The IRS is going to hire private tax collectors!) Bush's plan to privatize a huge chunk of the Social Security System is still on track, though Republicans are keeping quiet about it prior to the November elections.

18. Who Cares What You Drink or Breathe? We know that Bush environmental policy -- dealing with air and water pollution, mineral extraction, national parks, and so on -- is an unmitigated disaster, giving pretty much free rein to corporations whose bottom line does better when they don't have to pay attention to the public interest. It's the worst sort of grab-the-money-and-run scenario. Perhaps the best worst example of the Administration's attitude toward protecting the public's health can be seen in the EPA giving the green light for residents and workers to safely return to their homes and jobs in Lower Manhattan shortly after the Twin Towers fell five years ago, even though EPA scientists had determined that the air was grossly polluted and dangerous.

19. It's Greed for Money, Control, Power. We know from "insider" memoirs and reports by former Bush Administration officials -- Joseph DeIulio, Paul O'Neill, Richard Clarke, et al. -- that the public interest plays little role in the formulation of policy inside the Bush Administration. The motivating factors are mainly greed and ideological control and remaining in political power. Further, they say, there is little or no curiosity in this Administration to think outside the political box, or even to hear other opinions.

20. It's Faith Over Science, Myth Over Reality. We know that this attitude -- "my mind is made up, don't bother me with the facts" -- shows up most openly in how science is disregarded by the Bush Administration (good example: global warming) in favor of faith-based thinking. Some of this non-curiosity about reality may be based in fundamentalist religious, even Apocalyptic, beliefs. Much of Bush's bashing of science is designed as payback to his fundamentalist base, but the scary part is that a good share of the time he actually seems to believe what he's saying, about evolution vs. intelligent-design, stem-cell research, abstinence education, censoring the rewriting of government scientific reports that differ from the Bush party line, cutbacks in research&development grants for the National Science Foundation, etc., ad nauseum. This closed-mind attitude helps explain, on a deeper level, why things aren't working out in Iraq, or anywhere else for that matter.

AMERICA OR GERMANY IN THE '30s?

In sum, we know that permanent-war policy abroad and police-state tactics at home are taking us into a kind of American fascism domestically and an imperial foreign policy overseas. All aspects of the American polity are infected with the militarist Know-Nothingism emanating from the top, with governmental and vigilante-type crackdowns on protesters, dissent, free speech, freedom of assembly happening regularly on both the local and federal levels. More and more, America is resembling Germany in the early 1930s, group pitted against group while the central government amasses more and more power and control of its put-upon citizens, and criticizing The Leader's policies is denounced as unpatriotic or treasonous.

The good news is that after suffering through six-plus years of the CheneyBush presidency, the public's blinders are falling off. The fall from power of Tom DeLay is a good symbol of this, and the true nature of these men and their regime is finally starting to hit home. Cheney is acknowledged as the true power behind the throne, and Bush is seen for what he is: an insecure, uncurious, arrogant, dangerous, dry-drunk bully who is endangering U.S. national interests abroad with his reckless and incompetently-managed wars, his wrecking of the U.S. economy at home, and with his over-reaching in all areas.

If a Democratic president and vice president had behaved similarly to Bush and Cheney, they'd have been in the impeachment dock in a minute.

IF REPUBLICANS LOSE IN NOVEMBER

But there is no way for that to happen unless and until the Republicans lose control of one or both of the houses of Congress in the November election. If the Dems were to take over the House, for example, they would have subpoena power to compel witnesses to testify under oath for the first time in nearly seven years, which could lead to productive investigations of the machinations that sent the U.S. to war in Iraq, to what really happened on 9/11, to the other myriad scandals and embarrassments: torture, domestic spying, the punishment and outing of CIA agents for political ends, the Abramoff corruption network, etc., etc.

The Democrats are not politically pure, to be sure -- with too many beholden to the same interests that have corrupted the Republicans during the CheneyBush years -- but in enough instances that matter, they would be different enough to start to turn the ship of state away from its reckless, dangerous extremism and back more toward the center and maybe even, on some issues, in the direction of progressive liberalism.

That is why for the next two-plus months, we need to work our butts off to ensure a Republican defeat in the House, and, if we're lucky, in the Senate as well -- by a huge margin. We know that Rove and his minions will be doing everything to steal and manipulate this election. There will be more sleaze and slime and dirty tricks, and perhaps even some October "surprises," and we need to factor those in and work even harder, including sueing election officials who refuse to take steps for honest balloting and vote-counting. Landslide victories would make it more risky for Rove and his minions to try to fiddle with the vote totals.

Winning in November is our job, our moral duty. If we don't take them down in this midterm election, we may not have another good shot for a decade or more. It's crank-it-up time. Let's get to work.

http://crisispapers.org/essays6w/twentythings.htm

[W*GS]

Ya know, LABF, if you're gonna dump a big load on us, make sure it's fresh.

Your long "Twenty things we now know five years after 9/11" is just an old pile of rehashed material, parts of which have been amply discussed (and your views debunked) time and again.

But, thanks for deflecting from a book that discusses the facts of 9/11 to yet another exercise in Bush-bashing... You're keeping true to form...

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

The 9/11 Commission: A Play on Nothing in Three Acts

A wag once famously said that Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot was a play where nothing happened . . . twice. The two former co-chairmen of the 9-11 commission report, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, have released a new book, "Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9-11 Commission." This book goes Beckett one better – it is the third act of veneer over substance, self-aggrandizement over serious analysis, and cliché over perspicacity. It is another calculated attempt by the former commissioners to place themselves in the media spotlight, and to overcome the humiliation of their widely criticized and mostly debunked report. It is a vapid and substanceless attempt to claim moral high ground and present the co-chairmen as heroes of honesty. It would be a farce, except that it has no story line, save the aggrandizement of the authors. At least they are consistent in doing nothing and proclaiming that to be a sign of their devotion to the country and the government. Beckett once said that “habit is the ballast that chains the dog to its vomit,” and by this measure the chain restraining Kean and Hamilton is a short one indeed.

As you recall, Act One, “The Dirty Ten Digging on 9/11,” consisted of extraordinary performances by every single member of the commission to convince us, the audience -- the gullible public -- of commission independence, and its intent to provide our nation with the truth, nothing but the whole truth; their pledge to hold the ‘culprits’ accountable, no matter how high or low on the ladder of the bureaucracy; their commitment to provide “meaningful fixes and remedies,” regardless of any resistance they may have to face.

During Act Two, the commissioners, led by their stars, Kean and Hamilton, put on the performance of their lives. They delivered a document that promised to be more than the mere sum of mortal intelligence; they promised a report that drew on the nation’s soul and would lay bare the necessity and nature of change.

Initially, this play, scripted by the very powers the commission was to investigate, was to have only two acts. However, due to gradually increasing critiques by some in the media, even some of those who originally attended the serenade chorus, and fairly loud boos from some of the previously cheering audience, the producers have now decided to add additional act(s). Act Three, the Finger-Pointing and Blame Game, stars Kean and Hamilton as two comrades holding hands during the act and directing blame at the other eight commission members, who are now cast as traitors and deceivers. The audience is led to assume that the other eight members were responsible for the now untenable report; decided to pursue practical failure but achieve popular success; traded the public welfare for personal gain.

The Commission was created and put in place due to the relentless pressure and outcry by the 9/11 family members and their public supporters who had three objectives in mind: 1) Getting all the facts; 2) Establishing Accountability for those who failed us due to their intentional or unintentional acts; 3) Provide recommendation for real fixes and meaningful remedies.

The Commission fulfilled none of those three objectives. In their responsibility to report all the facts: They either refused to interview all relevant experts and witnesses, or, they censored the reports provided to them by those with direct and first-hand information. Both these acts were selective and intentional. Contrary to their pledge to establish accountability: They refused to hold anyone accountable and lamely justified it by saying, “We don’t want to point a finger at anyone.” All those responsible individuals remained in their positions or were even promoted. And as far as meaningful remedies and reforms are concerned, the commission threw in senseless, and in some cases, detrimental cosmetic and bureaucratic “solutions” that ended up making our government even more cumbersome and unable to respond to threats to national security. In the name of solutions and reforms, they forced down our throats exactly what led to the failure to protect our nation on 9/11: A highly bureaucratic, complicated, inefficient mammoth of a malfunctioning machine.

On the Fifth anniversary of the September Eleven Terror Attacks, we, the National Security Whistleblowers, want to go on record one more time to reiterate the significant issues and cases that were duly reported to the 9/11 commission by those of us from the Intelligence, Aviation, and Law Enforcement communities, but ended up being censored and omitted. The failure to address such serious and relevant issues, witnesses, and information renders the report flawed and the commissioners parties to a fraud on the nation.

The following Veteran National Security experts were turned away, ignored, or censored by the 9/11 Commission, even though they had direct and relevant information related to the Commission’s investigation (for the PDF version Click Here): http://www.nswbc.org/Reports%20-%20Documents/Veteran%20National%20Security%20Experts.pdf

John M. Cole, Former Veteran Intelligence Operations Specialist; FBI - Mr. Cole worked for 18 years in the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division as an Intelligence Operations specialist, and was in charge of FBI’s foreign intelligence investigations covering India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Mr. Cole had knowledge of certain activities that directly related to the terror attacks on September 11, 2001. He notified the 9/11 Commission during its investigation, but never received a response. His name and contact information was provided to the Commission as a key witness by other witnesses, but he was never contacted or interviewed.

John Vincent, Retired Special Agent, Counterterrorism; FBI - Mr. Vincent worked for the FBI for 27 1/2 years before retiring in 2002. He worked his last 8 years in counterterrorism in the FBI’s Chicago Field Office. Mr. Vincent, along with Robert Wright, exposed inefficiencies within the FBI in working counterterrorism cases, and certain warnings they had tried to pursue prior to the 9/11 attack that were directly related to Al-Qaeda’s financial network and money laundering activities. Although he was granted an interview, the commissioners’ investigators refused to let him provide them with information related to his case and the 9/11 terrorists network; they insisted on limiting the interview to only administrative and irrelevant questions and issues.

Robert Wright, Veteran Special Agent, Counterterrorism; FBI - Mr. Wright is a veteran special agent in the FBI Chicago Field Office Counterterrorism Unit. He had been investigating a suspected terrorist cell for three years, when he was informed in January 2001 that the case was being closed. Agent Wright, along with Mr. Vincent, exposed inefficiencies within the FBI in working counterterrorism cases and certain warnings they’d tried to pursue prior to the 9/11 attack that were directly related to Al-Qaeda’s financial network and money laundering activities. Three months before September 11, Wright wrote a stinging internal memo charging that the FBI was not interested in thwarting a terrorist attack, but rather "was merely gathering intelligence so they would know who to arrest when a terrorist attack occurred." The FBI refused to allow Wright to testify before the 9/11 Commission, however, the Commission did not insist or attempt to subpoena Wright; despite the fact that it had subpoena power.

Sibel Edmonds, Former Language Specialist; FBI - Ms. Edmonds worked for the FBI’s Washington Field Office as a language specialist with Top Secret Clearance performing translations for counterterrorism and counterintelligence operations dealing with Turkey, Iran, and Turkic speaking Central Asian countries. She contacted the 9/11 Commission in May 2003 and requested a meeting to provide them with information directly related to the terrorist attack. The Commission investigators refused to meet with Edmonds and informed her that due to their limited resources and time they were not going to interview all witnesses. She was able to provide the commission with information and documents only after certain 9/11 family members intervened directly. Ms. Edmonds’ testimony was completely censored by the Commission.

Behrooz Sarshar, Former Language Specialist; FBI - Mr. Sarshar worked for the FBI’s Washington Field Office as a language specialist with Top Secret Clearance performing Farsi translations for counterterrorism and counterintelligence operations dealing with Iran and Afghanistan. He had first-hand information of prior specific warning obtained from a reliable informant in April 2001 on the terrorist attacks of September 11. Mr. Sarshar contacted the Commission directly but was refused. He was given an interview with the Commission investigators only after 9/11 family members intervened directly. Mr. Sarshar’s documented testimony was completely omitted from the commission’s final report, despite his case being publicly confirmed by Director Mueller’s Office.

Mike German, Special Agent, Counterterrorism; FBI - Mr. German served sixteen years as an FBI Special Agent and is one of the rare agents credited with actually having prevented acts of terrorism before it became the FBI's number one priority. He contacted the Commission in the spring of 2004, but did not receive a response. In 2002 he reported gross mismanagement in a post 9/11-counterterrorism investigation, which included serious violations of FBI policy and federal law. Mr. German contacted the 9/11 Commission during its investigation and requested that he be given an interview session in order to provide them with certain domestic counterterrorism investigations that he’d pursued. According to Mr. German there were links between certain domestic and international counterterrorism related to the September 11 attacks. The 9/11 Commissioners refused to acknowledge his request and never interviewed him.

Gilbert Graham, Retired Special Agent, Counterintelligence; FBI - Mr. Graham worked for the FBI’s Washington Field Office Counterintelligence Division until 2002. In February 2004 his name and contact information were provided to the Commission as a key witness with information pertinent to the Commission’s investigation. The 9/11 Commission refused to follow up and never contacted Mr. Graham.

Coleen Rowley, Retired Division Counsel; FBI - In May 2002, Coleen Rowley, as the Division Counsel at the FBI Minneapolis Office, blew the whistle on the FBI’s failure to pursue Zacarias Moussaoui’s case prior to 9/11, despite all attempts made by the Minneapolis division counterterrorism agents. She reported that FBI HQ personnel in Washington, D.C., had mishandled and neglected to take action on information provided by her division. Despite her high-profile case the commission chose not to interview Ms. Rowley. According to Ms. Rowley, no one from the FBI Minneapolis Office (several Agents had direct information) was ever asked to provide testimony, information, to the 9/11 Commission.

Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Shaffer, DIA - Colonel Shaffer provided the Commission with detailed information on intelligence and pre warning information obtained by his unit’s data mining project, Able Danger. The 9/11 commission staff received not one but two briefings on Able Danger from Mr. Shaffer and his former team members, yet did not pursue the case, did not follow up on this documented report and refused to subpoena the relevant files. Mr. Shaffer’s testimony, together with other witnesses who corroborated his testimony and information, were censored by the 9/11 Commissioners and never made it to its final report.

Dick Stoltz, Retired Special Agent; ATF- Mr. Stoltz, a veteran undercover agent with the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms, had played an important role in Operation Diamondback between 1998 and 2001. The sting operation involved a group of Middle Eastern men living in New Jersey who were caught on tape in an ATF weapons sting conspiring to buy millions of dollars of weapons including components for nuclear bombs. The case came to a screeching halt with the arrest of only a handful of suspects in June of 2001 even though there was ample evidence that some of the people who were attempting to buy these weapons had connections with the Taliban, Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden himself. The 9/11 Commission refused to contact Agent Stoltz despite all attempts made by several witnesses from the intelligence & Law Enforcement Communities, and the 9/11 Family group, Jersey Moms.

Bogdan Dzakovic, Former Red Team Leader; FAA - Mr. Dzakovic had worked for the Security Division of the Federal Aviation Administration since 1987 as a Special Agent, as a Team Leader in the Federal Air Marshals, and from 1995 until September 11, 2001 was a Team Leader of the Red Team (terrorist team). Mr. Dzakovic had tried for several years prior to the 9-11 attacks to improve aviation security in the face of the ever-increasing terrorist threat. He provided the 9/11 Commission with his testimony and documented reports. His testimony and report to the Commission was completely omitted from the final report.

Linda Lewis, Retired Emergency Programs Specialist; USDA - Ms. Lewis worked for 13 years evaluating and coordinating federal, state and local preparedness for nuclear, radiological and chemical weapons emergencies. Prior to September 11, 2001, she had reported numerous inadequacies and dysfunctions in emergency preparedness, including a culture of intimidation that discouraged federal evaluators from reporting inadequacies in state and local plans and preparedness. USDA officials had thwarted her efforts to bring in terrorism experts to help the agency prepare for attacks on federal buildings, including bio-weapons attacks such as the anthrax attacks of 2001. In vain, she had urged FEMA officials to develop a national emergency communications plan and require interoperability of federally funded emergency communications equipment. In the absence of these preparations, New York City firefighters and police officers were unable to communicate critical information on September 11 at the World Trade Center. Ms. Lewis contacted the Commission and offered to provide information regarding dysfunctional government preparedness, but the Commission never responded.

Mark Burton, Senior Analyst; NSA – Mr. Burton served as an all-source threat analyst in NSA’s Information Assurance Directorate (IAD) for most of his 16-year career. He was the editor of IAD’s premier threat document; the 300+ page ISSO Global Threat Summary, and was an adjunct faculty member at NSA’s National Cryptologic School. He provided dozens of pages of relevant information to the 9/11 Commission, but was completely ignored and never asked to testify.

The above list does not include many others from the intelligence and law enforcement communities who had similarly contacted or reported to the commission but had been either turned away or censored, and of course many others’ who are still working within these agencies and are fearful of making their identities known, due to the relentless pursuit of and retaliation against whistleblowers by government agencies.

About National Security Whistleblowers Coalition

National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWBC), founded in August 2004, is an independent and nonpartisan alliance of whistleblowers who have come forward to address our nation’s security weaknesses; to inform authorities of security vulnerabilities in our intelligence agencies, at nuclear power plants and weapon facilities, in airports, and at our nation’s borders and ports; to uncover government waste, fraud, abuse, and in some cases criminal conduct. The NSWBC is dedicated to aiding national security whistleblowers through a variety of methods, including advocacy of governmental and legal reform, educating the public concerning whistleblowing activity, provision of comfort and fellowship to national security whistleblowers suffering retaliation and other harms, and working with other public interest organizations to affect goals defined in the NSWBC mission statement. For more on NSWBC visit www.nswbc.org

[mhgaffney]

Found a link to the actual directive:

http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nspd/nspd-1.htm

Here's the complete quote from what you quoted above mhgaffney:

Quote:
The existing system of Interagency Working Groups is abolished.

Do you have any evidence that handicapping intelligence was the goal of this reorganization?

Yes there is evidence. The evidence is in the fact that no one lost his job, or was demoted, or even reprimanded. The fact that no one was held accountable for 911 tells you that the key decisions were made at the very top. Meaning: by the White House.

That's the only reasonable conclusion.

[mhgaffney]

The 9/11 Commission: A Play on Nothing in Three Acts


heh heh. I suppose by now you saw my parallel post on the other 911 thread.

[W*GS]

The interesting thing is that we've been given a bait-and-switch; what LABF posted doesn't say that there was a conspiracy on 9/11 that involved controlled demolition of the WTC, missiles hitting the Pentagon, and Flight 93 being shot down, and so on.

What it does say is that the coverup had everything to do with hiding governmental incompetence (which everyone agrees happened), not a grand conspiracy, in which OBL and al-Qaeda are mere patsies and the real culprits are elements within the government and the Bush administration.

In sum, LABF (and MG) aren't getting the support for their conspiracy theories from "The 9/11 Commission: A Play on Nothing in Three Acts".

[Rohirrim]

Found a link to the actual directive:

http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nspd/nspd-1.htm

Here's the complete quote from what you quoted above mhgaffney:

Quote:
The existing system of Interagency Working Groups is abolished.

Do you have any evidence that handicapping intelligence was the goal of this reorganization?

Yes there is evidence. The evidence is in the fact that no one lost his job, or was demoted, or even reprimanded. The fact that no one was held accountable for 911 tells you that the key decisions were made at the very top. Meaning: by the White House.

That's the only reasonable conclusion.

As has already been proven time and time again, this administration doesn't fire anybody for incompetence, no matter how grand the scale (see: Rummy), it only fires those who disagree with them. No one in this administration is held accountable for anything, let alone 9/11.

[alkemical]

I'm disappointed.

Where's all the information showing how OBL is actually a CIA stooge, and where's the copy of the memo signed by Bush authorizing this "new Pearl Harbor" operation to be activated?

At the least, I wanna see the receipt for the thermite purchased to help implode the WTC towers - all three of 'em.

Sarcasm aside, looks like a good book.


Well Wags, to some since bush is so stoopid, i'd image i can't find his scrawling on crayon. But here's a document done by a think tank many bush cabinet members belong too. Feel free to read not only this PDF but the others on the site as well.

Also, here's a letter preculding the PNAC report - some familiar names signed this:

http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm

http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqletter1998.htm


http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf