Ex-CIA official to head investigations of intelligence failure in 9/11 attacks.
February 14, 2002 8:15 PM   Subscribe

Ex-CIA official to head investigations of intelligence failure in 9/11 attacks. Whether you trust the government or not -- do you think the truth will come out with someone so close to the agencies running the investigation?
posted by bas67 (17 comments total)
 
I think the truth wouldn't come out at all if it wasn't someone who was close to the agencies. They wouldn't know which closets held skeletons or who to talk to.
posted by SpecialK at 8:19 PM on February 14, 2002


As if the truth would come out at all. Uh huh.
posted by fleener at 8:28 PM on February 14, 2002


I sure hope the truth won't "come out". I don't think this investigation is supposed to be for the purpose of embarrassing or humiliating the agency in front of the public - it is to find out what went wrong, and try to fix it. And a lot of the investigation necessarily will be about covert topics, and the results deal with subject matter that should not all be made public.

The last thing I want is for an Bin Laden cell group to read, in the New York Times, a full analysis of where the major glitches in our intelligence agency are.
posted by MidasMulligan at 9:15 PM on February 14, 2002


All this conspricary theory reminds me of how Pearl Habor...There are some people out there who think FDR knew of the impending attacks, yet chose to ignore them in order to have a legitamite reason to declare was on Japan. Seems kind of like the same parallel where we *may* have been able to prevent the attacks, but didn't for whatever reason.
Will we ever no? NOPE.
posted by jmd82 at 9:42 PM on February 14, 2002


"All this conspricary theory reminds me of how Pearl Habor...There are some people out there who think FDR knew of the impending attacks, yet chose to ignore them in order to have a legitamite reason to declare was on Japan."

Some people like the history channel.
From the article:"...but there was evidence to suggest that the truth had been distorted by reversions of testimony, cover-ups, and outright lies. There was evidence, for instance, that President Roosevelt knew as early as December 2, 1941, that Japanese carriers were approaching Pearl Harbor."
posted by bas67 at 10:32 PM on February 14, 2002


"What they should have known but didn't" isn't a question of "truth," it's a question of comparison and defining how much you think can be done given current capabilities. Most important is, can this person get others to open up, and provide some useful analysis that actually fixes the system?
posted by sheauga at 10:44 PM on February 14, 2002


jmd82 - There has been the suggestion (I've read it only peripherally through Gore Vidal) that FDR expected Japan to attack, but that he didn't know exactly when or that it would be at Pearl Harbor. In any case, the supposed reason was that FDR needed an excuse to declare war on Germany, not Japan, based on his promise not to declare war unless the US was attacked.

There are stories showing up like this now, though not in US media, that (1) before September, US diplomats discussed with other countries our expectation to be at war with the Taliban by October, having to do with a failure to come to an agreement with them regarding an oil pipeline in Afghanistan; and (2) that the Bush administration, because of these same negotiations (and in the interests of the oil industry), instructed the FBI to back off its investigation of terrorist groups connected with the Taliban.

Have these reports have already been established as unreliable or untrue? It certainly makes suspicious the requests to Congress by both Cheney and Bush to limit investigation into the causes for 9-11, ostensibly so resources are not diverted from the war on terror.

It's hard to assess the validity of conspiracy theories like these, but the part that bothers me most is that if these things were proven to be true, nothing about it would surprise me.
posted by troybob at 11:17 PM on February 14, 2002


What about the X-Files?
posted by aaronshaf at 11:25 PM on February 14, 2002


troybob, I sure wish you had something, anything, to back up what you are saying.

I want to believe...
posted by acridrabbit at 2:16 AM on February 15, 2002


in other news, the F.O.X. announced it will investigate the recent henhouse massacres.
posted by quonsar at 6:41 AM on February 15, 2002


acridrabbit,

Heres the report on planned attack of Afghanistan.
posted by bas67 at 7:30 AM on February 15, 2002


thanks, bas67...I couldn't find that one.

Here's a review of a French book that goes into more detail about what has been reported; I had to find this particular link today, but I've seen the same set of allegations elsewhere on the web for the past few weeks. It looks like the original story goes back to November 2001. I like to think I follow the news pretty closely, particularly on the web, so I'm curious as to why I haven't seen anything on this in mainstream US press, if only to say that the information is incorrect.
posted by troybob at 9:13 AM on February 15, 2002


Day of Deceit is a recent book by Robert Stinnett that claims to have new evidence that FDR not only had foreknowledge of the Pearl harbor raid but maneuvered the Japanese into attacking. Salon trashed the book as revisionist FDR bashing.

Some of his evidence is interesting: A monograph by a naval intelligence officer detailing how to start a war with Japan. Evidence that the Hawaiian commanders were kept out of the intelligence loop. Coincidently, the carriers and most of the advanced battleships were sent away before the attack. All of it is circumstantial.

What’s eerie is that the Pacific fleet launched a mock attack on Pearl two weeks before Dec 7 from the same spot as the later Japanese attack.
posted by euphorb at 10:12 AM on February 15, 2002


troybob, you probably don't happen to read Common Dreams News Center, which reprinted the same article from IPS,The Village Voice, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Boston Herald, the Las Vegas Sun or the Toronto Sun, the reviews of the tendentious Online Journal, or the letters to the editor on Salon. Discussion of the French book really hasn't been suppressed.

Here's a Dutch writer who claims to work for Shell, and who uses Brisard's (Brissard's?) book in his commentary on why Bush might have to revisit the Kyoto Protocol: exactly what happened in yesterday's speech.
posted by sheauga at 11:00 AM on February 15, 2002


Re: Pearl Harbor. This biography of Errol Flynn has quite a story about Flynn's alleged role in it. Some of Flynn's fans say the book is an attempt to trash the reputation of a wonderful actor. (Its author did have a bent for writing conspiracy books on topics like collaboration between US companies and the Nazis.)
posted by sheauga at 11:12 AM on February 15, 2002


just saw this thing on the idler and remembered this thread so i thought i'd post it here:

What has happened over the years to the CIA? They have become a government inside a government. One problem is that the CIA spies on its own government. Yes, the CIA places 'agents' in other federal agencies, and on the staffs of House and Senate committees, to "keep an eye on things."

Which leads to this serious oversight problem: Every congressional committee that oversees intelligence activities has CIA staff on its staff. That way Langley can keep track of trouble brewing it its own backyard. That's like having the fox guarding the chicken coop.

This is the biggest - and so far unreported - scandal in the US today.

Bigger than Enron, bigger than anything else.
posted by kliuless at 3:07 PM on February 15, 2002


kliuless (whose post was entirely a quote after the colon), that article was by John Leboutillier, who wrote that Chandra Levy knew Gary Condit was a leather-wearing bisexual biker, so had her murdered by a Haitian male prostitute. Note that not even NoozeMax would let that story stay up. I wouldn't trust anything he writes farther than I could throw him.
posted by dhartung at 5:19 PM on February 15, 2002


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