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<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial">----- Original Message -----
<DIV style="BACKGROUND: #e4e4e4; font-color: black"><B>From:</B> <A
title=tanstl@aol.com href="mailto:tanstl@aol.com">David Sladky</A> </DIV>
<DIV><B>To:</B> <A title=undisclosed-recipients:
href="mailto:undisclosed-recipients:">undisclosed-recipients:</A> </DIV>
<DIV><B>Sent:</B> Thursday, February 11, 2010 5:27 PM</DIV>
<DIV><B>Subject:</B> Flight 253: Intelligence Agencies Nixed State Department
Move to Revoke Bomber's Visa (Global Research)</DIV></DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV><FONT face=arial color=black size=2><BR><BR>
<DIV style="CLEAR: both"></DIV><BR><BR>
<DIV
style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: black; FONT-FAMILY: arial,helvetica">-----Original
Message-----<BR>From: Nancy Allen <<A
href="mailto:nallen11@myfairpoint.net">nallen11@myfairpoint.net</A>><BR>To:
GPUS Media Commitee <<A
href="mailto:usgp-media@gp-us.org">usgp-media@gp-us.org</A>><BR>Sent: Thu,
Feb 11, 2010 2:04 pm<BR>Subject: [usgp-media] Flight 253: Intelligence Agencies
Nixed State Department Move to Revoke Bomber's Visa (Global Research)<BR><BR>
<DIV id=AOLMsgPart_0_a425e5d9-b317-46a7-9ba9-bb82a41796eb
style="FONT-SIZE: 12px; MARGIN: 0px; COLOR: #000; FONT-FAMILY: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, Sans-Serif; BACKGROUND-COLOR: #fff"><A
href="http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17473"
target=_blank>http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17473</A> <BR>Flight
253: Intelligence Agencies Nixed State Department Move to Revoke Bomber's
Visa <BR>by Tom Burghardt <BR> <BR>Global Research, February 8,
2010 <BR>Antifascist Calling - 2010-02-07 <BR> <BR>Rightist
demagogues, as they are wont to do, prattle-on how they, and they alone, can
"keep America safe"--by shredding the Constitution. <BR> <BR>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. <BR> <BR>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? <BR> <BR>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. <BR> <BR>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. <BR> <BR>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. <BR> <BR>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." <BR> <BR>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. <BR> <BR>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." <BR> <BR>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. <BR> <BR>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. <BR> <BR>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 onlyconstituency that matters--giant energy
firms, defense-related corporations and those who finance
them? <BR> <BR>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? <BR> <BR>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) <BR> <BR>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." <BR> <BR>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. <BR> <BR>Abdulmutallab on the CIA and NCTC's
Radar <BR> <BR>The 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. <BR> <BR>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." <BR> <BR>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." <BR> <BR>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." <BR> <BR>"Instead," Newsweek reports, "they point to the
intelligence analysis carried out by the CIA and NCTC." <BR> <BR>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." <BR> <BR>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. <BR> <BR>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." <BR> <BR>"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." <BR> <BR>Really? <BR> <BR>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." <BR> <BR>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. <BR> <BR>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. <BR> <BR>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. <BR> <BR>How's that for an inconvenient
truth! <BR> <BR>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. <BR> <BR>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." <BR> <BR>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. <BR> <BR>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. <BR> <BR>Burying the Evidence, "Moving
On" <BR> <BR>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." <BR> <BR>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. <BR> <BR>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. <BR> <BR>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. <BR> <BR>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." <BR> <BR>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." <BR> <BR>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." <BR> <BR>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. <BR> <BR>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. <BR> <BR>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. <BR> <BR>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. <BR> <BR>Why did the State Department fail to
revoke the accused terrorist's visa? <BR> <BR>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." <BR> <BR>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?'" <BR> <BR>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.'" <BR> <BR>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. <BR> <BR>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." <BR> <BR>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." <BR> <BR>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." <BR> <BR>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. <BR> <BR>As
Newsweek's unnamed sources claim, CIA and NCTC analystsdid 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." <BR> <BR>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. <BR> <BR>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'." <BR> <BR>"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." <BR> <BR>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. <BR> <BR>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. <BR> <BR>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. <BR> <BR>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. <BR> <BR>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. <BR> <BR>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. <BR> <BR>"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. <BR> <BR>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." <BR> <BR>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. <BR> <BR>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. <BR> <BR>And as we enter the
"political high season," what might comenext is anyone's
guess. <BR> <BR>Tom Burghardt is a frequent contributor to Global
Research. Global Research Articles by Tom Burghardt
<BR>_______________________________________________ <BR>usgp-media
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