Waging a decades-long psychological war against the American people,
corporatist thugs embedded within the National Security State assure us
that secrecy, deceit and imperial adventures that steal other peoples'
resources are the one true path to national prosperity and universal
happiness.
But what happens when those charged with protecting
us from attack, actually aid and abet those who would kill us, and then
handsomely profit from our slaughter in the process?
During a January 27
hearing
of the House Committee on Homeland Security, Under Secretary of State
for Management, Patrick F. Kennedy, testified that the visa of accused
bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, wasn't revoked at the specific
request of secret state agencies.
Kennedy, a Bushist State
Department holdover, was the former Director on National Intelligence
for Management and headed the transition team that set up the Office of
the Director of National Intelligence in 2005 under former Ambassador
to Iraq, John D. Negroponte, a veteran of U.S. covert operations since
the Vietnam war.
Given the avalanche of media interest, fueled by
Fox News and the editorial pages of
The Wall Street Journal,
whether or not the suspect should have been read his Miranda rights,
the only coverage of the hearings that reported Kennedy's explosive
testimony, was a brief article in the
Detroit News.
Claiming
that "revocation action would've disclosed what they were doing,"
Kennedy said that allowing the alleged terrorist to keep his visa would
have "helped" federal investigators take down the entire network
"rather than simply knocking out one solider in that effort."
A
"soldier" (indicted criminal) who would have murdered 300 air
passengers if the detonator concealed in his underpants hadn't
serendipitously failed to explode the device.
As Alex Lantier wrote February 3 on the
World Socialist Web Site,
the latest in a series of significant revelations "has been buried by
the media." The socialist critic avers: "As of this writing, nearly a
week after the hearing, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal,
Washington Post and Los Angeles Times have published no articles on the
subject. Nor have the broadcast or cable media reported on it."
Lantier charges that "despite--or perhaps more accurately,
because
of--the fact that this information exposes the official government
story of the near-disaster to be a lie" the corporate media is fully
complicit in the cover-up.
Weeks after the incident, it is now
clear that intelligence agencies did far more than simply "watch" a
potential terrorist. That they gave Abdulmutallab a leg up, bypassing
airline security systems put in place after 9/11 that would have
prevented him from boarding that plane, is also crystal clear.
The
question is: was a reckless calculation made that gambled the lives of
300 air passengers for ruthless political purposes? If so, was it
designed to destabilize the Obama government, thereby binding it
ever-closer to a permanent, unelected, security apparatus that feathers
its nest by serving the
only constituency that matters--giant energy firms, defense-related corporations and those who finance them?
Is this scenario being played out in Washington where Republican right-wingers like Senators
Susan Collins
(ME), Tom Coburn (OK), John McCain (AZ), John Ensign (NV) and Lindsey
Graham (SC), but also neocon Democrats such as Joseph Lieberman
(ID-CT), demand that the accused be turned over to the military for
"special handling," thereby ratcheting-up pressure for increased
domestic repression?
Just as pertinently, is this what White House insider Richard Wolffe meant when he said on MSNBC's
Countdown with Keith Olbermann
January 4 that the "president is leaning very much towards thinking
this was a systemic failure by individuals who maybe had an
alternative agenda." (emphasis added)
For
weeks now, the Obama administration and the media have played the same
broken record: despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, a
multitude of security agencies, ranging from the CIA, the FBI, the
National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), a satrapy of the Office of the
Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the National Security Agency
and the Department of Homeland Security, "failed to connect the dots."
But as I have documented in previous reports, most
recently
on January 22, citing multiple domestic and foreign intelligence
warnings, including a walk-in interview at the U.S. Embassy in Abuja,
Nigeria's capital, by the suspect's own father, a former top official
in the Nigerian government, consular officials and CIA officers passed
the warning up the food chain--where it sat.
Abdulmutallab on the CIA and NCTC's RadarThe
revelation that various agencies of America's shadow government made a
deliberate decision that allowed Abdulmutallab to board Flight 253 is
more extensive than previously disclosed.
Newsweek
revealed February 2 that "a single intelligence community database
operated by the CIA, known by the code name 'Hercules'," held all the
"'bits and pieces' of intelligence that White House officials believe
could have led U.S. authorities to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab before
last December 25."
However, even though the agencies had
assembled information on the suspect in a single computer system where
it was readily accessible to analysts, anonymous "intelligence
officials" told journalist Mark Hosenball that "all source" analysts at
CIA and NCTC "which both had access to 'Hercules,' were unable to
assemble the intelligence scraps in time to prevent Abdulmutallab from
boarding his Christmas Day flight from Amsterdam to Detroit with a bomb
hidden in his underpants."
The unnamed officials told Hosenball
that the failure to stop the suspect "validates assertions by White
House and congressional investigators that the alleged lapses in the
handling of intelligence related to Abdulmutallab did not stem from a
failure of sometimes turf-conscious spy agencies to share information
with each other."
"Instead,"
Newsweek reports, "they point to the intelligence analysis carried out by the CIA and NCTC."
As I previously reported, citing a January 18 investigation by
The New York Times,
the National Security Agency "learned from a communications intercept"
that a man named "'Umar Farouk'--the first two names of the jetliner
suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab--had volunteered for a coming
operation." Additional NSA intercepts in December "mentioned the date
of Dec. 25, and suggested that they were 'looking for ways to get
somebody out' or 'for ways to move people to the West,' one senior
administration official said."
Running for cover, an intelligence official told
Newsweek:
"The volume of any database doesn't matter much. That, by itself,
doesn't get you anywhere." An interesting spin, when one considers the
multibillion dollar
expansion by NSA, as investigative journalist James Bamford reported last November.
The
official continues, "Nor does the mere fact that the NCTC and the CIA
have shared access to material. The key is knowing what to look for,
how to bring together different bits and scraps of information that--on
the surface and in an ocean of data--don't appear to be connected."
Conversely, knowing which "bits and scraps" to
ignore from a parapolitical perspective, may have played an equally critical role in a presumed analytical "lapse."
"This
is hard stuff," the anonymous source pontificates. "It's not a case of
punching in a couple of search terms, sitting back, and waiting for
enlightenment. Once you know the answer, it seems easy. But in real
life, you don't get the answer ahead of time."
Really?
To
the contrary, as with the September 11, 2001 hijack team, the Flight
253 affair seems to indicate that the decision to allow Abdulmutallab
to board the plane was a
political, not a law enforcement decision that led analysts
not to "connect" more than a few of the "dots."
As we now know, prior to 9/11, the Pentagon's
Able Danger unit had amassed
terabytes
of data on al-Qaeda sleeper cells in the United States. According to
published reports, the unit had obtained detailed information on
ringleader, the drug-addled Mohammed Atta, and other members of the
suicide squad. Yet just scant months before the atrocity, the unit was
shuttered and the data destroyed.
Corporate media and the 9/11
Commission have advanced two contradictory propositions on Able
Danger's demise: the Pentagon unit hadn't gathered intelligence on Atta
and claims to contrary were overblown or they illegally obtained
information on ordinary Americans and were shut down for inadvertent
spying.
However as researcher Paul Thompson revealed in
The Terror Timeline, Able Danger
had identified Americans, only they were the
wrong
Americans. According to Thompson, the unit pegged "future National
Security Adviser and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former
Defense Secretary William Perry, and other prominent Americans as
potential security risks" over their illicit dealings with foreign
governments.
How's that for an inconvenient truth!
As
with earlier warnings of impending terrorist strikes, political
efficacy trumped the safety and security of the American people. This
is underscored by January 20 testimony by NCTC Director, Bushist embed
Michael E. Leiter, before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental
Affairs Committee.
CongressDaily
revealed that Leiter told the senators, "I will tell you, that when
people come to the country and they are on the watch list, it is
because we have generally made the choice that we want them here in the
country for some reason or another."
Journalist Chris Strohm
disclosed that intelligence officials "acknowledged the government
knowingly allows foreigners whose names are on terrorist watch lists to
enter the country in order to track their movement and activities," a
fact now confirmed by Patrick F. Kennedy's January 27 testimony before
the House Committee.
Similar to the
Detroit News report on Kennedy's admission, to date, not a single media outlet picked-up the trail and investigated
CongressDaily's chilling disclosure.
Burying the Evidence, "Moving On"Corporate
media are chock-a-block with reports of efforts by right-wing
Republicans and some Democrats to brand the Obama administration as
"soft on terrorism."
As readers are well aware,
Antifascist Calling
doesn't carry water for the Obama administration; a government that has
rightly been characterized as a slick makeover of the previous regime.
However it must be acknowledged, unlike Bushist torture freaks, in
Abdulmutallab's case constitutional norms were followed and a criminal
suspect lawfully charged for an egregious act.
In "new normal" America however,
not
disappearing a suspect into a gulag, subject to tender ministrations by
"enhanced interrogation" specialists (torturers) is viewed as a
bad thing in our debased political culture.
Meanwhile
media stenographers scrupulously ignore, with a single-mindedness one
has come to expect from totalitarian regimes, considerable evidence
that elements of the intelligence-security apparatus could be charged
as accessories before and after the fact with Abdulmutallab's alleged
offense.
In his prepared
statement
to the House Committee, Kennedy asserted that "following his father's
November 19 visit to the Embassy, we sent a cable to the Washington
intelligence and law enforcement community through proper channels (the
Visas Viper system) that 'Information at post suggests [that Farouk]
may be involved in Yemeni-based extremists.' At the same time, the
Consular Section entered Abdulmutallab into the Consular Lookout and
Support System database known as CLASS."
When it was discovered
that officials in Abuja had misspelled the suspect's name "information
about previous visas issued to him and the fact that he currently held
a valid U.S. visa was not included in the cable."
Despite the
misspelling however, "the CLASS entry resulted in a lookout using the
correct spelling that was shared automatically with the primary lookout
system used by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and accessible
to other agencies."
In other words, even though the initial
Embassy cable misspelled Abdulmutallab's name, the "lookout"
notification sent out to intelligence agencies, specifically DHS,
should have warranted further action. And it also appears that
initially it
did.
As both the
Los Angeles Times and
CongressDaily
reported, Customs and Border Protection agents obtained the suspect's
name from the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment or TIDE
database, maintained by the NCTC and planned to question Abdulmutallab
when Flight 253 landed in Detroit on arrival from Amsterdam.
However, as
CongressDaily
subsequently revealed, CBP agents "had information about alleged
terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab three days before his departure"
and not during the flight as the
Los Angeles Times report initially suggested.
As
we now know, information fed to NCTC's database contained specific
warnings from the State Department--as did the CIA's "Hercules" system
as
Newsweek reported, and
"that White House officials believe could have led U.S. authorities to
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab before last December 25," according to the
newsmagazine's anonymous sources.
Why did the State Department fail to revoke the accused terrorist's visa?
When
questioned by Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS), Kennedy told
the panel, "We will revoke the visa of any individual who is a threat
to the United States, but we do take one preliminary step."
Kennedy
explained, "We ask our law enforcement and intelligence community
partners, 'Do you have eyes on this person and do you want us to let
this person proceed under your surveillance so that you may potentially
break a larger plot?'"
The Undersecretary added: "And one of the
members [of the intelligence community]--and we'd be glad to give you
that [information] ... in private [closed session]--said, 'Please, do
not revoke this visa. We have eyes on this person. We are following
this person who has the visa for the purpose of trying to roll up an
entire network, not just stop one person.'"
In other words,
despite multiple sourced reports from American and overseas security
agencies that Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) was planning to
launch an attack, probably on Christmas Day, deploying an asset
identified by NSA intercepts as a "Nigerian" named "Umar Farouk,"
high-level intelligence officials, claiming to have "eyes" on the
alleged AQAP operative, a suspected suicide bomber to boot, allowed him
to board an airliner packed with nearly 300 passengers and crew.
In a prepared
statement
to the Committee, NCTC Director Leiter said, "Let's start with this
clear assertion: Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab should not have stepped on
that plane. The counterterrorism system failed and we told the
President we are determined to do better."
However, neither
House Committee members, nor the corporate media which suppressed the
story entirely, challenged Leiter's statement of a week earlier when he
testified before a Senate panel that intelligence agencies allow watch
listed terrorists to enter the country "because we have generally made
the choice that we want them here in the country for some reason or
another."
If Leiter's testimony was taken under oath, he should
be brought up on charges of perjury since he next asserted that
"Intelligence Community analysts who were working hard on immediate
threats to Americans in Yemen did not understand the fragments of
intelligence on what turned out later to be Mr. Abdulmutallab, so they
did not push him onto the terrorist watchlist."
This claim, as
with practically all the "facts" released to the American people by the
White House, Congress or by the secret state agencies themselves, is a
rank mendacity.
As
Newsweek's unnamed sources claim, CIA and NCTC analysts
did
have access to an "intelligence community database," "Hercules," and
that it held all the available data on Abdulmutallab and "validates
assertions by the White House and congressional investigators" that the
failure to stop the bomber were not due to bungled efforts "to connect
the dots."
As I reported last month, during a December 22
meeting at the White House, President Obama was briefed by top
officials from the CIA, FBI, and Department of Homeland Security "who
ticked off a list of possible plots against the United States and how
their agencies were working to disrupt them," as
The New York Times disclosed January 18.
Last month,
Newsweek
reported that "intelligence analysts had 'highlighted' an evolving
'strategic threat'," and that "'some of the improvised explosive device
tactics AQAP might use against U.S. interests were highlighted' in
other 'finished intelligence products'."
"Finished intelligence
products" on an evolving plot to destroy an airliner are hardly
"fragments," as Leiter deceitfully testified to the House Committee.
Cheekily, NCTC's head honcho falsely claimed that his agency, the
recipient of billions of dollars in taxpayer largesse, "did not
correlate the specific information that would have been required to
help keep Abdulmutallab off that Northwest Airlines flight."
Citing
the need to "improve" intelligence capabilities by accelerating
"information technology enhancements, to include knowledge discovery,
database integration, cross-database searches, and the ability to
correlate biographic information with terrorism-related intelligence,"
Leiter implies that billions more in handouts to security contractors
are needed to "solve" the problem.
This from the Director of an agency that
under his watch
wasted more than $500 million on its flawed Railhead project to
"upgrade" the TIDE database, an initiative "crippled by technical
failures and contractor mismanagement," as the Project on Government
Oversight (
POGO) and
congressional investigators revealed back in 2008.
Contractor
hanky-panky aside, the problem is not one of technical "upgrades" to an
agency that seems more concerned with facilitating the entrance of
terrorists into the country "for some reason or another" than stopping
them.
Rather, it is imperative that the American people demand
that Congress and the Executive Branch, which in theory, controls the
gaggle of alphabet-soup satrapies in cahoots with the most rotten and
predatory sectors of the U.S. ruling class, clean house and bring to
book, the rightist elements aligned with the petroleum-intelligence
nexus who continue to deploy terror gangs such as al-Qaeda as strategic
assets.
That they do so regardless of the cost, to the American
people and to the victims of illegal U.S. wars and occupations, is a
sign that the system, verging on bankruptcy will soon veer even further
out of any effective democratic control.
How else can one
interpret Director of National Intelligence, Dennis C. Blair's chilling
assertion to the Senate Committee on Intelligence that he was "highly
certain" that al-Qaeda "or one of its affiliates" will attempt a
large-scale attack on American soil within the next six months," as
The New York Times reported.
"We
judge that al Qaeda maintains its intent to attack the homeland,
preferably with a large-scale operation that would cause mass
casualties, harm the U.S. economy or both," Blair wrote in his annual
threat assessment to the Senate Intelligence Committee.
As investigative journalist Russ Baker wrote in his essential book,
Family of Secrets,
"Authoritarianism thrives in a climate of fear, and the [Bush]
administration invoked fear continually. But when it came to security,
there was the usual exemption for large corporate entities [and] the
tattoo of terror was relentless, especially during the political high
season."
Not much has changed since Barack Obama became
president. Many of the same dodgy players who ramped-up production
lines at the fear factory for the Bush/Cheney team are still in place,
doing what they do best: hitting the corporate "sweet spot" for their
clients in the Military-Industrial-Security-Complex.
In the
weeks since the attempted destruction of Flight 253, one thing is
certain: the White House, Congress, the intelligence agencies and their
handmaidens, the corporate media, are participating in a massive
cover-up.
And as we enter the "political high season," what might come
next is anyone's guess.
Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly and Global Research,
an independent research and media group of writers, scholars,
journalists and activists based in Montreal, his articles can be read
on Dissident Voice, The Intelligence Daily, Pacific Free Press , Uncommon Thought Journal, CJO's Avenger212, and the whistleblowing website Wikileaks. He is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military "Civil Disturbance" Planning, distributed by AK Press.
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