Source: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article28866.htm
Neither ink nor air
Did Tenet Hide Key 9/11 Info?
By Ray McGovern
August 17, 2011 " <http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/> Information
Clearing House" With few exceptions, like some salacious rumor about the
Kennedy family, the mainstream U.S. news media has shown little interest in
stories that throw light on history - even recent, very relevant history. So
it comes as no surprise that, when a former White House counter-terrorism
czar accuses an ex-CIA director of sitting on information that could have
prevented a 9/11 attack, the story gets neither ink nor air.
Bulletin for those of you who get your information only from the New York
Times, the Washington Post and other outlets of the Fawning Corporate Media
(FCM): Former White House director for counterterrorism Richard Clarke has
accused former CIA Director George Tenet of denying him and others access to
intelligence that could have thwarted the attack on the Pentagon on 9/11.
Deliberately withholding critical intelligence from those who need it, and
can act on it, is - at the least - gross dereliction of duty. The more so if
keeping the White House promptly and fully informed is at the top of your
job jar, as it was for Director of Central Intelligence Tenet. And yet that
is precisely the charge Clarke has leveled at the former DCI.
In an interview aired on Aug. 11 on a local PBS affiliate in Colorado,
Clarke charges that Tenet and two other senior CIA officials, Cofer Black
and Richard Blee, deliberately withheld information about two of the
hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77 - al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar. The two
had entered the United States more than a year before the 9/11 attacks.
Clarke adds that the CIA then covered it all up by keeping relevant
information away from Congress and the 9/11 Commission.
Lying by senior officials is bad enough, and there is now plenty of evidence
that former CIA Director George Tenet and his closest agency associates are
serial offenders. Think for a minute about the falsehoods spread regarding
Iraq's non-existent "weapons of mass destruction" stockpiles.
But withholding intelligence on two of the 9/11 hijackers would have been
particularly unconscionable - the epitome of malfeasance, not just
misfeasance. That's why Richard Clarke's conclusion that he should have
received information from CIA about al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar, "unless
somebody intervened to stop the normal automatic distribution" amounts, in
my view, to a criminal charge, given the eventual role of the two in the
hijacking on 9/11 of AA-77, the plane that struck the Pentagon.
Tenet has denied that the information on the two hijackers was
"intentionally withheld" from Clarke, and he has enlisted the other two
former CIA operatives, Cofer Black (more recently a senior official of
Blackwater) and Richard Blee (an even more shadowy figure), to concur in
saying, Not us; we didn't withhold.
Whom to believe? To me, it's a no-brainer. One would have to have been born
yesterday to regard the "George is right" testimony from Black and Blee as
corroborative.
Tenet's Dubious Credibility
Tenet is the same fellow who provided the "slam dunk" on the existence of
"weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq, as well as the "artist renderings" of
equally non-existent mobile laboratories for developing biological warfare
agents, based on unconfirmed information from the impostor code-named
(appropriately) "Curveball."
It was Tenet who, under orders from President George W. Bush and Vice
President Dick Cheney, ordered up and disseminated a fraudulent National
Intelligence Estimate on WMD in Iraq, the purpose of which was to deceive
our elected representatives out of their constitutional prerogative to
authorize war. No small lies.
After a five-year investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee,
Chairman Jay Rockefeller described the intelligence adduced under Tenet to
"justify" attacking Iraq as "uncorroborated, contradicted, and
non-existent." Good enough to win Tenet the Presidential Medal of Freedom,
though. The corruption of intelligence worked just fine for the purposes of
Bush and Cheney, thank you very much.
It is a actually a matter of record that Tenet lies a lot - on occasion,
displaying what I would call chutzpah on steroids. Recall, for example,
Tenet in April 2007 snarling at Scott Pelley on "60 Minutes" - five times,
in five consecutive sentences - "We do not torture people."
Even Under Oath
Tenet has lied about 9/11, too. The joint statement from Tenet, Black and
Blee - orchestrated by former CIA spokesman Bill Harlow - concludes: "We
testified under oath about what we did, what we knew and what we didn't
know. We stand by that testimony."
Almost made me laugh . almost.
In his sworn testimony to the 9/11 Commission on April 14, 2004, Tenet said
he had not spoken to Bush - even on the telephone - during the entire month
of August 2001.
But Tenet did fly down to see the President in Crawford - not once, but
twice during August 2001, and briefed Bush again in Washington on the 31st.
After the TV cameras at the 9/11 Commission hearing were shut off, Bill
Harlow phoned the commission staff to say, Oops, sorry, Tenet misspoke. Even
then, Harlow admitted only to Tenet's Aug. 17 visit to Crawford (and to the
briefing on the 31st).
How do we know Tenet was again in Crawford, on Aug. 24? From a White House
press release quoting President Bush to that effect - information somehow
completely missed by our vigilant Fawning Corporate Media.
Funny, too, how Tenet could have forgotten his first visit to Crawford on
Aug. 17. In his memoir, At the Center of the Storm, Tenet waxes eloquent
about the "president graciously driving me around the spread in his pickup
and me trying to make small talk about the flora and the fauna." But the
visit was not limited to small talk.
In his book Tenet writes: "A few weeks after the August 6 PDB was delivered,
I followed it to Crawford to make sure the president stayed current on
events." The Aug. 6, 2001, President's Daily Brief contained the article
"Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the US." According to Ron Suskind's The
One-Percent Doctrine, the president reacted by telling the CIA briefer, "All
right, you've covered your ass now."
If, as Tenet says in his memoir, it was the Aug. 6, 2001, PDB that prompted
his visit on Aug. 17, what might have brought him back on Aug. 24? I believe
the answer can be found in court documents released at the trial of Zacarias
Moussaoui, the fledgling pilot in Minnesota interested in learning to steer
a plane but indifferent as to how to land it.
Those documents show that on Aug. 23, 2001, Tenet was given an alarming
briefing focusing on Moussaoui, titled "Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly."
Tenet was told that Moussaoui was training to fly a 747 and, among other
suspicion-arousing data, had paid for the training in cash.
It is an open question - if a key one - whether Tenet told Bush about the
two hijackers, al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar, while keeping that key information
from the person who most needed it - White House counter-terrorist czar
Richard Clarke. Clarke finds the only plausible explanation in his surmise
that Tenet was personally responsible. Clarke says:
"For me to this day, it is inexplicable, when I had every other detail about
everything related to terrorism, that the director didn't tell me, that the
director of the counterterrorism center didn't tell me, that the other 48
people inside CIA that knew about it never mentioned it to me or anyone in
my staff in a period of over 12 months."
Enter Harlow
But Tenet's aide-de-camp Bill Harlow has branded Clarke's statements "absurd
and patently false." And the statement Harlow shepherded for Tenet, Black
and Blee adds "reckless and profoundly wrong . baseless . belied by the
record . unworthy of serious consideration."
And Harlow never lies? Right. I'm reminded of Harlow's reaction to
Newsweek's publication on Feb. 24, 2003, of the intelligence information
provided by Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, Hussein Kamel when he defected to
Jordan in 1995. Kamel brought with him a treasure trove of documents and
unique knowledge of Iraq's putative "weapons of mass destruction."
Most significantly, he told his U.S. debriefers there were no WMD in Iraq.
He knew. He had been in charge of Iraq's chemical, biological, nuclear and
missile programs for almost a decade, and he ordered what weapons existed
destroyed before the U.N. inspectors could discover them after the war in
1991. In his words:
"I ordered the destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons -
biological, chemical, missile, nuclear were destroyed."
He told the U.S. much more, and the information that could be checked out
was confirmed. But Kamel's information didn't fit with the Bush
administration's propaganda regarding its certainty that Iraq did have WMD
stockpiles and was defying United Nations demands that the WMD be destroyed.
Those pushing the Iraq War juggernaut in early 2003 almost had a conniption
when Newsweek acquired a transcript of Kamel's debriefing and published this
potentially explosive story barely three weeks before the invasion.
Newsweek noted gingerly that this information "raises questions about
whether the WMD stockpiles attributed to Iraq still exist." It was, in fact,
the kind of impeccably sourced documentary evidence after which intelligence
analysts and lawyers lust.
But this was not at all what Bush, Cheney, and - by sycophantic extension -
Tenet wanted Newsweek readers, or the rest of us, to learn less than a month
before the U.S./U.K. attack on Iraq ostensibly to find and destroy those
non-existent weapons.
Bill Harlow to the rescue: he told the FCM in no uncertain terms that the
Newsweek story was, "incorrect, bogus, wrong, untrue." And the media
cheerleaders for war breathed a sigh of relief, saying, Gosh, thanks for
telling us, and then dropped the story like a hot potato.
By all indications, Harlow is still able to work his fraudulent magic on the
FCM, which have virtually ignored this major Clarke v. Tenet story since it
broke six days ago.
If Harlow says it's not true . and hurls still more pejorative epithets and
adjectives, in a crude attempt to discredit the very serious charge Clarke
has made . well, I guess we'll have to leave it there, as the FCM is so fond
of saying.
No matter Clarke's well-deserved reputation for honesty and professionalism
- and Tenet's for the opposite. And so it goes.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical
Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. As a CIA analyst, he served
under seven presidents and nine CIA directors; he is co-founder of Veteran
Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
A version of this column was first published at <http://consortiumnews.com>
Consortiumnews.com
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