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by James Corbett
BoilingFrogsPost.com
September 8, 2011

Welcome, this is James Corbett of The Corbett Report with your Eyeopener Report from BoilingFrogsPost.com.

Last month, the former White House counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke made headlines in the alternative press when he revealed that the CIA’s failure to pass on information it knew about two of the alleged 9/11 hijackers living in the United States for over a year before the attacks–long known and discussed amongst 9/11 researchers but never mentioned in mainstream discussions of the subject—did not merely involve a few lowly CIA analysts who did not understand the importance of the information, but instead extended all the way to former CIA director George Tenet.

The explosive comments, virtually ignored in the establishment media, were made to a documentary film crew during an interview for an upcoming documentary on the CIA’s pre-9/11 intelligence “failures.”

**VIDEO

The claim that the Director of Central Intelligence knowingly and purposely blocked the White House counter-terrorism czar and high-level FBI officials from learning about known Al Qaeda agents living in the United States is profound in its implications.

Given that any interpretation of this assertion would necessarily mean that Tenet and the other CIA officials who blocked this information actually aided the alleged 9/11 attackers and have now participated in a decade-long cover-up of their role, the question necessarily becomes: Why did they do this?

Clarke provided his own, completely speculative and non-evidence based answer to this question for the documentary cameras.

**VIDEO

In Clarke’s view, then, the CIA was doing its best to attempt to recruit these Al Qaeda terrorists, but Saudi intelligence, perhaps working as the terrorist handlers, didn’t manage to (or didn’t attempt to) flip them in time. On the face of it, this explanation for the monumental criminal cover-up Clarke has just exposed seems to fit in with a pattern of information suggesting the good intentions of the CIA and the dastardly double-dealing of the Saudis.

Osama Bin Laden, after all, was a Saudi, and 15 of the alleged 9/11 hijackers were allegedly carrying Saudi passports.

In the immediate wake of the attacks, the FBI infamously cleared numerous members of the Saudi Bin Laden family, as well as Saudi royals, to fly out of the country.

It has been an open secret for some time that the 28 redacted pages of the Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 referring to foreign government involvement in the attacks in fact refers to Saudi Arabia.

But this pattern, according to 9/11 researchers like Kevin Ryan, is in fact a false trail, carefully constructed as a “Get Into Saudi Arabia Free” card for America to use at a convenient time whenever the official story of 9/11, as represented in the 9/11 Commission Report, begins to fall apart under the weight of its own lies and obfuscations, or whenever the establishment deems it necessary to motivate the American people into yet another war of conquest for the purpose of securing the largest proven oil reserves in the world.

Earlier this week, I had the chance to talk to Kevin Ryan about the suggesion that the Saudis were the true masterminds of 9/11, and what purpose this carefully-constructed trail of evidence serves.

**INTERVIEW

If the case of Al-Hazmi and Al-Mihdar is not quite as simple as Clarke suggests, then–if it is not merely a case of well-meaning CIA officials trying to “flip” these terrorists and instead being duped by Saudi intelligence–then what is the explanation for Tenet’s duplicity? Why would the CIA have actively prevented other intelligence officials from learning of key information which, by Clarke’s own admission, would have led to the FBI rounding up the two alleged hijackers and unravelling the 9/11 plot within 24 hours?

The only other logical explanation is in fact the more straightforward one: that the CIA in fact wanted the plot to go ahead. As researcher, author and activist David Swanson puts it in a recent article on the case:

“…what if, just as Obama’s actions make sense when we stop fantasizing about him being a liberal, Tenet’s actions make sense when we stop assuming his top priority was protecting the people of this country?”

Although a radical-sounding suggestion to those who only receive information from the carefully-controlled “news” programs of the corporate-controlled and foundation-funded media, the suggestion that the alleged 9/11 attackers were actively aided every step of the way by complicit high-level officials in key positions in the intelligence community is in fact one that is borne out by a much more detailed pattern of information than the one suggesting Saudi involvement.

In the mid-1990s, the NSA began monitoring communications at a suspected Al Qaeda communications hub in Yemen. Despite having access to this incredibly important intelligence, the NSA did not even inform the CIA of the existence of the hub, and once the CIA became aware of it, they refused to share any information from their wiretaps.

In the late 1990s, FBI agent Robert Wright’s investigation into terrorist financing started to connect the funding for attacks like the 1998 embassy bombings to Yassin al-Qadi, a wealthy financier who, amongst other things, was one of the founding investors in Ptech, an enterprise software company with a who’s who list of government clients who happened to be running tests on FAA/NORAD system interoperability in the basement of the Pentagon on the morning of 9/11. When attempting to launch an official investigation into the African Embassy money trail, his supervisor reportedly flew into a rage, saying ‘You will not open criminal investigations. I forbid any of you. You will not open criminal investigations against any of these intelligence subjects.’

Earlier this year it was revealed that the Asymmetric Threats Division, an elite intelligence unit within the Joint Forces Intelligence Command that had been tracking Bin Laden since 1999, was ordered to stop their activities and curtail their efforts to monitor Afghan training camps shortly before the 9/11 attacks.

A secret Defense Intelligence unit code-named Able Danger identified supposed 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta no less than 13 times prior to the attacks. According to one intelligence official with knowledge of the program, when shown pictures of suspected terrorist operatives in the US, ranking officials placed yellow sticky notes over the faces of Atta and several others as a way to denote that these operatives were not to be tracked. In mid-2000, Army Intelligence and Security Command General Counsel Tony Gentry ordered the program’s data, some 2.5 terabytes worth, deleted. When program whistleblower Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, who was ignored by the 9/11 commission, attempted to publish a book about his experiences working for Able Danger, the Pentagon itself bought the entire first print run of the book and burnt them.

In the weeks leading up to the attacks, Minneapolis FBI agents eager to examine the possessions of Zaccarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20^th hijacker who had been arrested while attempting to secure flying lessons for large commercial aircraft were frustrated by numerous roadblocks thrown up by FBI supervisors in their investigation—roadblocks the agents themselves identified as acts of “sabotage.” Several of the agents joked that key officials in Washington “had to be spies or moles … working for Osama bin Laden.”

Although incompetence, short-sightedness, bureaucratic infighting, and now—with Richard Clarke’s recent speculation—secret agent double dealings “gone wrong” are typically used to explain away one or two acts of incompetence, what these and the many, many other pieces of evidence reveal is how these are not random acts of oversight but in fact a pattern. In the light of this information, the idea that every single attempt to identify and disrupt the alleged perpetrators of the 9/11 plot failed because of incompetence begins to strain the bonds of credulity under the much simpler explanation that these operatives were in fact being assisted and protected every step of the way.

Yet still, this line of thought is beyond the pale of serious discourse on the road to 9/11, even amongst the vast majority of the supposedly alternative media.

In an ideal world, mainstream journalists would be using the opportunity presented by Clarke’s recent revelations to begin asking the hard questions about 9/11. Kevin Ryan himself posed a list of questions that any serious journalist would ask Clarke if they were trying to really understand the context of 9/11. These questions include:

-When you met with UAE Defense Minister Al Maktoum in February 1999, just days before the CIA planned to kill or capture Bin Laden as he was meeting with UAE royals, who else did you meet with?

-Why did you vote down the CIA plan to kill or capture Bin Laden while he was hunting with UAE royals in February 1999?

-Why did you expose the CIA’s secret plan, without approval from the CIA or the president, to kill or capture Bin Laden in March 1999 as he was meeting with UAE royals again?

-Did you ever communicate with NSA Director, Michael Hayden, between January 2000 and the attacks of 9/11? If so, why did you not, in your recent interview, accuse him of withholding information on Alhazmi and Almihdar? He has spoken openly of having known about their presence in the US and said that he did share it with the intelligence community.

-You appear to be saying that neither you nor the FBI knew that Almihdar and Alhazmi lived with Abdussattar Shaikh, a tested FBI asset, for at least four months in the year 2000. Is that correct and, if so, don’t you think that contradicts your claim in this interview that “I know how all this stuff works, I’ve been working it for 30 years. You can’t snowball me on this stuff.”?

Until such time as so-called journalists begin asking these types of questions, interested citizens will have to continue looking for such information from the alternative media.