I have had my third run in with Norman Solomon, an anti-war activist and media critic who is running for Congress. I have compiled 2 of my run-ins along with some historical context in the video below. I hope you like it and find it interesting.
Norman Solomon has a history of avoiding 9/11, even silencing it.
Now he is running for Congress to represent the 2nd District of California, right where I live.
The US media is especially proud of standing up for the victims of 9/11 by self righteously reporting the apology from Walhberg.Why is it that an actor is able to apologize for insensitive comments but intelligence officials and agents won’t explain let alone apologize for getting a bunch of people killed? When US media could have stood up for the victims in a substantive way they failed to do so. As recently as September 2011, 60 Minutes countered former FBI agent Ali Soufan’s credible accusation of CIA withholding of information by way of a CIA talking point:
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.”
This is journalism? Soufan (and others) have already credible demonstrated that the withholding was deliberate. The question then is why did CIA and FBI UBLU officials and agents withhold the information? For unknown reasons the US media will not use their access to power to get an answer. US media has never interviewed Rich Blee, chief of CIA’s Alec Station in the lead up to 9/11 or Rod Middleton, chief of the FBI Bin Laden unit (UBLU) in the lead up to 9/11. Blee was even promoted after 9/11! How on earth could the media not ask Tenet to account for this?
There is a total disconnect in US society in regard to 9/11. Actors are pressured to apologize for making comments that are disrespectful to the victims while US officials and intelligence agents who obstructed al Qaeda investigations before 9/11 are given a complete pass by the US media. If anyone should apologize to 9/11 victims it should be the US media.
In his recent book The Black Banners, former FBI agent Ali Soufan portrays a key 9/11 Commission staff member, Doug MacEachin, as believing the CIA deliberately withheld information from the FBI in January 2001. This is in contrast with the Commission’s final report, which states that the CIA failed to pass on intelligence to the FBI on multiple occasions, but puts it down to honest failings.
MacEachin was one of the best-known of the Commission’s staffers before its formation. He was a career CIA officer and even served as Deputy Director for Intelligence between 1993 and 1996.
According to Soufan, MacEachin believed that the CIA purposefully withheld information placing al-Qaeda leader Khallad bin Attash at the Malaysia summit, a gathering of top al-Qaeda figures in Kuala Lumpur in January 2000 that was monitored by the CIA. This intelligence was especially significant because it linked bin Attash, then known to be a mastermind of the October 2000 USS Cole bombing, to future Flight 77 hijackers Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi.
In the firsttwo parts of this series we saw how a group of officers at Alec Station, the CIA’s bin Laden unit, concealed information about al-Qaeda’s Malaysia summit from their FBI colleagues in January 2000. In particular they hid information about a US visa in the possession of Flight 77 hijacker Khalid Almihdhar. We also saw how this protection of Almihdhar, his partner Nawaf Alhazmi and al-Qaeda leader Khallad bin Attash continued even after the involvement of Almihdhar and bin Attash in the October 2000 USS Colebombing became known to the US intelligence community. Concealing information about terrorists involved in seventeen homicides was bad enough, but things were about to get much worse.
Shortly after the CIA had failed to respond truthfully to a second formal request for information about the Cole bombing from FBI agent Ali Soufan in April 2001, the cables the CIA drafted about the Malaysia summit were reviewed at Alec Station. The review was conducted by Tom Wilshire, the station’s deputy chief and one of the key figures in the withholding of the information, and a female CIA officer whose name is not known. The two of them re-read cables from the previous year that said Almihdhar had a US visa and that Alhazmi had flown to Los Angeles with a companion, but neither of them took the appropriate action—watchlisting the Malaysia attendees and alerting the FBI.
After this review, Wilshire ordered another review of the same information. The review was to be carried out by Margaret Gillespie, a CIA detailee to Alec Station whose alleged memory loss regarding the events of January 2000 makes one suspicious of her motives. Wilshire believed, correctly as it turns out, that the cables contained the key to preventing the next major al-Qaeda attack—had they been handled properly, 9/11 would never have happened.
Three weeks before the attacks, Gillespie allegedly discovered a key cable, and this led her to tell the FBI about Almihdhar and Alhazmi. As you know, the FBI hunt for Almihdhar and Alhazmi was unsuccessful and this, as you probably don’t know, was largely due to Wilshire. Nevertheless, Wilshire received substantial praise from the post-attack investigations for getting Gillespie to do the review. Plenty of his other actions cast suspicion on him, but this review seemed to put him in the clear—if he really was trying to hide the information, why start a review?
Public disclosure of graphic photos and video taken of Osama bin Laden after he was killed in May by U.S. commandos would damage national security and lead to attacks on American property and personnel, the Obama administration contends in a court documents.
In a response late Monday to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group seeking the imagery, Justice Department attorneys said the CIA has located 52 photographs and video recordings. But they argued the images of the deceased bin Laden are classified and are being withheld from the public to avoid inciting violence against Americans overseas and compromising secret systems and techniques used by the CIA and the military.
The Justice Department has asked the court to dismiss Judicial Watch’s lawsuit because the records the group wants are “wholly exempt from disclosure,” according to the filing.
In Boiling Frogs Post’s recent interview with Ray Nowosielski and John Duffy, Sibel Edmonds questioned the timing of former Counter-Terrorism Czar, Richard Clarke’s willingness to speak out about alleged 9/11 hijackers, Nawaf al Hazmi and Khalid al Mihdhar, and the CIA’s knowledge of their whereabouts after the January 2000 Malaysia “terrorist summit.” Sibel asked Ray and John, “why now?” We would like to note that the interview with Clarke was actually recorded two years ago, in October 2009. As such, the “why now” question should actually be posed to Ray and John. The real questions for Clarke should be, “why then?” Why then and not during his testimony before the 9/11 Commission, when it would have been meaningful to the Commission’s investigation? In addition, in his October 2009 interview, Clarke revealed pertinent insight into information sharing at high levels, which would clearly counter the misleading findings of the 9/11 Commission regarding the “failures” of communications between the FBI and CIA.
It is extremely troubling to us that the former Counter-Terrorism Czar, for both the Clinton and Bush Junior Administrations, as well as chair of the Counter-Terrorism Security Group for Bush Senior (essentially working in an anti-terrorism related capacity since about 1992), took so long to speak out about why the CIA would intentionally fail to share such critically important information with the FBI. If nothing else, he should have mentioned in his testimony before the 9/11 Commission in 2004 that information sharing was not a problem between intelligence agencies themselves or with the Executive Branch. Clarke was clearly well aware of how he, and the FBI, received raw data from CIA sources and had to be keenly aware that the Commission was basing many of their recommendations on this misinformation. Clarke did not bother to clear that up during his testimony or immediately afterwards.
This is just another glaring example of how the 9/11 Commission failed. How could the Commission have been unaware of how information sharing was actually accomplished within the agencies and with the White House? Did they fail to ask any appropriate questions to the key witnesses? Why did they purposely choose to relegate the extremely important fact that the CIA intentionally withheld information from the FBI to a tiny footnote (Chapter 6, Footnote 44) in their final report? Worse yet, according to the 9/11 Commission, they allegedly have never found out who in the CIA gave the order to keep the FBI out of the loop. They had to know that this deliberate failure to share information could only be fixed by removing the individuals responsible and not be cured by a reorganization recommendation. Despite logic, that is what they recommended.
by James Corbett source Corbett Report September 13 ,2011
Everything you ever wanted to know about the 9/11 conspiracy theory in under 5 minutes.
TRANSCRIPT: On the morning of September 11, 2001, 19 men armed with boxcutters directed by a man on dialysis in a cave fortress halfway around the world using a satellite phone and a laptop directed the most sophisticated penetration of the most heavily-defended airspace in the world, overpowering the passengers and the military combat-trained pilots on 4 commercial aircraft before flying those planes wildly off course for over an hour without being molested by a single fighter interceptor.
This article highlights a number of seemingly absurd CIA demands for redactions from Ali Soufan’s forthcoming book on the CIA’s pre-9/11 intel ‘failures’ and post-9/11 prisoner abuse, but, imho, the most significant info is buried at the end of the article; the hard cover version of Soufan’s book is going to be 448 pgs, while Shane refers to a “600-page manuscript.” This is possibly a round number; in any case, at least 152 pgs of material have been cut due to CIA demands. – loose nuke (@ 9/11 Blogger)
WASHINGTON — In what amounts to a fight over who gets to write the history of the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath, the Central Intelligence Agency is demanding extensive cuts from the memoir of a former F.B.I. agent who spent years near the center of the battle against Al Qaeda.
The agent, Ali H. Soufan, argues in the book that the C.I.A. missed a chance to derail the 2001 plot by withholding from the F.B.I. information about two future 9/11 hijackers living in San Diego, according to several people who have read the manuscript. And he gives a detailed, firsthand account of the C.I.A.’s move toward brutal treatment in its interrogations, saying the harsh methods used on the agency’s first important captive, Abu Zubaydah, were unnecessary and counterproductive.
Neither critique of the C.I.A. is new. In fact, some of the information that the agency argues is classified, according to two people who have seen the correspondence between the F.B.I. and C.I.A., has previously been disclosed in open Congressional hearings, the report of the national commission on 9/11 and even the 2007 memoir of George J. Tenet, the former C.I.A. director.
The establishment media just keep getting worse. They’re further and further from good, tough investigative journalism, and more prone to be pawns in complicated games that affect the public interest in untold ways. A significant recent example is The New Yorker’s vaunted August 8 exclusive on the vanquishing of Osama bin Laden.
The piece, trumpeted as the most detailed account to date of the May 1 raid in Abbottabad Pakistan, was an instant hit. “Got the chills half dozen times reading @NewYorker killing bin Laden tick tock…exquisite journalism,” tweeted the digital director of the PBS show Frontline. The author, freelancer Nicholas Schmidle, was quickly featured on the Charlie Rose show, an influential determiner of “chattering class” opinion. Other news outlets rushed to praise the story as “exhaustive,” “utterly compelling,” and on and on.
With the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks only a month away, former CIA Director George Tenet and two former top aides are fighting back hard against allegations that they engaged in a massive cover-up in 2000 and 2001 to hide intelligence from the White House and the FBI that might have prevented the attacks.
The source of the explosive, unproved allegations is a man who once considered Tenet a close friend: former White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, who makes the charges against Tenet and the CIA in an interview for a radio documentary timed to the 10th anniversary next month. Portions of the Clarke interview were made available to The Daily Beast by the producers of the documentary.
In the interview for the documentary, Clarke offers an incendiary theory that, if true, would rewrite the history of the 9/11 attacks, suggesting that the CIA intentionally withheld information from the White House and FBI in 2000 and 2001 that two Saudi-born terrorists were on U.S. soil – terrorists who went on to become suicide hijackers on 9/11.
With the tenth anniversary of 9/11 just a month away, the intelligence failures leading up to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have started to attract fresh scrutiny from former counterterrorism officials, who have called into question the veracity of the official government narrative that concluded who knew what and when.
Indeed, recently Truthout published an exclusive report based on documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and an interview with a former high-ranking counterterrorism official that showed how a little-known military intelligence unit, unbeknownst to the various investigative bodies probing the terrorist attacks, was ordered by senior government officials to stop tracking Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda’s movements prior to 9/11.
And now, in a stunning new interview made available to Truthout that is scheduled to air on a local PBS affiliate in Colorado tonight, former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, for the first time, levels explosive allegations against three former top CIA officials – George Tenet, Cofer Black and Richard Blee – accusing them of knowingly withholding intelligence from the Bush and Clinton White House, the FBI, Immigration and the State and Defense Departments about two of the 9/11 hijackers who had entered the United States more than a year before the attacks. Moreover, Clarke says the former CIA officials likely engaged in a cover-up by withholding key details about two of the hijackers from the 9/11 Commission.
“They’ve been able to get through a joint House investigation committee and get through the 9/11 Commission and this has never come out,” Clarke said about Blee, Tenet and Black. “They got away with it.”
In a never-before-seen interview, Richard Clarke, former White House Counterterror “Tsar” to Presidents Clinton and Bush, goes on record about what he believes happened at CIA in the run-up to the 9/11 attacks, accusing then-CIA Director George Tenet and two of his deputies of deliberately not informing the White House, FBI, and Defense Department about two future hijackers inside U.S., then covering up from the 9/11 investigations. His comments air and stream Thursday, August 11, 2010 at 7 p.m. MDT on Colorado Public Television (CPT12) and simultaneously go live on SecrecyKills.com, along with CIA reaction.
News of the premiere set off attacks on Clarke from three of those he singled out. Tenet and former CIA officials Cofer Black and Richard Blee, chiefs of CounterTerrorist Center and Bin Laden Station respectively on 9/11, have issued a one-page joint statement to the producers calling Clarke’s comments “reckless and profoundly wrong.” Significantly, this is the only statement Blee has issued publicly since the intelligence failure of September 11th and, indeed, the first time his real name has been made public in the major media.
Filmmaker-journalists John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski conducted the interview in 2009 for a documentary to be released on the 9/11 tenth anniversary entitled “Who Is Rich Blee?”, promising further
revelations from Commission Chairman Tom Kean and other gov’t insiders, produced by transparency advocates SecrecyKills.com in association with media company Globalvision, winner of the George Polk Journalism Award. They will be appearing live in-studio on Thursday night to introduce the footage and discuss.
Posted by Brian 
