There was so much bureaucratic incompetence, indifference, uncooperative behavior, and sloppy analysis in the hierarchy, it’s no fucking wonder the muzzie terrorists were able to pull 9/11 off so easily.
From this source, we find out when the detection of the ‘Brooklyn Cell’ transpired and when the report was made:
“In September 2000, one year before the Al Qaeda attacks of 9/11, a U.S. Army military intelligence program, known as Able Danger, identified a terrorist cell based in Brooklyn, NY, one of whose members was 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta, and recommended to their military superiors that the FBI be called in to take out that cell…”
……Which puts the Able Danger Report right on top of these other events.
What is missing is when did the DoD lawyers make the determination to drop Atta and his 3 compatriots, and who in the administration was involved in that decision.
Interestingly enough, around 6 months or so after their report on Atta the group was disbanded in Clinton’s last federal budget year
A small group of intelligence employees ran “Able Danger” from the fall of 1999 until February 2001 – just seven months before the terrorist attacks – when the operation was axed.
I think we need to know when the Able Danger report was made and when the decision came down to let Atta go. We need to understand how far up the report went (which would seem pretty high given the Clinton administrations focus on AQ in country) and who participated in the decision to back off Atta.
From The History Channel:
HISTORY talked to five intelligence and law-enforcement veterans of those investigations about the challenges they faced convincing others in the government of the threat posed by al Qaeda and other Sunni Islamist groups.
Cynthia Storer, former analyst with the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center
One of first big missed opportunities was just losing most of our intelligence collection after the Soviets began to withdraw from Afghanistan in 1988. It was that peace dividend that [Bill] Clinton wanted, that the American people wanted after the Soviet Union collapsed, so we fired all of our Afghan assets and ramped down our signals-intelligence collection and everything else. If you don’t get the information to follow something closely, then you’re going to be behind the curve, which is what happened.
Everybody needed to have a change of mindset. At the end of the Cold War, the beginning of this international Sunni terrorist organization was something nobody imagined could happen, because ‘Arabs can’t work together, and these guys are a bunch of ragheads who’ve been fighting in the mountains of Afghanistan.’ Except that we knew there was a lot of very well-educated people who had been hanging out together in Afghanistan for 10 years.
Those of us who worked it weren’t under those illusions, but that was the conventional wisdom—that they weren’t capable of doing anything. We were in the Counterterrorist Center, which was the first center in the CIA [established in 1986], so the rest of the organization didn’t really understand what we did, and we were looked down on. So that combination of factors, and having women, frankly, be in the forefront of this, made it hard to convince people. My experience is, from studying these things academically, it takes about 10 years to turn people’s mindsets around. We didn’t have 10 years.
The skepticism over al Qaeda’s threat] was bad enough that the week of the Africa bombings in ’98, I was supposed to go on rotation to another office, because I was tired of swimming upstream or battling uphill or whatever you want to call it. I was exhausted. And I was tired of being talked down to… I actually got counseled by my branch chief on my performance review that I was spending too much time on bin Laden.
I’d love to know who her branch chief was.
Jack Cloonan, FBI agent who worked on the CIA-FBI Osama bin Laden unit from 1996-2002
You could say that while [al Qaeda] was beating up on the Soviets and helping us, that was terrific. But after the Soviets departed Afghanistan, the question [for U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement] then was, ‘Well, who are these people? What are they doing? What’s their focus? And was it the United States? If it was, when did that occur, and what were we doing about it?’ One of the things that I think about often is how these individual acts [like the 1990 assassination of ultra-nationalist orthodox rabbi Meir Kahane] were investigated, but not necessarily seen as part of a much broader, foreign-based radical Islam that was launching this and that the United States was Target Number One.
The mistake we made in Afghanistan at the time of the Russian pullout, was walking away and leaving a vacuum, which was promptly filled by the Taliban; the extremist faction with the most power. The Al Qaeda also took advantage by using the country as a base of operations.
The first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 should have been a wake up call. Intelligence agencies’ counter terrorism divisions weren’t just complacent, they were brain dead.
People like FBI Agent John O’Neill warned of the Al Qaeda threat long before he was killed on 9/11.
In 1993, the FBI had information on Bin Laden’s plans to attack America.
In 1998, an FBI agent in Oklahoma wrote a memo describing reports of “large numbers of Middle Eastern males receiving flight training at Oklahoma airports” which “may be related to planned terrorist activity”.
In 2001, Kenneth Williams, an FBI agent in Phoenix, wrote a memorandum two months before the 9/11 attacks, warning of the possibility of Osama bin Laden’s followers hijacking aircraft within the United States and using the planes in a terrorist attack.
Every one of those warnings were ignored.
The abject idiocy and dismissive attitudes of a leadership which should be focused on the threats to national security are incredible to fathom. There’s plenty of blame to go around. The State Department, the FBI, and all the three-letter acronym intelligence agencies who didn’t connect the dots or worse, dismissed information outright because they don’t want to “offend” muslims.
Bill Clinton can also pat himself on the back. That son of a bitch had multiple opportunities to get Bin Laden and failed. Sudan even captured him and offered him up on a goddamned silver platter. Clinton turned it down.
Clinton’s response to the FIVE terrorist attacks against Americans during his term: ZERO. The Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, the USS Cole, Khobar Towers, and the first World Trade Center attack in 1993, resulted in Bubba biting his quivering lower lip, tearing up, and doing absolutely nothing…Oh wait, that’s right, he wagged the dog by bombing KOSOVO.
He never did take the war on terrorism as seriously as Monica’s mouth-to-crotch resuscitation. Three times after Aug. 20, 1998, when Clinton ordered the only missile strike of his presidency against bin Laden’s organization, the CIA came close enough to pinpointing bin Laden in order for Clinton to authorize final preparations to launch. In each case, he aborted the mission. Bin Laden got away.
The 19 hijackers applied for and received tourist/student visas. (Thank you, State Department) Muzzie hijackers Atta, Shehhi, and Jarrah violated the terms of their status and/or overstayed their periods of admission, but SNAFUs and inspectors’ inattention to detail, let them slip through the cracks.
None of that information was passed on to the CIA or George W. Bush, for that matter, thanks to Jamie Gorlick, former Clinton Deputy Attorney General. In 1995, Gorlick wrote a memo directing that counterintelligence efforts be kept separate from criminal intelligence. This action created a wall that prohibited collaboration between agencies like the FBI and the CIA, and impeded the investigation into Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called “20th hijacker”, (pre-9/11) which could have led to the arrest of the other 19.
The intelligence agencies and Homeland Security had better get their shit together or mark my words, there will be another attack on America that will make 9/11 look like a fucking picnic.
Related Posts:
https://sfcmac.wordpress.com/2014/09/23/scoamf-launches-airstrikes-into-syria-with-arab-allies/
Related articles:
The Clintons: http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/4354
http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/category/uncategorized/able-danger9-11