How could CIA/NSA/FBI miss the 9/11 attack?

[Foolmewunz]

The Cole investigators were prevented from investigating crucial links in the Cole attack. Later they were not permitted to be involved in the search for al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar.

Thus their investigations were obstructed by the CIA and FBI UBLU personnel. Maybe you want the word changed because you rightly realize that such conduct is bizarre and sickening.

I've seen nothing on the CIA/NSA obstructing the investigation. I'm admittedly not an expert on the Cole case/investigation, though. Do you have links to a credible source?

I have seen numerous reports, however, that it was inter-departmental squabbling with State backing a headstrong ambassador who preferred good relationships with the Yemeni government above all else... to the detriment of the FBI's investigation.

 

[dafydd]

The Cole investigators were prevented from investigating crucial links in the Cole attack. Later they were not permitted to be involved in the search for al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar.

Thus their investigations were obstructed by the CIA and FBI UBLU personnel. Maybe you want the word changed because you rightly realize that such conduct is bizarre and sickening.

How would you go about stopping the next terrorist attack? Gaze into a twoofer crystal ball?

 

[MaGZ]

So the Atta Gang did it then? Cool!

Lets shut down the 911 Sub forum, MaGZ has had major breakthrough!

This has always been my view.


http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=166811

 

[MaGZ]

Most of this is confirmed by the KGB (who had moles in the CIA at the time).

Can you provide a source for this?

 

[MaGZ]

The DOD data mining project Able Danger picked up on Atta before he came to the US. In Hamburg his group was under German intelligence surveillance. The information obtained by the Germans would have been shared with the CIA and Mossad.
I think Able Danger would have known about Atta (not necessary the entire 9/11 conspiracy) when he first started sending emails to the US inquiring about flight schools.
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2005/08/able-a19.html

 

[MaGZ]

The Mossad had the hijackers under surveillance. I think they were given this assignment by the CIA.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2007/03/07/what-did-israel-know-in-advance-of-the-9-11-attacks/

 

[dafydd]

The DOD data mining project Able Danger picked up on Atta before he came to the US. In Hamburg his group was under German intelligence surveillance. The information obtained by the Germans would have been shared with the CIA and Mossad.
I think Able Danger would have known about Atta (not necessary the entire 9/11 conspiracy) when he first started sending emails to the US inquiring about flight schools.
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2005/08/able-a19.html

Hindsight. Attaboy!

 

[JoeMorgue]

Hindsight. Attaboy!

Yes and this is yet another thing that the Twoofers are comically and monumentally failing to grasp.

9/11 was one of countless things that the United States intelligence community received "chatter" might have happened. Everyday the CIA, FBI, NSA, military intelligence, law enforcement agencies, news media, and so forth receive thousands of credible, possible threats... the vast majority of which never happen.

Twoofers live in some fantasy world where the intelligence prior to the 9/11 attacks was the only report that had ever been received and they had nothing else to do but act on this one possible attack and factoring in which attack was more likely and which ones were red herrings wasn't a thing.

And like Myriad said it's a high level of supreme irony for a bunch of conspiracy theorist that don't think the attacks happened at all even after they... well clearly did, to find fault in someone not magically predicting they would happen before hand.

 

[beachnut]

The DOD data mining project Able Danger picked up on Atta before he came to the US. In Hamburg his group was under German intelligence surveillance. The information obtained by the Germans would have been shared with the CIA and Mossad.
I think Able Danger would have known about Atta (not necessary the entire 9/11 conspiracy) when he first started sending emails to the US inquiring about flight schools.
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2005/08/able-a19.html

The Mossad had the hijackers under surveillance. I think they were given this assignment by the CIA.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2007/03/07/what-did-israel-know-in-advance-of-the-9-11-attacks/

What a bunch of nonsense. How do you find silly stuff like this, and then make up dumber stuff? Your sources are for people who can't think for themselves, gullible people who repeat junk freely and without thinking. Did you drop the missiles at ground zero joke?

 

[swright777]

This has always been my view.


http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=166811

If I had ever posted something that ludicrous I damn sure wouldn't bring it up again and provide a link to it.

 

[dafydd]

If I had ever posted something that ludicrous I damn sure wouldn't bring it up again and provide a link to it.

Twoofers and Holocaust deniers are very hard to fathom. They don't seem to live in the same world as us.

 

[JohnG]

Yes and this is yet another thing that the Twoofers are comically and monumentally failing to grasp.

9/11 was one of countless things that the United States intelligence community received "chatter" might have happened. Everyday the CIA, FBI, NSA, military intelligence, law enforcement agencies, news media, and so forth receive thousands of credible, possible threats... the vast majority of which never happen.

Twoofers live in some fantasy world where the intelligence prior to the 9/11 attacks was the only report that had ever been received and they had nothing else to do but act on this one possible attack and factoring in which attack was more likely and which ones were red herrings wasn't a thing.

And like Myriad said it's a high level of supreme irony for a bunch of conspiracy theorist that don't think the attacks happened at all even after they... well clearly did, to find fault in someone not magically predicting they would happen before hand.

One of the many other poignant ironies of the Truth Movement is that they have infinitely more faith in the government than us supposedly trusting "sheeple" do. We know the government, which is comprised of flawed individuals is fully capable of inadvertently screwing up. Truthers believe that if the government "screwed up", it must have been on purpose.

I had a government clearance (and what a PITA that was to get) in a previous job so that I could assist in a project to index and convert old government documents to electronic format. The infrastructure on the government side was ridiculously low-tech, utilizing technology from literally 60+ years ago. Added to that was our government contact's surly, unhelpful, micromiddlemanaging incompetence and it's a minor miracle the project went as smoothly as it did.

 

[Axxman300]

The Cole investigators were prevented from investigating crucial links in the Cole attack. Later they were not permitted to be involved in the search for al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar.

Thus their investigations were obstructed by the CIA and FBI UBLU personnel. Maybe you want the word changed because you rightly realize that such conduct is bizarre and sickening.

No, the Cole Bombing investigation was hampered by the US Ambassador to Yemen. The CIA didn't hamper anything, they were doing their own thing, and they did forward their information to the FBI. Just not with the priority tracking the information (in hindsight) needed. The FBI didn't act until late August.

We saw this late last year when the State Department and the CIA failed to communicate over threats to the new embassy in Libya.

It's really that simple, and that sad.

 

[Axxman300]

The DOD data mining project Able Danger picked up on Atta before he came to the US. In Hamburg his group was under German intelligence surveillance. The information obtained by the Germans would have been shared with the CIA and Mossad.
I think Able Danger would have known about Atta (not necessary the entire 9/11 conspiracy) when he first started sending emails to the US inquiring about flight schools.
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2005/08/able-a19.html

This story comes from one man. A guy who published a book on his exploits in Afghanistan without vetting it with DoD. The man has a monster ego.

Let me explain this this to you.

Able Danger an experiment on data-mining. When the Army command found out about it they shut it down. Why? Because it is illegal for the Army to spy on US citizens, and conduct real-world operations within the borders of the USA without Congressional approval. Had Able Danger progressed into an operation everyone involved would have gone to prison.

The source for this story also said that there were 30 photographs of different middle eastern men on that board, and that he only saw the board once.

Bottom line: Able Danger was shut down because the Army upheld the laws of the country.

Look at the mess with the trials of the ACTUAL 9/11 Al Qaeda conspirators. Between water-boarding, secret CIA prisons, and other incidents of playing loose with the rule of law have made them a circus.

The fact is that the US Government just can't do whatever it wants to whenever it wants to.

 

[thatsmystory]

No, the Cole Bombing investigation was hampered by the US Ambassador to Yemen. The CIA didn't hamper anything, they were doing their own thing, and they did forward their information to the FBI. Just not with the priority tracking the information (in hindsight) needed. The FBI didn't act until late August.

We saw this late last year when the State Department and the CIA failed to communicate over threats to the new embassy in Libya.

It's really that simple, and that sad.

Your information is not accurate. The CIA also interfered with the Cole investigation:

Anyway, Ali, while he was questioning the people involved in the Cole bombing, developed leads to a meeting that had taken place earlier that year, in January of 2000, somewhere in Southeast Asia, as it happens in Kuala Lumpur. Three times he and O'Neill queried the CIA, asking for information about this meeting, and three times the CIA refused to respond. Just set aside 9/11, what happened; Sufan is investigating the death of seventeen American sailors and the CIA is essentially obstructing justice and refusing to help him. They knew about the meeting in Kuala Lumpur, they had surveilled it, they had the Malaysian authorities surveil it for them, they had photographs of the participants who included some of the plotters of the Cole bombing but also two future 9/11 hijackers who flew from Kuala Lumpur to Los Angeles and then to San Diego.

Harry Kreisler interview of Lawrence Wright

While they were investigating the attack on the USS Cole in November 2000, Soufan's team learned that an al Qaeda operative had met with other terrorists in Asia and received a large sum of money. Soufan says he made three formal requests through the FBI to the CIA to see if anything was known about what this operative was up to. Each time, he says, the CIA indicated that it did not know anything.

But, Soufan says he later learned the CIA knew - eight months before 9/11 - that this same operative had met in Malaysia with two terrorism suspects who would later hijack the plane that crashed into the Pentagon. And the CIA also knew that those two suspects were heading to the U.S.

"The agency knew that these al Qaeda operatives in Southeast Asia flew to America or they have visas to come to the United States, and somebody decided, 'Let's not share the information,'" Soufan said.

"And if it had been shared with you, what then?" Logan asked.

"I try not to think about that. I try not to think about, about what could have happened. Maybe, maybe thousands of American lives will be spared, maybe," Soufan said.

The CIA told us any suggestion it purposely refused to share critical information on the 9/11 plots with FBI is "baseless" and "these allegations diminish the hard work and dedication of countless CIA officers."

60 Minutes interview with Ali Soufan

John Farmer, the former senior counsel at the commission, tended to agree. Had they found them—Messrs. Mihdhar and Hazmi—he said, “it is much more likely that the whole operation would have been compromised. Mission security was very important to Al Qaeda leaders, to the point that if they were that concerned, I think it is certainly possible that they would have called it off completely.”

So the question has always been quite simple: Why wasn’t the Mihdhar information shared with the F.B.I.? “That is one of the big mysteries. Why was the information not passed on?” Mr. Farmer told The Observer. Mr. Farmer is also the author of a recent book about the attacks, Ground Truth. “And the explanations aren’t good,” he added.

The 9/11 Commission, in its exhaustive report, never explained why such important intelligence disappeared into the C.I.A.’s black hole. (Complicating matters, the C.I.A. initially claimed it did tell the F.B.I.) One reason for the lapse, insiders have speculated, is that C.I.A. analysts concealed it out of spite—they simply hated the F.B.I. Cliques in national security agencies, of course, can rival those in high school.

The Gay Terrorist by Aram Roston

The turf war explanation doesn't hold up because the information was finally shared in late August '01 with the FBI UBLU. This intelligence unit withheld the information from the Cole investigators for no good reason. Even worse once the information was successfully withheld, an intel side investigation was assigned to a single rookie agent (Robert Fuller) with routine priority.

The bottom line here is that the people involved owe the public an explanation for this outrageous conduct. It sounds like you folks are happy with absurd CIA excuses.

 

[Andy_Ross]

How would the head of security at the WTC be able to stop airliners crashing in to the building?

 

[timhau]

True, however the OP's claim is that it's suspicious for the US intelligence agencies to have a suspect (Bin Laden and AQ in general) within hours. I was just pointing out that at the time the prime suspect was glaringly obvious to anyone who had paid just a little bit of attention to the news prior to the attacks. Bin Laden was already known for his spectacular and well timed multiple attacks. It was his M.O. Add in that he had "Declared war" on the US well over a year prior and it's not a stretch at all to have him as suspect #1 right off of the bat.

That's true. I wasn't challenging the general point of your post.

Of course, if they didn't have a suspect immediately then that would be suspicious. "How could the best spies on Earth not know who did this"?

Yeah, this. Tails I win, heads you lose.

 

[twinstead]

So apparently is it a conspiracy every time somebody does something bad without being stopped in advanced.

This goes deeper than I thought!

 

[LSSBB]

All LIHOP arguments boil down to "they shoulda done something about it and didn't" with no real proof that they didn't do anything by intention. Where's the missing memos, recorded conversations and confessions admitting to intention?

 

[Sabretooth]

How would the head of security at the WTC be able to stop airliners crashing in to the building?

Pretty sure those little handheld "Slow/Stop" signs are standard issue for security.