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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 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."
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.
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