For some reason, most of the progressive blogs are deep-sixing the important news surrounding the publication of former FBI Special Agent Ali Soufan's new book, The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda. There are two crucial reasons to pay attention to this media event.
One: Soufan makes clear that his interrogations of Al Qaeda-suspected terrorists was interrupted multiple times by the CIA or Pentagon higher-ups in order to implement torture techniques as part of the interrogation, something that ultimately drove the FBI away from the interrogation scene at Guantanamo and elsewhere.
Two: Soufan makes clear that the CIA on multiple occasions blocked information on reaching him and other FBI agents relating to foreknowledge of Al Qaeda-suspected terrorists, including one involved in the USS Cole attack, entering the United States. Even more, they lied about informing the FBI about this, and they lied to the FBI about their even having knowledge of a major terrorist summit in Malyasia in 2000, where the 9/11 plot was presumably discussed.
Now, some of the latter material was discussed for the first time by author Lawrence Wright, and he got the Pulitzer Prize for it. (See The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.) The story is of two AQ terrorists, Khalid Al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, who both died on the plane that rammed into the Pentagon. The CIA was tipped off by the NSA that Al-Mihdhar was going from the terrorist summit in Malyasia (about which CIA was giving then-National Security Advisor Sandy Berger daily briefings) to the United States.
An FBI agent, Doug Miller, working with the CIA's Alec Station, i.e., the CIA's Bin Laden station, saw a cable to this effect. But when he asked to forward the information to his superiors back at FBI headquarters, he was told not to by Alec Station's deputy chief, Tom Wilshire. Another FBI agent at Alec Station, Mark Rossini, also inquired, and was told the info was not the FBI's jurisdiction.
According to Kevin Fenton's new book, Disconnecting the Dots, Rossini felt bad about letting the whole thing go, back in early 2000, "telling PBS' NOVA in January 2009, 'I can't come up with a rational reason why I didn't break the rules, pick up the phone, and tell that the jijackers, or really bad guys, are in the U.S. And I don't know if I'll ever be able to come to terms with that. I don't know. I really don't know."
And so began a months long series of events wherein the CIA, and later certain FBI officials, blocked key FBI investigators, including Ali Soufan, as he relates in his new book, from tracking down the terrorists who would conduct the 9/11 terror actions.
Soufan, who was lead investigator on the USS Cole bombing, asked the CIA on three separate occasions about the Malaysia meeting, but each time they told him they didn't know anything about it.
Here's how Scott Shane at the New York Times described the moment when Soufan realized he’d been had. For some strange reason, the NYT refrains from actually giving al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi’s names in the article.
[Soufan] recounts a scene at the American Embassy in Yemen, where, a few hours after the attacks on New York and Washington, a C.I.A. official finally turned over the material the bureau requested months earlier [from the CIA], including photographs of two of the hijackers.
“For about a minute I stared at the pictures and the report, not quite believing what I had in my hands,” Mr. Soufan writes. Then he ran to a bathroom and vomited. “My whole body was shaking,” he writes. He believed the material, documenting a Qaeda meeting in Malaysia in January 2000, combined with information from the Cole investigation, might have helped unravel the airliner plot.
The CIA revelations must be put into the context of other documented instances of investigations into AQ terror plots pre-9/11, and not only by the CIA. There were the FBI field investigations in Phoenix and Minneapolis that were ignored. There was the Army's Able Danger data mining operation, shut down in early 2001, after identifying key terrorists.
And finally, there was my own investigation into the shutdown of the Pentagon's Joint Forces Command's special intel unit, the Asymmetrical Threats Division (ATD), which had been tracking Bin Laden in 1999-early 2001, and identified the Pentagon and World Trade Center as primary targets. The latter was the subject of a Pentagon Inspector General report, which I critique in this article, based heavily on documents provided to me by the former Deputy Chief of the ATD himself.
The mainstream media has really picked up on this story (at last, some would say), but the liberal bloggers are dragging behind, for the most part.
A list of recent stories reporting on the above include Frontline, whose show airs tonight, but already has a videoonline: “Chapter 1: Could 9/11 Have Been Prevented? Former FBI Agent Ali Soufan says the CIA did not share critical intelligence about Al Qaeda with the FBI before 9/11.″
There's also the New York Times story noted above, two segments on MSNBC's Rachel Maddow show last night (which can also be viewed online), and a 60 Minutes interview with Ali Soufan (also can be viewed online).
The story is also the subject of a far-ranging documentary that was due out on 9/11, but has been held up because of CIA legal threats. A portion of that documentary, with an interview with Richard Clarke is available here.
Regarding the importance of all this to those who read liberal or progressive blogs, I wrote this at Firedoglake's blog The Dissenter yesterday:
Whether it was a deliberate attempt to let terrorists operate in this country (as Kevin Fenton maintains), or a terrible combination of over-caution, inertia, lack of imagination, bad judgement, institutional hubris, and bad luck, as others would suggest, remains to be seen. What is clear is that we need a new investigation of the activities of the intelligence groups and the military leading up to 9/11, the earlier investigations being hog-tied by lies, information coerced from tortured detainees, and repeated efforts (mostly successful) to hide or withhold crucial information from investigators.
Only our silence will guarantee that we will never know the truth. Given that 9/11 and the threat of terrorism is used to justify trillions spent on wars, a major crackdown on civil liberties, and the use of torture and other abuses upon detainees, I don’t see silence as an option.