Clarke, Richard
=<div>blank 1/19, odd?
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</div><div>=</div><div>7/19 AN is this relatesd to doemstic terorism?</div><div>b2 worst prez)
Richard A. Clarke, a prominent counterterrorism expert who has served under almost every president since Reagan, has long been convinced that the worse president in his lifetime was George W. Bush — even through much of the early period of President Donald Trump’s administration.<div class="p1_5" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><div class="mvp-post-soc-in" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Cabin, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div id="mvp-content-body" class="left relative" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><div id="mvp-content-body-top" class="left relative" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><div id="mvp-content-main" class="left relative 319" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;">But on Monday, The Daily Beast <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/george-w-bush-was-bad-but-trump-might-be-worse-richard-clarke?ref=home" target="_blank" rel="noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; color: rgb(0, 191, 165); transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">published</a> new comments from Clarke suggesting that he is growing less sure of this assessment....</p></div></div></div></div></div><div><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/the-illegal-cia-operation-that-brought-us-9-11/">https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/the-illegal-cia-operation-that-brought-us-9-11/</a></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Was it conspiracy or idiocy that led to the failure of U.S. intelligence agencies to detect and prevent the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon headquarters? That’s one of the questions at the heart of “<b>The Watchdogs Didn’t Bark: The CIA, NSA, and the Crimes of the War on Terror,</b>” by John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski. In their careful and thorough investigation of the events leading up to the attacks, the authors uncover a story about the Central Intelligence Agency’s neglect, possible criminal activities and a cover-up that may have allowed al-Qaida to carry out its plans uninhibited by government officials.</font></p><div class="p1_53" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In the latest installment of “Scheer Intelligence,” the journalists tell Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer how an interview with <b>Richard Clarke, the counterterror adviser to Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush</b>, led them to a jaw-dropping revelation regarding two hijackers involved in the infamous attacks. As it turns out, Khalid Muhammad Abdallah al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi,</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> two men linked to al-Qaida, were staying at an FBI informant’s home in San Diego in 2000, and they were being tracked by the National Security Agency. Despite knowledge of the men’s ties to the terrorist organization responsible for 9/11, neither was investigated by the FBI. Clarke and others believe that this may have had to do with a CIA attempt to turn the two men into agency informants.</span></font></p><div class="p2_53" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><div class="advertisement " style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 10px 0px; padding: 0px;"><div class="header" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 5px 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: center;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div class="teadsNative" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“When we sat down with </span><b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Clarke … he told us he couldn’t see any other explanation but that there was an op [and] that it never made it to the White House because it would have had to go through him,” says Nowosielski. “And his friend [then </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">CIA Director] George Tenet </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">was responsible for malfeasance and misfeasance in the runup to 9/11.”</span></b></font></p><div class="p3_53" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Once the plans for the 9/11 attack must have become clear to the CIA, why didn’t the agency prevent it from taking place? Duffy and Nowosielski come to the simple, <b>shocking conclusion that because the CIA is prohibited from operating on U.S. soil, those involved in the operation chose to avoid prosecution rather than come clean.</b></font></p><div class="p4_53" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In a well-documented case study that touches senior government officials, including current special counsel <b>Robert Mueller</b> and other high-level individuals, crucial questions arise about who is responsible for allowing “a plot that resulted in 3,000 murders” and led to ongoing U.S. military entanglements in the Middle East to move forward. However, our country’s recent crimes and the people behind them, including President Bush, are currently being “whitewashed” by our national obsession with Donald Trump, the authors warn.</font></p><div class="p5_53" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“All the crimes of the war on terror, the torture, Abu Ghraib, it’s all just gone—the unnecessary invasion of the war in Iraq, it’s all just sort of under the rug now because of Trump,” Duffy says.</font></p><div class="p6_53" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><br style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" /></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Listen to their discussion to learn more about the stunning investigation into the tragedy that changed the course of our nation’s history and the Americans who could have thwarted the attacks but decided to cover their own backs instead. You can also read a transcript of the interview below the media player.</font></p><div class="p7_53" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">RS: </strong><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of “Scheer Intelligence,” where the intelligence comes from my guests. And the title is really appropriate for the book we’re going to talk about today, “The Watchdogs Didn’t Bark: The CIA, NSA, and the Crimes of the War on Terror.” And the authors are John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski. And they are investigative reporters, and the watchdogs here are the people in our intelligence agencies that are supposed to be protecting the nation. And this book cuts very deeply into the unsolved mystery of how 9/11 happened. Why weren’t we better prepared to prevent it? It’s one of the most important events in American history; it certainly has shaped our lives in terms of a surveillance state, our rights and everything else, up to the present. And this book, I think, represents the most exhaustive and well-documented effort to get to the bottom of the whole thing. You’re very careful in what you do and do not assert about 9/11, what we don’t know about it, and</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">particularly the role of George Tenet, who was then head of the CIA, and the role of the CIA in—what is the right word?—obscuring the story, even keeping information from the White House, from the FBI. So give me the gist of the book.</span></font></p><div class="p8_53" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">RN: </strong>This is Ray. The book is largely about looking at this case study of the failure leading up to 9/11, the people who were involved in that failure, how that came about, and how they were successful, to the present day, in managing to obscure the public from really fully understanding that this was, in the words of one of our sources, really just a handful of people. And the most jarring thing is that they’re still, in some cases, working today in I guess Trump’s CIA. And we sort of document through the second half of the book what damage was done to America because they remained in their positions.</font></p><div class="p9_53" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">JD: </strong>This is John. And intelligence was gathered around the time of the millennium that led people in the Bin Laden unit at the CIA to monitor a meeting in Malaysia that was a gathering of these al-Qaida figures. In monitoring this—</font></p><div class="p10_53" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">RS: </strong>That was in the year 2000, right?</font></p><div class="p11_53" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">JD: </strong><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Yes. Right at the outset of the year. In monitoring this meeting, they became aware of the fact that one of the attendees had a multiple-entry visa to the United States. That man’s name was Khalid al-Mihdhar. He would eventually be on the plane that crashed into the Pentagon; he was one of the hijackers. So this starts the whole thing there, the fact that the CIA becomes aware of this information; the Bin Laden unit, counterterror center, and then all the way up to</span><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> George Tenet </b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">are aware of this information. There’s a lot of ins, outs, and what-have-yous about where that information goes, but it ultimately does not go over to the FBI’s counterterror division in New York, much to the protest of the FBI agents who were detailed to the CIA’s Bin Laden unit.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> And it did not make it to the White House counterterror czar, Richard Clarke, who very much finds this to be, like, the crux of the whole story—the fact that this information was kept from his office for basically a year and eight months, up until the success of the attacks. The crux is there, that they had this information, these guys were coming into the country, they had just left the terror planning summit, and this information was being held close by the Bin Laden unit, by the counterterror center, and by George Tenet. </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The reason for that is unknown; the speculation that Richard Clarke has was that George Tenet and these people in the Bin Laden unit and counterterror center thought having these al-Qaida people in the United States, they could possibly go through Allied proxies in the Saudi intelligence to try to get close to these guys, monitor them, potentially find out information from them or even try to flip them. That’s Richard Clarke’s speculation as to why this was kept from him for so long. Ultimately, the attack was successful; that they all just did their best to bury all this and, you know, hope no one noticed.</span></font></p></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><div>=</div></div></div>