Fw: Fwd: Hue & Cry: "CIA tried to recruit 9/11 hijackers—then covered it up."

[Mark Kohut]

Spying, counterspying at the international level, embodied in the CIA, is a deep theme of Pynchon's
as we've written of...
 
Norman Mailer pursued the CIA's shadow too in fact and probable fiction.
 
Allen Ginsberg was another self-educated expert.
 
Say it ain't so........(but it probably is)
 
 
Not my intro but good one: 
THIS CHARGE HAS AIRED BEFORE, AS YOU WILL RECOLLECT. THE CIA WITHHELD
SUPPORT FROM THE ORIGINAL 9/11 COMMISSION. I ALWAYS ASSUMED THAT THIS
WAS THE SWORD OF DAMOCLES WIELDED BY CHENEY TO KEEP THE CIA IN LINE
BEFORE AND AFTER IRAQ INVASION.

DAILY BEAST.COM:
An Explosive New 9/11 Charge

In a new documentary, ex-national security aide Richard Clarke
suggests the CIA tried to recruit 9/11 hijackers—then covered it up.
Philip Shenon on George Tenet’s denial.

Aug 11, 2011 8:47 AM EDT

With the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks only a month away,
former CIA Director George Tenet and two former top aides are fighting
back hard against allegations that they engaged in a massive cover-up
in 2000 and 2001 to hide intelligence from the White House and the FBI
that might have prevented the attacks.

The source of the explosive, unproved allegations is a man who once
considered Tenet a close friend: former White House counterterrorism
czar Richard Clarke, who makes the charges against Tenet and the CIA
in an interview for a radio documentary timed to the 10th anniversary
next month. Portions of the Clarke interview were made available to
The Daily Beast by the producers of the documentary.

In the interview for the documentary, Clarke offers an incendiary
theory that, if true, would rewrite the history of the 9/11 attacks,
suggesting that the CIA intentionally withheld information from the
White House and FBI in 2000 and 2001 that two Saudi-born terrorists
were on U.S. soil – terrorists who went on to become suicide hijackers
on 9/11.

Clarke speculates – and readily admits he cannot prove -- that the CIA
withheld the information because the agency had been trying to recruit
the terrorists, while they were living in southern California under
their own names, to work as CIA agents inside Al Qaeda. After the
recruitment effort went sour, senior CIA officers continued to
withhold the information from the White House for fear they would be
accused of “malfeasance and misfeasance,” Clarke suggests.

Clarke says it is fair to conclude “there was a high-level decision in
the CIA ordering people not to share information.” Asked who would
have made the order, Clarke replies, “I would think it would have been
made by the director,” referring to Tenet.

Clarke said that if his theory is correct, Tenet and others would
never admit to the truth today “even if you waterboarded them.”

Clarke’s theory addresses a central, enduring mystery about the 9/11
attacks – why the CIA failed for so long to tell the White House and
senior officials at the FBI that the agency was aware that two Al
Qaeda terrorists had arrived in the United States in January 2000,
just days after attending a terrorist summit meeting in Malaysia that
the CIA had secretly monitored.

In a written response prepared last week in advance of the broadcast,
Tenet says that Clarke, who famously went public in 2004 to blow the
whistle on the Bush White House over intelligence failures before
9/11, has “suddenly invented baseless allegations which are belied by
the record and unworthy of serious consideration.”

The CIA insisted to the 9/11 Commission and other government
investigations that the agency never knew the exact whereabouts of the
two hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, inside the
U.S.—let alone try to recruit them as spies.

Agency officials said the CIA's delay in sharing information about the
two terrorists was a grave failure, but maintained there was no
suggestion of deception by CIA brass. Tenet has said he was not
informed before 9/11 about Hazmi and Mihdhar's travel to the U.S.,
although the intelligence was widely shared at lower levels of the
CIA.

The 9/11 Commission investigated widespread rumors in the intelligence
community that the CIA tried to recruit the two terrorists—Clarke was
not the first to suggest it—but the investigation revealed no evidence
to support the rumors. The commission said in its final report that
"it appears that no one informed higher levels of management in either
the FBI or CIA" about the two terrorists.

But in his interview, Clarke said his seemingly unlikely, even wild
scenario – a bungled CIA terrorist-recruitment effort and a subsequent
cover-up – was “the only conceivable reason that I’ve been able to
come up with” to explain why he and others at the White House were
told nothing about the two terrorists until the day of the attacks.

“I’ve thought a lot about this,” Clarke says in the interview, which
was conducted in October 2009. He said it was fair to conclude “there
was a high-level decision in the CIA ordering people not to share
information.” Asked who would have made the order, Clarke replies, “I
would think it would have been made by the director,” referring to
Tenet.

Clarke, now a security consultant and bestselling author, has hinted
in his writings in the past that there may have been a CIA cover-up
involving Hazmi and Mihdhar, although he has never made such direct
attacks on Tenet and others at the CIA by name.

He did not reply to requests from The Daily Beast to expand on his
comments or to explain why he has not repeated them publicly since the
2009 interview. The documentary’s producers, FF4 Films, said they had
been in contact with Clarke this month and that he stood by his
remarks in the broadcast.

The producers, John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski, had previously made a
well-reviewed film documentary, "Press for Truth,"
(www.911pressfortruth.com), on the struggle of a group of 9/11
victims' families to force the government to investigate the attacks.

In finishing the radio documentary, they recently supplied a copy of
Clarke's comments to Tenet, who joined with two of former top CIA
deputies -- Cofer Black, who was head of the agency's counterterrorism
center, and Richard Blee, former head of the agency's Osama Bin Laden
unit -- in a statement denouncing Clarke.

“Richard Clarke was an able public servant who served his country well
for many years,” the statement says. “But his recently released
comments about the run-up to 9/11 are reckless and profoundly wrong.”

“Clarke starts with the presumption that important information on the
travel of future hijackers to the United States was intentionally
withheld from him in early 2000. It was not.”

The statement continued. “Building on his false notion that
information was intentionally withheld, Mr. Clarke went on to
speculate – which he admits is based on nothing other than his
imagination – that the CIA might have been trying to recruit these two
future hijackers as agents. This, like much of what Mr. Clarke said in
his interview, is utterly without foundation.”

Clarke, who led government-wide counterterrorism efforts from the
White House during the Bush and Clinton administration, has said in
the past that he was astonished to learn after 9/11 that the CIA had
long known about the presence of Hazmi and Mihdhar inside the United
States.

“To this day, it is inexplicable why, 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,”
Clarke said in the interview for the documentary, referring to Tenet
and Cofer Black. “They told us everything – except this.”

He said that if he had known anything about Hazmi and Mihdhar even
days before 9/11, he would have ordered an immediate manhunt to find
them – and that it would have succeeded, possibly disrupting the 9/11
plot.

“We would have conducted a massive sweep,” he said. “We would have
conducted it publicly. We would have found those assholes. There’s no
doubt in my mind, even with only a week left. They were using credit
cards in their own names. They were staying in the Charles Hotel in
Harvard Square, for heaven’s sake.” He said that “those guys would
have been arrested within 24 hours.”

Like The Daily Beast on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for updates
all day long.

Philip Shenon is an investigative reporter based in Washington, D.C.
Almost all of his career was spent at The New York Times, where he was
a reporter from 1981 until 2008. He is the bestselling author of The
Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation. He has
reported from several war zones and was one of two reporters from the
Times embedded with American ground troops during the invasion of Iraq
in the 1991 Gulf War.

For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial at thedailybeast.com.

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