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CIA threatens "Press for Truth" producers over release of new documentary

Brilliant. The old, "I'm right because I have credentials, but can't prove it" argument. How wonderful.

Some of you guys probably push brooms and change wastepaper basket liners inside government facilities and believe that gives you some kind of special insight into how the government functions.

It doesn't.

SHC...........my comment really wasn't directed at you anyway. Believe what you want....you are going to anyway.
 
Now I feel bad for reading double meaning into your comment. To quick on the draw for the joke. :D

Agreed on the "Listen". It is true that not everyone on the internet, by far, is whom they claim to be. On the other hand, you shouldn't automatically assume that someone you don't know is lying about their credentials, on the basis that you don't like what they say or that it challenges your tightly held beliefs, and that is where some posting on here have failed.

The audio documentary referenced in the OP made the case that the withholding was deliberate. Meaning we aren't talking about bureaucratic inefficiency, turf battles, risk aversion, outdated computer systems, incompetence, etc. For sure these factors hindered US intelligence before 9/11 and continue to be an issue today but they do not explain away deliberate withholding.

I've read almost all the mainstream 9/11 books. None to date has a credible explanation for the al-Hazmi/al-Mihdhar withholding. We have speculation that the CIA was trying to double them or that they were Saudi uncover agents posing as al Qaeda. The CIA and FBI have not declassified any 9/11 Commission interviews with Alec Station or UBLU agents. As posted above FBI agent Ali Soufan still has no explanation for the withholding. Author Lawrence Wright wrote in his Pulitzer Prize winning book The Looming Tower that CIA withholding amounted to obstruction of justice in the USS Cole investigation. He too was unable to get a explanation from the CIA.

We have never heard a word from Richard Blee even though he headed Alec Station when the withholding took place from January 2000 through August 2001. We have never heard a word from Rodney Middleton who was in charge of the FBI UBLU. Middleton's unit kept the information from the Cole agents and instead a single rookie agent was given a routine priority intel side investigation to track al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar.

There is no good reason why the public should not know what was going on in these units.
 
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Brilliant. The old, "I'm right because I have credentials, but can't prove it" argument. How wonderful.

Some of you guys probably push brooms and change wastepaper basket liners inside government facilities and believe that gives you some kind of special insight into how the government functions.

It doesn't.

It appears being a janitor is all that is needed to understand 911 better than you do.
Here is what I did for my job, I swept up a lot of air and turned it into thrust.
1tankerflight.jpg


I am a janitor, and I understand 911; you don't.

Oh, I pass gas too, and love photography, and flew jets, and some engineering on the side - what do you do besides fail to understand 911 and call people liars? I just took out the trash.

The OP remains nonsense, or worse.

... We have speculation ... or that they were Saudi uncover agents posing as al Qaeda. ...
You speculate two of the hijackers were undercover agents? Is that special 911 truth logic, or did you come up with that all by yourself?

or worse
 
That was a good movie. Are there any others I should watch so I can learn more about how the CIA actually works? I would like to be an expert and an authority.

Le Carre's books are pretty accurate, I'm told. Also, surprisingly, Burn Notice, which makes a point of showing how spies are just as human as anyone. They can be exploited, blackmailed, emotionally compromised, and so on. They actually have an ex-spy as a consultant. There's also it's predecessor The Equalizer.

The shrinks call this "projection."

I shouldn't laugh, really I shouldn't.
 
FYI, secretaries and other admin types are a prime target for recruitment by other intelligence services precisely because they often have access to materials far above their GS level as part of their jobs. That's not to say that secretaries know everything, but you can't just say "she/he doesn't know anything, they're just a secretary!"
 
From the wikipedia plot summary of Tom Clancy's Clear and Present Danger:

Cortez, a former colonel of Cuban military intelligence, has an unwitting contact inside the U.S. government — Moira Wolfson (Ann Magnuson), a secretary to Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Emil Jacobs. Cortez feigns romantic interest to discover that Jacobs is visiting Colombia to negotiate with the local attorney general concerning the frozen money.
 
It appears being a janitor is all that is needed to understand 911 better than you do.
Here is what I did for my job, I swept up a lot of air and turned it into thrust.
[qimg]http://i286.photobucket.com/albums/ll116/tjkb/1tankerflight.jpg[/qimg]

I am a janitor, and I understand 911; you don't.

Oh, I pass gas too, and love photography, and flew jets, and some engineering on the side - what do you do besides fail to understand 911 and call people liars? I just took out the trash.

The OP remains nonsense, or worse.


You speculate two of the hijackers were undercover agents? Is that special 911 truth logic, or did you come up with that all by yourself?

or worse

Don't you know that hands-on experience with the subject matter makes you part of the plot?
 
In your professional opinion what is the likelihood of a perfect coverup like the ones suggested by conspiracy nuts?

In my opinion? About negative infinity.

In a conspiradroid's world, the government is a well-oiled machine where every part does exactly what it's supposed to do, when it's supposed to do it, and everyone can keep their big yap shut no matter what because they're either unscrupulous bastages who couldn't give a hoot for the lives that may be lost on account of their actions or they're so thoroughly cowed by the big shots that they're too scared to say anything. The reality is far less smooth, shall we say; even now, most of the agencies, intelligence or otherwise, don't get along very well, mistakes are made on a daily basis, and it's pretty clear that there are people who are willing to break their silence on how things work, either in a legitimate fashion or by violating their oaths (i.e. Sibel Edmonds and Bradley Manning, to name a few). Like I said before, there's a reason the saying goes "three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead"; the notion that a conspiracy of this size could POSSIBLY be kept secret for this long is utterly ludicrous if you know the day-to-day workings of the government agencies. Again, not just intel; all the agencies have their little foibles, and they are hardly the well-oiled machine the conspiradroids like to say they are. But we all know SHC and his like will ignore this... as always. :rolleyes:
 
The reality is far less smooth, shall we say; even now, most of the agencies, intelligence or otherwise, don't get along very well, mistakes are made on a daily basis, and it's pretty clear that there are people who are willing to break their silence on how things work, either in a legitimate fashion or by violating their oaths (i.e. Sibel Edmonds and Bradley Manning, to name a few).

Sibel Edmonds.......now people want to talk about "low level' people in the Intel community...........here is one.

Translators are low level people in Intel (and other agencies) and usually only know a very small piece of a very big pie (and for good reasons!).

Most translators I have worked with understand their role though......unlike Sibel Edmonds who worked for 4 months.

She makes me sick!
 
Sibel Edmonds founded the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition in the early days of her odyssey against a kafkaesk system and all those people, many of them high rank were happy to join. Daniel Ellsberg calls her a hero. Foot soldiers in some agencies who were successfully brainwashed into accepting a tight hierarchy and to never question authority, essentially giving up their independent thinking for a paycheck, have to hate her, because couraged people like her and her foundations members force them to look into the mirror and see the face of enablers.

No surprise there.
 
Sibel Edmonds founded the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition in the early days of her odyssey against a kafkaesk system and all those people, many of them high rank were happy to join. Daniel Ellsberg calls her a hero. Foot soldiers in some agencies who were successfully brainwashed into accepting a tight hierarchy and to never question authority, essentially giving up their independent thinking for a paycheck, have to hate her, because couraged people like her and her foundations members force them to look into the mirror and see the face of enablers.

No surprise there.

Kafkaesque.
 
Sibel Edmonds founded the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition in the early days of her odyssey against a kafkaesk system and all those people, many of them high rank were happy to join. Daniel Ellsberg calls her a hero. Foot soldiers in some agencies who were successfully brainwashed into accepting a tight hierarchy and to never question authority, essentially giving up their independent thinking for a paycheck, have to hate her, because couraged people like her and her foundations members force them to look into the mirror and see the face of enablers.

No surprise there.

I can't speak for everyone here (nor anyone, really) as I know that there are very likely posters here who are absolutely against whistle-blowing - by the simple fact that there are posters here who are against, well, just about everything. Meh, I'm all for the creation of a halfway house and safe refuge for whistleblowers. I also think the WPA needs to be worded more strongly and be better enforced.

My problem, as with many who share some of my opinions, is with Edmonds making herself out to be some kind of expert on 9/11, taunting the world for years with all that she was privy to and would one day reveal, and then shutting up like a clam (on the topic of 9/11) when she took the witness stand. I don't think she sold us out - I think she never had anything other than what she ultimately revealed in those hearings.

She was a low-grade translator for a brief period. The stuff she saw had to do with political contributions by interested parties who shouldn't have been allowed to be interested. Nothing more. If she wants to tell me about how the translation desks in the FBI worked during that period, I'm all ears. If she wants to tell me that the documents she was exposed to somehow were the first in a series of connect-the-dot moves to get to the bottom of 9/11? Then she's going to have to prove it. This, she has not accomplished and she's had a lot of time and a change of administrations. The fact that this has not been forthcoming suggests to me that what we saw of her testimony behavior is what she's got..... nothing.
 
So a CIA secretary knows how covert operations work, where operations are taking place anywhere on the globe, what the overall goal of the operations are, where the money for the operations is coming from, and who are the operatives involved?

No, this sort of knowledge is possessed by a select few known as "Anyone with a Youtube account". Youtube. The source of all hidden knowledge.
 
No, this sort of knowledge is possessed by a select few known as "Anyone with a Youtube account". Youtube. The source of all hidden knowledge.

Yes, I'm quite certain the CIA puts videos of all their legal and illegal covert operations on YouTube for the hams to watch and point their fingers in horror at. Right.

LOLZ!
 
Sibel Edmonds founded the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition in the early days of her odyssey against a kafkaesk system and all those people, many of them high rank were happy to join. Daniel Ellsberg calls her a hero. Foot soldiers in some agencies who were successfully brainwashed into accepting a tight hierarchy and to never question authority, essentially giving up their independent thinking for a paycheck, have to hate her, because couraged people like her and her foundations members force them to look into the mirror and see the face of enablers.

No surprise there.
In other words, they were willing to sacrifice to expose wrongdoing.

That's kind of an argument in the debunkers' favor, CE.
 

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