Wiki Editor Helps Reveal Pre-9/11 CIA Mistakes

An anonymous reader writes "Kevin Fenton was reading the Department of Justice's 2004 Inspector General report on pre-9/11 intelligence failures. Parts of it didn't make sense to him, so he decided to add the information in the report to Paul Thompson's 9/11 timeline at the wiki-style website History Commons. Eventually, Fenton's work led him to uncover the identity of a CIA manager who ran the Bin Ladin unit before 9/11, when agents there deliberately withheld information about two 9/11 hijackers from the FBI. That manager was named Richard Earl Blee and he is now the subject of a documentary by Ray Nowosielski and John Duffy, of secrecykills.org, who confirmed his identity using techniques right out of the 70s film All the President's Men. Blee, along with Cofer Black and George Tenet, have found the work disturbing enough to release a joint statement denying some of the allegations."

Comments

So what is new?

[JoshuaZ]

As far as I can tell, this is just one more example of how turf wars between the different agencies caused severe information gaps before 9/11. That was obviously a problem. However, after the last decade of the Patriot Act, I'm sufficiently worried by the government information sharing as part of a wider pattern, that part of me wants to go back to the silly turf wars as a de facto restraint on various government agencies becoming too powerful or having access to things they shouldn't.

But there's no real evidence of any sort of high-level conspiracy. This is just low-level bureaucratic infighting at its finest. You can see lots of examples of this in the 9/11 Report which details the many intelligence failures leading up to 9/11. Some of them seem like intelligence failures mainly due to hindsight bias where what the evidence meant became obvious only if you knew what happened, but others are genuine failures. There's really not that much new here.

Re:So what is new?

[Anonymous Coward]

We need to raise taxes on the job killers and the wealthy people that drive our economy off a cliff .

FTFY

Re:So what is new?

[joebagodonuts]

But there's no real evidence of any sort of high-level conspiracy. This is just low-level bureaucratic infighting at its finest.

Doesn't that make it even more tragic?

We really screwed up. We panicked and essentially said "Bureaucracy is inefficient - lets add more!"

Re:So what is new?

[sarhjinian]

Just so's you know, the problem isn't taxes, it's demand. Pumping money into the coffers of the wealthy---who are already doing quite well and hoarding almost unprecedented levels of cash---won't help. We've tried tax cuts for the wealthy (what, you didn't know that the rounds of stimulus were, depending on the country, 30-60% tax cuts?) and they aren't working: all it does is cut the revenue to the very programs that would help us get out of recession.

The "job creators" are the disenfranchised middle and lower classes. They're the ones who buy stuff, keeping stores open and others gainfully employed. They're the ones who need TARP programs for underwater mortgages, stable employment and a sense of stability. Not the rentiers who are doing quite well, thank you very much.

Re:So what is new?

[elrous0]

We need to cut taxes on the job creators

That might work if the jobs they were creating were in the U.S., and not in China and India.

Re:So what is new?

[Gilmoure]

But, but, rich people drive nice cars and wear nice suits. They must know what they're talking about, when they say their too scared to hire people right now because their taxes and business taxes are at the lowest levels since 1926. How can they possible think of expanding business if things might change? They really need the government to lock down things so that nothing ever changes again and then turn over control of everything to them. Then they'll finally feel safe enough to start hiring more people. Mostly for private armies.

Re:So what is new?

[LibRT]

The current level of demand is likely to be close to the "new normal", because the level of demand that previously existed was predicated largely upon homeowners withdrawing equity from their homes, which itself was predicated upon house prices always rising, which itself was predicated upon the federal government backstopping mortgages via Fannie and Freddie, for politically-motivated purposes (ie the federal government's odd notion that one of its jobs is to facilitate home ownership, and to particularly dictate that less qualified applicants should have their mortgage applications accepted, with defaults paid by the taxpayer, and both parties are guilty of this).

The current problem is the continuing notion that the demonstrably unsustainable level of demand must be returned to by getting housing prices to rise again via sustained low interest rates. It's dumb luck that the EU is having such problems with Greece et al that currency is fleeing to the US dollar despite the US dollar's inherent devaluation (hidden, as it is, by the influx of capital from the EU).

But taking money from one group of people and giving it to another group of people (that happen to be more favorable to your view of the world) by way of a massive bureaucracy is particularly inefficient. The current tax revenues exist to support the 1 in 7 people in the US who work directly for government of one level or another (which is higher than Spain, Germany, Italy, France and Portugal, and just behind Greece, which is just above 1 in 5). The fundamental and structural part of the problem is there are too many people working for government (requiring, of course, tax dollars to pay for them) and that number consistently grows faster than inflation or the economy. At some point that number simply becomes unsustainable (which Portugal and Italy are learning and which Greece already has learned). It's like Social Security: when it was established, there were 30 workers paying for each retiree; currently it's 3 workers to each retiree, and getting close to 2 workers to each retiree. It cannot be sustained long term.

The other fundamental and structural problem is that government borrowing is massively crowding out investment in the private sector (which is the sector which, you know, actually creates jobs). When about $16.6 trillion of investment capital goes to US government bonds to prop up the government, that is, of course, $16.6 trillion not going to private sector investment and in turn not creating private sector jobs.

It is going to take quite some time for the amount of demand to pick up to match the supply of labor available, and that equilibrium point isn't going to resemble the prior equilibrium point, the demand portion of which was subsidized by government policy (see above). But if you think taking even more money from one segment of the population to "bail out" another segment of the population will speed things along or be sustainable long-term, you're most certainly mistaken. I can see the populist appeal of the proposition among the economically unsophisticated, but it will not work.

As an aside, other than putting their money under a mattress, it is impossible for the wealthy (or anyone else) to "hoard" money: as soon as their money is placed in a bank, or on a stock market, or purchases bonds, or is used to purchase something, or start a business, it's back in the economy. And also, it is a decidely different thing to tax people less than it is to give them so-called "government money" (there's no such thing as "government money" - there is only that portion of your money, and your neighbors' money, which the government appropriates), although the current debate does not seem to distinguish between the two (ie people continually claim the government needs to "pay for" tax reductions). When you tax people less, you are forcibly taking less from them, you are not redistributing money. When people claim the government needs to "pay for" a tax reduction, what they are saying is government spending exceeds revenue, and the only option is to increase government revenue. That's a false conclusion - there's obviously one other option available.

So

[SlippyToad]

Deliberately screwing something up is still called a "mistake" when it leads to thousands of easily-prevented deaths?

I guess if I intentionally sabotage a project I'm working on I can claim a mistake was made too. I am just as sure that I will get fired regardless.

If just ONE person gets fired or becomes unemployable due to this it would be a sign that some kind of credibility still exists in our federal law enforcement/security agencies. But, I doubt it's ever going to happen.

Re:So

[Dan Dankleton]

The thing is, there are a whole bunch of people around the world who think that this is government conspiracy to cause those thousands of easily prevented deaths. Yes, it was deliberate screwing up. No, it wasn't government conspiracy, it was just humans being short-sited idiots. We as a race are pretty good at that.

credibility?

[rjejr]

I think you mean culpability. Nobody gets fired anymore. Colin Powell's huge WMD speech before the UN is still my favorite example. Oh sure, Clinton got impeached for getting a bj from a fat chick, but "Brownie" destroying New Orleans? Heckuva job there. Mission Accomplished in Iraq. On the bright side, cover-ups will soon be a thing of the past, all the evils of the world exposed and the perpetrators will simply say - "there ya go, do something about it", but nobody can, or will.

Re:credibility?

[Mister Whirly]

Yeah, remember when lying about a bj was this nation's biggest problem? How do we get back to those times?

Re:credibility?

[cwgmpls]

How stupid do you think we are? Everybody knows exactly what happened to Clinton. So edit the statement to read "Clinton got impeached for lying about getting a bj from a fat chick" and it still carries the same meaning. Clinton was impeached for an act that was of no consequence to the nation. Yet we have leaders destroy cities and nations through lies and incompetence and yet they face no consequences.

Re:credibility?

[Nimey]

Wrong. He was impeached because he made the Republicans look bad during the government shutdowns, so they found an excuse to hurt him back.

It was never about whether Clinton broke the law or not, it was simply low politics.

Re:Wrong

[DriedClexler]

Right, and isn't this what most civil liberties advocates (who I count myself among) want? That is, the more that government agencies can cooperate with each other, the easier it is to arrest any one person.

I'm not trying to blame anyone, just predict that future news will cycle between:

"OMG! They missed the 9/11 attack because of stupid rules about info-sharing between agencies?"

and

"OMG! A totalitarian bill going through the Senate is going to let government agencies share their files on us, giving them unlimited power to raid your privacy."

Folks, there are tradeoffs.

Re:Wrong

[TheSync]

"OMG! A totalitarian bill going through the Senate...Folks, there are tradeoffs."

Totalitarian governments kill millions of people (USSR, China, Germany, etc.)

Terrorists so far only seem to be able to kill a few thousand at a pop...

Put me down for prefers missing the occasional terrorist over totalitarian government.

Now if the government was more open and actually publicized the fact that terrorists were planning on hijacking planes as missiles (which we knew years before), it is possible 9/11 may have only lead to a few hundred deaths, if that. Instead, we got security through obscurity...