This piece was reprinted by OpEd News with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.
Deliberately withholding critical intelligence from those who need it, and can act on it, is, at the least, gross dereliction of duty. The more so if keeping the White House promptly and fully informed is at the top of your job jar, as it was for Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet -- especially amid accumulating evidence that a terrorist attack on U.S. territory was in the works.
And yet dereliction of duty is precisely the charge former anti-terrorism chief, Richard Clarke leveled at the former DCI. In a little-noticed interview aired on Aug. 11, 2011 on a local PBS affiliate in Colorado, Clarke charges that Tenet and two other senior CIA officials, Cofer Black and Richard Blee, deliberately withheld information about two of the hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77, al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar. The two had entered the United States more than a year before the 9/11 attacks.
Clarke added that the CIA then covered it all up by keeping relevant information away from Congress and the 9/11 Commission.
Lying by senior officials is bad enough, and there is now plenty of evidence that former CIA Director George Tenet and his closest agency associates are serial offenders. (Think for a minute about the falsehoods spread regarding Iraq's nonexistent WMD stockpiles.)
But withholding intelligence on two of the 9/11 hijackers would have been particularly unconscionable, the epitome of malfeasance, not just misfeasance.
That's why Richard Clarke's conclusion that he should have received information from CIA about al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar, "unless somebody intervened to stop the normal automatic distribution" amounts to a criminal charge, given the eventual role of the two in hijacking on 9/11 of AA-77, the plane that struck the Pentagon.
Tenet has denied that the information on the two hijackers was "intentionally withheld" from Clarke, and he has enlisted the other two former CIA operatives, Cofer Black (more recently a senior official of Blackwater) and Richard Blee (an even more shadowy figure), to concur in saying, Not us; we didn't withhold. Whom to believe?
It is an open question, if a key one, whether Tenet told Bush about the two hijackers, al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar, while keeping that key information from the person who most needed it, White House counter-terrorist czar Richard Clarke. Clarke finds the only plausible explanation in his surmise that Tenet was personally responsible.
Clarke says: "For me to this day, it is inexplicable, when I had every other detail about everything related to terrorism, that the director didn't tell me, that the director of the counterterrorism center didn't tell me, that the other 48 people inside CIA that knew about it never mentioned it to me or anyone in my staff in a period of over 12 months."
The CIA is said to have had zero spies within al-Qaeda at the time. It would be reasonable to expect that there were desperate attempts to "turn" al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar and get them working for the agency. Once Richard Clarke and - inevitably - the FBI found out about these two al-Qaeda operatives already inside the US, the Bureau would acquire jurisdiction. This may account for Tenet's unconscionable silence, but it cannot -- by a long shot -- excuse it.
The Other Big Rap on Tenet
As DCI (Director of Central Intelligence) George Tenet had the authority/responsibility to gather the various elements of the intelligence community and cobble together a National Intelligence Estimate for the President and his chief advisers. The NIE process is designed to provide each intelligence element the opportunity to share information and to make it difficult for a particular agency too hide/hoard relevant data.
After 9/11 the conventional wisdom was that "No one was in charge of the intelligence community." That was self-serving -- and dead wrong. Tenet was in charge, but had not ordered an NIE. Indeed, the NIE, once the coin of the realm for intelligence analysis and impact with policy makers, seems to have become a vanishing species. (See: "Generals End-Run Around Civilian Intel Analysts."
*** Drake added, "I subsequently blew the whistle on " NSA's hoarding of critical pre- and post-9/11 intelligence, and its cover-up. I shared this information via proper channels with the Joint Congressional Inquiry on 9/11 and the Defense Department Inspector General to no avail."
Drake also blew the whistle, through authorized channels, on NSA's gross violation of 4th Amendment rights, as well as widespread waste, fraud, and abuse.. The Department of Justice retaliated by indicting and prosecuting Drake under the Espionage Act. In July 2011, the DOJ lawyers abruptly dropped felony charges, which could have put Tom in prison for 35 years; at which point Maryland's Federal District Court judge, Richard D. Bennett, termed DOJ behavior "unconscionable."
1
1
1
