The 9/11 Secret in the CIA's Back Pocket

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http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-scheer19oct19,1,6762967.column?coll=la-util-op-ed
The 9/11 Secret in the CIA's Back Pocket
The agency is withholding a damning report that points at senior officials.
By Robert Scheer
October 19, 2004

It is shocking: The Bush administration is suppressing a CIA report on 9/11 until after the election, and this one names names. Although the report by the inspector general's office of the CIA was completed in June, it has not been made available to the congressional intelligence committees that mandated the study almost two years ago.

"It is infuriating that a report which shows that high-level people were not doing their jobs in a satisfactory manner before 9/11 is being suppressed," an intelligence official who has read the report told me, adding that "the report is potentially very embarrassing for the administration, because it makes it look like they weren't interested in terrorism before 9/11, or in holding people in the government responsible afterward."

When I asked about the report, Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice), ranking Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee, said she and committee Chairman Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.) sent a letter 14 days ago asking for it to be delivered. "We believe that the CIA has been told not to distribute the report," she said. "We are very concerned."

According to the intelligence official, who spoke to me on condition of anonymity, release of the report, which represents an exhaustive 17-month investigation by an 11-member team within the agency, has been "stalled." First by acting CIA Director John McLaughlin and now by Porter J. Goss, the former Republican House member (and chairman of the Intelligence Committee) who recently was appointed CIA chief by President Bush.

The official stressed that the report was more blunt and more specific than the earlier bipartisan reports produced by the Bush-appointed Sept. 11 commission and Congress.

"What all the other reports on 9/11 did not do is point the finger at individuals, and give the how and what of their responsibility. This report does that," said the intelligence official. "The report found very senior-level officials responsible."

By law, the only legitimate reason the CIA director has for holding back such a report is national security. Yet neither Goss nor McLaughlin has invoked national security as an explanation for not delivering the report to Congress.

"It surely does not involve issues of national security," said the intelligence official.

"The agency directorate is basically sitting on the report until after the election," the official continued. "No previous director of CIA has ever tried to stop the inspector general from releasing a report to the Congress, in this case a report requested by Congress."

None of this should surprise us given the Bush administration's great determination since 9/11 to resist any serious investigation into how the security of this nation was so easily breached. In Bush's much ballyhooed war on terror, ignorance has been bliss.

The president fought against the creation of the Sept. 11 commission, for example, agreeing only after enormous political pressure was applied by a grass-roots movement led by the families of those slain.

And then Bush refused to testify to the commission under oath, or on the record. Instead he deigned only to chat with the commission members, with Vice President Dick Cheney present, in a White House meeting in which commission members were not allowed to take notes. All in all, strange behavior for a man who seeks reelection to the top office in the land based on his handling of the so-called war on terror.

In September, the New York Times reported that several family members met with Goss privately to demand the release of the CIA inspector general's report. "Three thousand people were killed on 9/11, and no one has been held accountable," 9/11 widow Kristen Breitweiser told the paper.

The failure to furnish the report to Congress, said Harman, "fuels the perception that no one is being held accountable. It is unacceptable that we don't have [the report]; it not only disrespects Congress but it disrespects the American people."

The stonewalling by the Bush administration and the failure of Congress to gain release of the report have, said the intelligence source, "led the management of the CIA to believe it can engage in a cover-up with impunity. Unless the public demands an accounting, the administration and CIA's leadership will have won and the nation will have lost."

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BBB:

Why aren't the Dems screaming to get this report released?? This could be the final nail in the coffin for the "Bushies".

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Rodeman

rodeman wrote:

BBB:

Why aren't the Dems screaming to get this report released?? This could be the final nail in the coffin for the "Bushies".

It will take all of us raising hell with our congressional representatives(and for the Media to start screaming) to put enough pressure on Bush to order the report released before the election---but don't hold your breath. National security is the basis of his relection campaign and Bush will hide anything that reflects badly on him because he doesn't have a decent record on which to run.

BBB

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C.I.A. Is Accused of Delaying Internal Report
October 27, 2004
C.I.A. Is Accused of Delaying Internal Report
By DOUGLAS JEHL
New York Times

WASHINGTON, Oct. 26 - The Central Intelligence Agency has blocked, at least temporarily, the distribution of a draft internal report that identifies individual officers by name in discussing whether anyone should be held accountable for intelligence failures leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, members of Congress from both parties said.

The delays began in July, at the direction of John E. McLaughlin, then the acting director of central intelligence, and have continued since Porter J. Goss took over as the intelligence chief last month, members of Congress said. The delays have postponed the next step in the process, which calls for the draft report to be reviewed by affected individuals.

It is not known who is named in the report, conducted by the C.I.A.'s inspector general, an independent internal investigator. The review was sought in December 2002 by the joint Congressional committee that investigated intelligence failures leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks. The purpose, that panel said, should be to determine "whether and to what extent personnel at all levels should be held accountable'' for any mistakes that contributed to the failure to disrupt the attacks.

In a Sept. 23 letter to Mr. McLaughlin, the top Republican and Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Representatives Peter Hoekstra of Michigan and Jane Harman of California, said they were "concerned that the C.I.A. is unwilling to hold its officers accountable for failures to meet the professional standards we know C.I.A stands for.'' On Tuesday, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, wrote separately to Mr. Goss, expressing concern "about the appearance that the inspector general's independence is being infringed.''

Neither letter has been made public, but copies were obtained Tuesday by The New York Times. In both letters, the members of Congress cited as evidence of the delays identical letters sent to the intelligence committees on Aug. 31 by John Helgerson, the C.I.A. inspector general. The members of Congress described the delays as a departure from normal procedure.

A C.I.A. spokesman declined to comment about the status of the report. An intelligence official said that Mr. Goss had asked to review the draft himself before it was distributed further. The official would not address the question of who might be named in the document but said, "No C.I.A. official, current or former, has been found accountable, because we're talking about a draft.''

Senator Pat Roberts, af Kansas Republican who is chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, did not sign the letter that Mr. Rockefeller sent. A Republican Congressional official said that Mr. Roberts did not yet believe that the postponement of the report was a matter for concern and said the delay was "uncommon but not abnormal.''

Sarah Little, a spokeswoman for Mr. Roberts, said: "Senator Roberts is closely monitoring the progress of the C.I.A. inspector general's report on 9/11. Senator Roberts has already made it clear to the agency that he expects to see the report upon its completion."

That Mr. Hoekstra and Ms. Harman had called on the C.I.A. to release the report had been previously disclosed, but not the contents of the letter. In it, Mr. Hoekstra and Ms. Harman said that Mr. Helgerson had indicated that Mr. McLaughlin had broken with normal practice and directed him "not to distribute the sections of the report that identify individual officers by name.''

A spokesman for George J. Tenet, who stepped down in July after seven years as director of central intelligence, said that Mr. Tenet had not been interviewed for the draft report, had not been briefed on its contents and had not been asked to respond to it.

James L. Pavitt, who retired in August as the C.I.A.'s deputy director of operations, also said he had not seen the report and had not been asked to respond to it. Mr. Pavitt said in an e-mail message: "We failed to stop the 11 September attacks. It surely was not for lack of effort, lack of focus or lack of courage.''

"Given what we now know, in all the hindsight of the year 2004, I still do not believe we could have stopped the attacks,'' Mr. Pavitt added. "If there is to be blame, it belongs with me, not with the remarkable folks who worked the counterterrorism issue day in and day out."

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So the CIA withheld information from the 9-11 commission? Is that what you are really saying???

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The 9/11 Secret in the CIA's Back Pocket

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