NY Post : Inside the Saudi 9/11 coverup

Inside the Saudi 9/11 coverup

By Paul Sperry | December 15, 2013

After the 9/11 attacks, the public was told al Qaeda acted alone, with no state sponsors.

But the White House never let it see an entire section of Congress’ investigative report on 9/11 dealing with “specific sources of foreign support” for the 19 hijackers, 15 of whom were Saudi nationals.

It was kept secret and remains so today.

President Bush inexplicably censored 28 full pages of the 800-page report. Text isn’t just blacked-out here and there in this critical-yet-missing middle section. The pages are completely blank, except for dotted lines where an estimated 7,200 words once stood (this story by comparison is about 1,000 words).

A pair of lawmakers who recently read the redacted portion say they are “absolutely shocked” at the level of foreign state involvement in the attacks.

Reps. Walter Jones (R-NC) and Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) can’t reveal the nation identified by it without violating federal law. So they’ve proposed Congress pass a resolution asking President Obama to declassify the entire 2002 report, “Joint Inquiry Into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001.”

Some information already has leaked from the classified section, which is based on both CIA and FBI documents, and it points back to Saudi Arabia, a presumed ally.

The Saudis deny any role in 9/11, but the CIA in one memo reportedly found “incontrovertible evidence” that Saudi government officials — not just wealthy Saudi hardliners, but high-level diplomats and intelligence officers employed by the kingdom — helped the hijackers both financially and logistically. The intelligence files cited in the report directly implicate the Saudi embassy in Washington and consulate in Los Angeles in the attacks, making 9/11 not just an act of terrorism, but an act of war.

The findings, if confirmed, would back up open-source reporting showing the hijackers had, at a minimum, ties to several Saudi officials and agents while they were preparing for their attacks inside the United States. In fact, they got help from Saudi VIPs from coast to coast:

LOS ANGELES: Saudi consulate official Fahad al-Thumairy allegedly arranged for an advance team to receive two of the Saudi hijackers — Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi — as they arrived at LAX in 2000. One of the advance men, Omar al-Bayoumi, a suspected Saudi intelligence agent, left the LA consulate and met the hijackers at a local restaurant. (Bayoumi left the United States two months before the attacks, while Thumairy was deported back to Saudi Arabia after 9/11.)

SAN DIEGO: Bayoumi and another suspected Saudi agent, Osama Bassnan, set up essentially a forward operating base in San Diego for the hijackers after leaving LA. They were provided rooms, rent and phones, as well as private meetings with an American al Qaeda cleric who would later become notorious, Anwar al-Awlaki, at a Saudi-funded mosque he ran in a nearby suburb. They were also feted at a welcoming party. (Bassnan also fled the United States just before the attacks.)

WASHINGTON: Then-Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar and his wife sent checks totaling some $130,000 to Bassnan while he was handling the hijackers. Though the Bandars claim the checks were “welfare” for Bassnan’s supposedly ill wife, the money nonetheless made its way into the hijackers’ hands.

Other al Qaeda funding was traced back to Bandar and his embassy — so much so that by 2004 Riggs Bank of Washington had dropped the Saudis as a client.

The next year, as a number of embassy employees popped up in terror probes, Riyadh recalled Bandar.

“Our investigations contributed to the ambassador’s departure,” an investigator who worked with the Joint Terrorism Task Force in Washington told me, though Bandar says he left for “personal reasons.”

FALLS CHURCH, VA.: In 2001, Awlaki and the San Diego hijackers turned up together again — this time at the Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center, a Pentagon-area mosque built with funds from the Saudi Embassy. Awlaki was recruited 3,000 miles away to head the mosque. As its imam, Awlaki helped the hijackers, who showed up at his doorstep as if on cue. He tasked a handler to help them acquire apartments and IDs before they attacked the Pentagon.

Awlaki worked closely with the Saudi Embassy. He lectured at a Saudi Islamic think tank in Merrifield, Va., chaired by Bandar. Saudi travel itinerary documents I’ve obtained show he also served as the ­official imam on Saudi Embassy-sponsored trips to Mecca and tours of Saudi holy sites.

Most suspiciously, though, Awlaki fled the United States on a Saudi jet about a year after 9/11.

As I first reported in my book, “Infiltration,” quoting from classified US documents, the Saudi-sponsored cleric was briefly detained at JFK before being released into the custody of a “Saudi representative.” A federal warrant for Awlaki’s arrest had mysteriously been withdrawn the previous day. A US drone killed Awlaki in Yemen in 2011.

HERNDON, VA.: On the eve of the attacks, top Saudi government official Saleh Hussayen checked into the same Marriott Residence Inn near Dulles Airport as three of the Saudi hijackers who targeted the Pentagon. Hussayen had left a nearby hotel to move into the hijackers’ hotel. Did he meet with them? The FBI never found out. They let him go after he “feigned a seizure,” one agent recalled. (Hussayen’s name doesn’t appear in the separate 9/11 Commission Report, which clears the Saudis.)

SARASOTA, FLA.: 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta and other hijackers visited a home owned by Esam Ghazzawi, a Saudi adviser to the nephew of King Fahd. FBI agents investigating the connection in 2002 found that visitor logs for the gated community and photos of license tags matched vehicles driven by the hijackers. Just two weeks before the 9/11 attacks, the Saudi luxury home was abandoned. Three cars, including a new Chrysler PT Cruiser, were left in the driveway. Inside, opulent furniture was untouched.

Democrat Bob Graham, the former Florida senator who chaired the Joint Inquiry, has asked the FBI for the Sarasota case files, but can’t get a single, even heavily redacted, page released. He says it’s a “coverup.”

Is the federal government protecting the Saudis? Case agents tell me they were repeatedly called off pursuing 9/11 leads back to the Saudi Embassy, which had curious sway over White House and FBI responses to the attacks.

Just days after Bush met with the Saudi ambassador in the White House, the FBI evacuated from the United States dozens of Saudi officials, as well as Osama bin Laden family members. Bandar made the request for escorts directly to FBI headquarters on Sept. 13, 2001 — just hours after he met with the president. The two old family friends shared cigars on the Truman Balcony while discussing the attacks.

Bill Doyle, who lost his son in the World Trade Center attacks and heads the Coalition of 9/11 Families, calls the suppression of Saudi evidence a “coverup beyond belief.” Last week, he sent out an e-mail to relatives urging them to phone their representatives in Congress to support the resolution and read for themselves the censored 28 pages.

Astonishing as that sounds, few lawmakers in fact have bothered to read the classified section of arguably the most important investigation in US history.

Granted, it’s not easy to do. It took a monthlong letter-writing campaign by Jones and Lynch to convince the House intelligence panel to give them access to the material.

But it’s critical they take the time to read it and pressure the White House to let all Americans read it. This isn’t water under the bridge. The information is still relevant ­today. Pursuing leads further, getting to the bottom of the foreign support, could help head off another 9/11.

As the frustrated Joint Inquiry authors warned, in an overlooked addendum to their heavily redacted 2002 report, “State-sponsored terrorism substantially increases the likelihood of successful and more ­lethal attacks within the United States.”

Their findings must be released, even if they forever change US-Saudi relations. If an oil-rich foreign power was capable of orchestrating simultaneous bulls-eye hits on our centers of commerce and defense a dozen years ago, it may be able to pull off similarly devastating attacks today.

Members of Congress reluctant to read the full report ought to remember that the 9/11 assault missed its fourth target: them.

Paul Sperry is a Hoover Institution media fellow and author of “Infiltration” and “Muslim Mafia.”

Investors Business Daily : Time To Declassify 9/11 Probe's Secret Saudi Section

Time To Declassify 9/11 Probe's Secret Saudi Section

December 11, 2013

Foreign Affairs: Congress might soon vote on a proposed bipartisan resolution calling for release of a secret Saudi section of the congressional 9/11 Joint Inquiry report. It's about time.

In 2002, President Bush censored 28 pages of the report dealing with foreign sponsorship of the grisly attacks on our nation. Some of the information has leaked out over the years, and it points back to Riyadh.

Now a couple of lawmakers who recently read the redacted portion and walked away "absolutely shocked" are demanding the White House make it public. Reps. Walter Jones, R-N.C., and Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., suggest the conspiracy was much wider than al-Qaida. They say every American deserves to know the truth.

Their resolution, H.R. 428, urges President Obama to declassify the 28-page section that deals with "foreign" sources of support for the 9/11 hijackers.

"The contents of the redacted pages are necessary for a full public understanding of the events and circumstances surrounding the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks upon the United States," it states.

"The executive branch's decision to maintain the classified status of these pages prevents the people of the United States from having access to information about the involvement of certain foreign governments in the terrorist attacks," the two-page resolution adds. It stresses that victims' families "deserve answers."

Indeed they do. Relatives have demanded the release of those redacted pages for years. We can't imagine the torture of living under that veil of secrecy. Or the anxiety of not knowing what really happened that day and who was really behind the murder of their loved ones.

The resolution sponsors insist that releasing the information won't violate national security, as the Bush administration claimed when it stepped in and erased it from a congressional report intended for public viewing.

Of course, that doesn't mean it won't hurt foreign relations. The fallout could be both diplomatically and economically damaging. There's also fear that openly punishing a Mideast ally could hurt efforts to box in a nuclear Iran. So the White House and State Department have to weigh these sensitive issues in making a decision.

But we believe it is worth the risks. The American public has a right to know if a foreign government aided the hijackers, whether that support was direct or indirect.

If a presumed ally knew of the plot to attack the very headquarters of the U.S. military, it certainly is no ally. And if there are no penalties for such a monumental betrayal, what message does that send to other nations that seek to do us harm?

Press TV : Hersh revelations and false-flag talk in media

Hersh revelations and false-flag talk in media

By Kevin Barrett | December 11, 2013

Whenever a big, media-hyped attack or atrocity happens, the mainstream media always says the same thing: “The bad guys did it.”

And who are these “bad guys”? The enemy-du-jour of the powers-that-be.

The authorities blamed 9/11 on “radical Muslims.” They blamed the Boston Marathon, Sandy Hook and Aurora, Colorado massacres on “gun nuts” and “extremists.”

The mainstream media have not yet admitted that these atrocities were false-flag operations. They are too recent. People would be too angry.

But mainstream journalists and historians do admit the truth about past false-flags.

During the Cold War, Western governments and media blamed the Operation Gladio massacres in Brabant, Belgium and Bologna, Italy on “anti-American leftists”. . . just as they blamed the fake Gulf of Tonkin attack on the North Vietnamese. Today, everyone admits that these were all false-flag operations commanded by the US military.

During Operation Ajax - the CIA's overthrow of Iran's prime minister Mossadeq in 1953 - CIA operatives repeatedly committed mass murder and falsely blamed Mossadeq supporters. They blew up mosques, targeted religious leaders for assassination, machine-gunned crowds, then scattered thousands of leaflets claiming Mossadeq was responsible.

Former CIA operative Kermit Roosevelt has admitted to committing these murders and spreading these lies. CIA documents released this year confirm the Agency's role in the atrocities.

The Israelis, world champion false-flag terrorists, have admitted that their agents dressed up as Egyptian Arabs and bombed American targets in Egypt during the Lavon Affair in 1954. It took the Zionists fifty years to admit the truth. When the Israeli government finally confessed in 2005 to its attack on America, it lavished honors on the false-flag terrorists.

When will Israel finally admit that its slaughter of the American sailors of the USS Liberty in 1967 was a botched false-flag designed to be blamed on Egypt and trigger a US attack on Cairo?

Today, thanks to the power of the internet, more and more people are learning about false-flags. The media are finding it more and more difficult to ignore this critically-important, massively-censored topic.

A few days ago, award-winning mainstream journalist Seymour Hersh forced the mainstream media to talk about false-flags. In his article “Whose sarin?” Hersh confirmed what alternative media outlets like Press TV and Veterans Today reported back in August: The chemical weapons attack in al-Ghouta was almost certainly perpetrated by Saudi-supported militants, not the Syrian government.

That was the only conceivable purpose of such an attack. Obama had drawn a “red line” around the chemical weapons issue. Hence, the only way the rebels could hope to convince the US to bomb Syria was by staging a chemical weapons attack and falsely blaming Assad on such an attack.

In August, no mainstream publication even raised this as a possibility. They all mindlessly echoed Israeli and US government sources assuring the world that Assad must have been responsible for the al-Ghouta atrocity. Yet they offered no convincing evidence of Assad's responsibility.

If you were paying attention to Press TV, Veterans Today, Global Research, or other independent media outlets, you knew how unlikely it was that Assad would unleash chemical weapons in a militarily useless attack just a few miles from where chemical weapons inspectors were touching down in Damascus.

The mainstream story was ridiculous on its face...almost as ridiculous as the official story of 9/11, which blames nineteen debauched “radical Muslims” with box-cutters led by a terminal kidney patient in a cave in Afghanistan for the three most logistically-complex, technologically-advanced skyscraper demolitions in history.

The mainstream media would rather report ridiculous, self-evidently false assertions than even raise the possibility of a false-flag. That is because the corporate media are, as Noam Chomsky puts it, “manufacturers of consent.”

Their job is not to report the truth, but to help powerful forces shape public opinion. And false-flags are the most powerful tool available to those who wish to shape public opinion.

The media will never even mention that false-flags exist unless they are forced to do so by someone like Seymour Hersh.

Hersh's article cites all kinds of documentary evidence proving that US intelligence sources knew that the Syrian rebels, not Assad's government, were behind the al-Ghouta gas attack.

For example: “One high-level intelligence officer, in an email to a colleague, called the administration’s assurances of Assad’s responsibility a “ruse.” The attack “was not the result of the current regime,” he wrote.

Another high-level US intelligence source compared the al-Ghouta attack to the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which is now officially admitted to have been a false-flag designed to trigger massive US escalation of the war against Vietnam.

This is not the first time that Hersh has forced false-flag talk upon a reluctant media. During the Bush Administration’s attempt to win public support for its increasingly unpopular occupation of Iraq, Hersh reported that the one-legged al-Qaeda superman Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was a “composite figure” whose exploits were being wildly exaggerated, if not invented out of whole cloth, by US government propagandists.

More recently, Hersh reported that the official story of the alleged killing of Osama Bin Laden by US Navy Seals is “one big lie, not one word of it is true.” He added, “The republic's in trouble, we lie about everything, lying has become the staple.”

Hersh's revelations about al-Zarqawi, Bin Laden, and the al-Ghouta false-flag raise a larger question: Is “al-Qaeda” itself one big Western false-flag operation designed to demonize Islam and destabilize the Islamic world?

KB/AB

Epoch Times : Yale Study Finds 9/11 Kin More Political

Yale Study Finds 9/11 Kin More Political

Associated Press | December 10, 2013

NEW YORK—Relatives of 9/11 victims have stepped up their political activity since the attack more than other New Yorkers have and have become a bit more Republican, a Yale university researcher has found.

His study, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that when compared to a control group, families of victims—and even victims’ neighbors, to a lesser degree—have voted more often in general elections and primaries.

Families also have donated more heavily to federal political campaigns, the study found. And victims’ relatives and neighbors who changed party affiliation were more likely to switch to the GOP, it found.

“The result is a clear indication that 9/11 catalyzed long-lasting political changes among those most affected, making them more active in politics, more partisan, and more supportive of the political right,” Yale political scientist Eitan Hersh wrote in the paper.

The difference between the families and the control group was between 1 and 5 percentage points in most cases, and Hersh acknowledged in an interview that the findings in some years since the attack were not significant.

However, he said, “a few percentage points can make a difference in elections, especially primaries, where so few people are voting.”

Leonie Huddy, a political science professor and director of the Center for Survey Research at Stony Brook University, said the increase in political activity was “small, but in a certain direction.”

For 9/11 families, she said, “There was this massive event, and some of them have decided they need to become somewhat more active because their lives have been touched by what was essentially not just a personal tragedy but a political event.”

As for party registration, Huddy suggested that all New Yorkers, including the control group, may have shifted toward the Republican Party after 9/11, especially for the 2004 presidential election.

“There’s some evidence that New York and New Jersey voted more Republican than would have been expected, and some feel terrorism is the reason,” she said.

Hersh studied New York registered voter records from 2001 and found 1,181 victims of the 9/11 attacks among them. He then identified household members and neighbors and used other public records to determine when they voted and made political contributions. He formed a control group of New Yorkers who were similar in many ways including prior political activity, but without a relative or neighbor killed.

The study was limited to New York residents and did not include family members of victims from elsewhere.

Hersh said such a study wouldn’t have been possible until recently “because of improvements in public records and computational power.”

Huddy called the approach “novel and creative.” However, she pointed out that party registration records don’t reveal how people actually voted.

“We can’t know unless we talk to them,” she said.

IBT : 9/11 Link To Saudi Arabia Is Topic Of 28 Redacted Pages In Government Report; Congressmen Push For Release

9/11 Link To Saudi Arabia Is Topic Of 28 Redacted Pages In Government Report; Congressmen Push For Release

By Jamie Reno | December 9, 2013

Since terrorists attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, victims’ loved ones, injured survivors, and members of the media have all tried without much success to discover the true nature of the relationship between the 19 hijackers – 15 of them Saudi nationals – and the Saudi Arabian government. Many news organizations reported that some of the terrorists were linked to the Saudi royals and that they even may have received financial support from them as well as from several mysterious, moneyed Saudi men living in San Diego.

Saudi Arabia has repeatedly denied any connection, and neither President George W. Bush nor President Obama has been forthcoming on this issue.

But earlier this year, Reps. Walter B. Jones, R-N.C., and Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., were given access to the 28 redacted pages of the Joint Intelligence Committee Inquiry (JICI) of 9/11 issued in late 2002, which have been thought to hold some answers about the Saudi connection to the attack.

"I was absolutely shocked by what I read," Jones told International Business Times. "What was so surprising was that those whom we thought we could trust really disappointed me. I cannot go into it any more than that. I had to sign an oath that what I read had to remain confidential. But the information I read disappointed me greatly."

The public may soon also get to see these secret documents. Last week, Jones and Lynch introduced a resolution that urges President Obama to declassify the 28 pages, which were originally classified by President George W. Bush. It has never been fully explained why the pages were blacked out, but President Bush stated in 2003 that releasing the pages would violate national security.

While neither Jones nor Lynch would say just what is in the document, some of the information has leaked out over the years. A multitude of sources tell IBTimes, and numerous press reports over the years in Newsweek, the New York Times, CBS News and other media confirm, that the 28 pages in fact clearly portray that the Saudi government had at the very least an indirect role in supporting the terrorists responsible for the 9/11 attack. In addition, these classified pages clarify somewhat the links between the hijackers and at least one Saudi government worker living in San Diego.

Former Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., who chaired the Joint Inquiry in 2002 and has been beating the drum for more disclosure about 9/11 since then, has never understood why the 28 pages were redacted. Graham told IBTimes that based on his involvement in the investigation and on the now-classified information in the document that his committee produced, he is convinced that “the Saudi government without question was supporting the hijackers who lived in San Diego…. You can't have 19 people living in the United States for, in some cases, almost two years, taking flight lessons and other preparations, without someone paying for it. But I think it goes much broader than that. The agencies from CIA and FBI have suppressed that information so American people don't have the facts."

Jones insists that releasing the 28 secret pages would not violate national security.

“It does not deal with national security per se; it is more about relationships,” he said. “The information is critical to our foreign policy moving forward and should thus be available to the American people. If the 9/11 hijackers had outside help – particularly from one or more foreign governments – the press and the public have a right to know what our government has or has not done to bring justice to the perpetrators."

It took Jones six weeks and several letters to the House Intelligence Committee before the classified pages from the 9/11 report were made available to him. Jones was so stunned by what he saw that he approached Rep. Lynch, asking him to look at the 28 pages as well. He knew that Lynch would be astonished by the contents of the documents and perhaps would join in a bipartisan effort to declassify the papers.

"He came back to me about a week ago and told me that he, too, was very shocked by what he read,” Jones said. “I told him we need to join together and put in a resolution and get more members on both sides of the aisle involved and demand that the White House release this information to the public. The American people have a right to know this information."

A decade ago, 46 senators, led by Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., demanded in a letter to President Bush that he declassify the 28 pages.

The letter read, in part, "It has been widely reported in the press that the foreign sources referred to in this portion of the Joint Inquiry analysis reside primarily in Saudi Arabia. As a result, the decision to classify this information sends the wrong message to the American people about our nation's antiterror effort and makes it seem as if there will be no penalty for foreign abettors of the hijackers. Protecting the Saudi regime by eliminating any public penalty for the support given to terrorists from within its borders would be a mistake.... We respectfully urge you to declassify the 28-page section that deals with foreign sources of support for the 9/11 hijackers."

All of the senators who signed that letter but one, Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kansas), were Democrats.

Lynch, who won the Democratic primary for his congressional seat on that fateful day of Sept. 11, 2001, told IBTimes that he and Jones are in the process of writing a “Dear Colleague” letter calling on all House members to read the 28 pages and join their effort.

"Once a member reads the 28 pages, I think whether they are Democrat or Republican they will reach the same conclusion that Walter and I reached, which is that Americans have the right to know this information," Lynch said. “These documents speak for themselves. We have a situation where an extensive investigation was conducted, but then the Bush [administration] decided for whatever purposes to excise 28 pages from the report. I'm not passing judgment. That was a different time. Maybe there were legitimate reasons to keep this classified. But that time has long passed.”

Most of the allegations of links between the Saudi government and the 9/11 hijackers revolve around two enigmatic Saudi men who lived in San Diego: Omar al-Bayoumi and Osama Basnan, both of whom have long since left the United States.

In early 2000, al-Bayoumi, who had previously worked for the Saudi government in civil aviation (a part of the Saudi defense department), invited two of the hijackers, Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, to San Diego from Los Angeles. He told authorities he met the two men by chance when he sat next to them at a restaurant.

Newsweek reported in 2002 that al-Bayoumi’s invitation was extended on the same day that he visited the Saudi Consulate in Los Angeles for a private meeting.

Al-Bayoumi arranged for the two future hijackers to live in an apartment and paid $1,500 to cover their first two months of rent. Al-Bayoumi was briefly interviewed in Britain but was never brought back to the United States for questioning.

As for Basnan, Newsweek reported that he received monthly checks for several years totaling as much as $73,000 from the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar, and his wife, Princess Haifa Faisal. Although the checks were sent to pay for thyroid surgery for Basnan’s wife, Majeda Dweikat, Dweikat signed many of the checks over to al-Bayoumi’s wife, Manal Bajadr. This money allegedly made its way into the hands of hijackers, according to the 9/11 report.

Despite all this, Basnan was ultimately allowed to return to Saudi Arabia, and Dweikat was deported to Jordan.

Sources and numerous press reports also suggest that the 28 pages include more information about Abdussattar Shaikh, an FBI asset in San Diego who Newsweek reported was friends with al-Bayoumi and invited two of the San Diego-based hijackers to live in his house.

Shaikh was not allowed by the FBI or the Bush administration to testify before the 9/11 Commission or the JICI.

Graham notes that there was a significant 9/11 investigation in Sarasota, Fla., which also suggests a connection between the hijackers and the Saudi government that most Americans don’t know about.

The investigation, which occurred in 2002, focused on Saudi millionaire Abdulaziz al-Hijji and his wife, Anoud, whose upscale home was owned by Anoud al-Hijji’s father, Esam Ghazzawi, an adviser to Prince Fahd bin Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, the nephew of Saudi King Fahd.

The al-Hijji family reportedly moved out of their Sarasota house and left the country abruptly in the weeks before 9/11, leaving behind three luxury cars and personal belongings including clothing, furniture and fresh food. They also left the swimming-pool water circulating.

Numerous news reports in Florida have said that the gated community’s visitor logs and photos of license tags showed that vehicles driven by several of the future 9/11 hijackers had visited the al-Hijji home.

Graham said that like the 28 pages in the 9/11 inquiry, the Sarasota case is being “covered up” by U.S. intelligence. Graham has been fighting to get the FBI to release the details of this investigation with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and litigation. But so far the bureau has stalled and stonewalled, he said.

Lynch said he didn’t know how the Obama administration would respond to the congressional resolution urging declassification, if it passes the House and Senate.

“But if we raise the issue, and get enough members to read it, we think we can get the current administration to revisit this issue. I am very optimistic,” he said. “I’ve talked to some of my Democratic members already, and there has been receptivity there. They have agreed to look at it.”

Obama administration officials declined to comment on the congressional resolution or on the classification of these documents.

The 9/11 Families United for Justice Against Terrorism (JASTA), an activist group comprised of the attack victims, has been calling for the declassification of the 28 pages for more than a decade. The group plans to contact Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, this week to urge her to introduce a similar resolution in the Senate.

Sharon Premoli, a 9/11 survivor who was on the North Tower's 80th floor when the plane hit and is a JASTA member, says Jones and Lynch “share our objectives of seeking the truth behind 9/11 and bringing to justice those who bankrolled the attacks.”

Premoli said it was a “miracle” that she survived 9/11. “I found myself buried under dust and on top of a dead body,” she said. “It makes me angry that I still don’t know what happened or who was supporting these hijackers. The veil of secrecy must be lifted for the families, the survivors and for the American people.

LRB : Whose sarin?

Whose sarin?

Seymour M. Hersh | December 8, 2013

Barack Obama did not tell the whole story this autumn when he tried to make the case that Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack near Damascus on 21 August. In some instances, he omitted important intelligence, and in others he presented assumptions as facts. Most significant, he failed to acknowledge something known to the US intelligence community: that the Syrian army is not the only party in the country’s civil war with access to sarin, the nerve agent that a UN study concluded – without assessing responsibility – had been used in the rocket attack. In the months before the attack, the American intelligence agencies produced a series of highly classified reports, culminating in a formal Operations Order – a planning document that precedes a ground invasion – citing evidence that the al-Nusra Front, a jihadi group affiliated with al-Qaida, had mastered the mechanics of creating sarin and was capable of manufacturing it in quantity. When the attack occurred al-Nusra should have been a suspect, but the administration cherry-picked intelligence to justify a strike against Assad.

In his nationally televised speech about Syria on 10 September, Obama laid the blame for the nerve gas attack on the rebel-held suburb of Eastern Ghouta firmly on Assad’s government, and made it clear he was prepared to back up his earlier public warnings that any use of chemical weapons would cross a ‘red line’: ‘Assad’s government gassed to death over a thousand people,’ he said. ‘We know the Assad regime was responsible … And that is why, after careful deliberation, I determined that it is in the national security interests of the United States to respond to the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons through a targeted military strike.’ Obama was going to war to back up a public threat, but he was doing so without knowing for sure who did what in the early morning of 21 August.

He cited a list of what appeared to be hard-won evidence of Assad’s culpability: ‘In the days leading up to August 21st, we know that Assad’s chemical weapons personnel prepared for an attack near an area where they mix sarin gas. They distributed gas masks to their troops. Then they fired rockets from a regime-controlled area into 11 neighbourhoods that the regime has been trying to wipe clear of opposition forces.’ Obama’s certainty was echoed at the time by Denis McDonough, his chief of staff, who told the New York Times: ‘No one with whom I’ve spoken doubts the intelligence’ directly linking Assad and his regime to the sarin attacks.

But in recent interviews with intelligence and military officers and consultants past and present, I found intense concern, and on occasion anger, over what was repeatedly seen as the deliberate manipulation of intelligence. One high-level intelligence officer, in an email to a colleague, called the administration’s assurances of Assad’s responsibility a ‘ruse’. The attack ‘was not the result of the current regime’, he wrote. A former senior intelligence official told me that the Obama administration had altered the available information – in terms of its timing and sequence – to enable the president and his advisers to make intelligence retrieved days after the attack look as if it had been picked up and analysed in real time, as the attack was happening. The distortion, he said, reminded him of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, when the Johnson administration reversed the sequence of National Security Agency intercepts to justify one of the early bombings of North Vietnam. The same official said there was immense frustration inside the military and intelligence bureaucracy: ‘The guys are throwing their hands in the air and saying, “How can we help this guy” – Obama – “when he and his cronies in the White House make up the intelligence as they go along?”’

The complaints focus on what Washington did not have: any advance warning from the assumed source of the attack. The military intelligence community has for years produced a highly classified early morning intelligence summary, known as the Morning Report, for the secretary of defence and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; a copy also goes to the national security adviser and the director of national intelligence. The Morning Report includes no political or economic information, but provides a summary of important military events around the world, with all available intelligence about them. A senior intelligence consultant told me that some time after the attack he reviewed the reports for 20 August through 23 August. For two days – 20 and 21 August – there was no mention of Syria. On 22 August the lead item in the Morning Report dealt with Egypt; a subsequent item discussed an internal change in the command structure of one of the rebel groups in Syria. Nothing was noted about the use of nerve gas in Damascus that day. It was not until 23 August that the use of sarin became a dominant issue, although hundreds of photographs and videos of the massacre had gone viral within hours on YouTube, Facebook and other social media sites. At this point, the administration knew no more than the public.

Obama left Washington early on 21 August for a hectic two-day speaking tour in New York and Pennsylvania; according to the White House press office, he was briefed later that day on the attack, and the growing public and media furore. The lack of any immediate inside intelligence was made clear on 22 August, when Jen Psaki, a spokesperson for the State Department, told reporters: ‘We are unable to conclusively determine [chemical weapons] use. But we are focused every minute of every day since these events happened … on doing everything possible within our power to nail down the facts.’ The administration’s tone had hardened by 27 August, when Jay Carney, Obama’s press secretary, told reporters – without providing any specific information – that any suggestions that the Syrian government was not responsible ‘are as preposterous as suggestions that the attack itself didn’t occur’.

The absence of immediate alarm inside the American intelligence community demonstrates that there was no intelligence about Syrian intentions in the days before the attack. And there are at least two ways the US could have known about it in advance: both were touched on in one of the top secret American intelligence documents that have been made public in recent months by Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor.

On 29 August, the Washington Post published excerpts from the annual budget for all national intelligence programmes, agency by agency, provided by Snowden. In consultation with the Obama administration, the newspaper chose to publish only a slim portion of the 178-page document, which has a classification higher than top secret, but it summarised and published a section dealing with problem areas. One problem area was the gap in coverage targeting Assad’s office. The document said that the NSA’s worldwide electronic eavesdropping facilities had been ‘able to monitor unencrypted communications among senior military officials at the outset of the civil war there’. But it was ‘a vulnerability that President Bashar al-Assad’s forces apparently later recognised’. In other words, the NSA no longer had access to the conversations of the top military leadership in Syria, which would have included crucial communications from Assad, such as orders for a nerve gas attack. (In its public statements since 21 August, the Obama administration has never claimed to have specific information connecting Assad himself to the attack.)

The Post report also provided the first indication of a secret sensor system inside Syria, designed to provide early warning of any change in status of the regime’s chemical weapons arsenal. The sensors are monitored by the National Reconnaissance Office, the agency that controls all US intelligence satellites in orbit. According to the Post summary, the NRO is also assigned ‘to extract data from sensors placed on the ground’ inside Syria. The former senior intelligence official, who had direct knowledge of the programme, told me that NRO sensors have been implanted near all known chemical warfare sites in Syria. They are designed to provide constant monitoring of the movement of chemical warheads stored by the military. But far more important, in terms of early warning, is the sensors’ ability to alert US and Israeli intelligence when warheads are being loaded with sarin. (As a neighbouring country, Israel has always been on the alert for changes in the Syrian chemical arsenal, and works closely with American intelligence on early warnings.) A chemical warhead, once loaded with sarin, has a shelf life of a few days or less – the nerve agent begins eroding the rocket almost immediately: it’s a use-it-or-lose-it mass killer. ‘The Syrian army doesn’t have three days to prepare for a chemical attack,’ the former senior intelligence official told me. ‘We created the sensor system for immediate reaction, like an air raid warning or a fire alarm. You can’t have a warning over three days because everyone involved would be dead. It is either right now or you’re history. You do not spend three days getting ready to fire nerve gas.’ The sensors detected no movement in the months and days before 21 August, the former official said. It is of course possible that sarin had been supplied to the Syrian army by other means, but the lack of warning meant that Washington was unable to monitor the events in Eastern Ghouta as they unfolded.

The sensors had worked in the past, as the Syrian leadership knew all too well. Last December the sensor system picked up signs of what seemed to be sarin production at a chemical weapons depot. It was not immediately clear whether the Syrian army was simulating sarin production as part of an exercise (all militaries constantly carry out such exercises) or actually preparing an attack. At the time, Obama publicly warned Syria that using sarin was ‘totally unacceptable’; a similar message was also passed by diplomatic means. The event was later determined to be part of a series of exercises, according to the former senior intelligence official: ‘If what the sensors saw last December was so important that the president had to call and say, “Knock it off,” why didn’t the president issue the same warning three days before the gas attack in August?’

The NSA would of course monitor Assad’s office around the clock if it could, the former official said. Other communications – from various army units in combat throughout Syria – would be far less important, and not analysed in real time. ‘There are literally thousands of tactical radio frequencies used by field units in Syria for mundane routine communications,’ he said, ‘and it would take a huge number of NSA cryptological technicians to listen in – and the useful return would be zilch.’ But the ‘chatter’ is routinely stored on computers. Once the scale of events on 21 August was understood, the NSA mounted a comprehensive effort to search for any links to the attack, sorting through the full archive of stored communications. A keyword or two would be selected and a filter would be employed to find relevant conversations. ‘What happened here is that the NSA intelligence weenies started with an event – the use of sarin – and reached to find chatter that might relate,’ the former official said. ‘This does not lead to a high confidence assessment, unless you start with high confidence that Bashar Assad ordered it, and began looking for anything that supports that belief.’ The cherry-picking was similar to the process used to justify the Iraq war.

*

The White House needed nine days to assemble its case against the Syrian government. On 30 August it invited a select group of Washington journalists (at least one often critical reporter, Jonathan Landay, the national security correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers, was not invited), and handed them a document carefully labelled as a ‘government assessment’, rather than as an assessment by the intelligence community. The document laid out what was essentially a political argument to bolster the administration’s case against the Assad government. It was, however, more specific than Obama would be later, in his speech on 10 September: American intelligence, it stated, knew that Syria had begun ‘preparing chemical munitions’ three days before the attack. In an aggressive speech later that day, John Kerry provided more details. He said that Syria’s ‘chemical weapons personnel were on the ground, in the area, making preparations’ by 18 August. ‘We know that the Syrian regime elements were told to prepare for the attack by putting on gas masks and taking precautions associated with chemical weapons.’ The government assessment and Kerry’s comments made it seem as if the administration had been tracking the sarin attack as it happened. It is this version of events, untrue but unchallenged, that was widely reported at the time.
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An unforseen reaction came in the form of complaints from the Free Syrian Army’s leadership and others about the lack of warning. ‘It’s unbelievable they did nothing to warn people or try to stop the regime before the crime,’ Razan Zaitouneh, an opposition member who lived in one of the towns struck by sarin, told Foreign Policy. The Daily Mail was more blunt: ‘Intelligence report says US officials knew about nerve-gas attack in Syria three days before it killed over 1400 people – including more than 400 children.’ (The number of deaths attributable to the attack varied widely, from at least 1429, as initially claimed by the Obama administration, to many fewer. A Syrian human rights group reported 502 deaths; Médicins sans Frontières put it at 355; and a French report listed 281 known fatalities. The strikingly precise US total was later reported by the Wall Street Journal to have been based not on an actual body count, but on an extrapolation by CIA analysts, who scanned more than a hundred YouTube videos from Eastern Ghouta into a computer system and looked for images of the dead. In other words, it was little more than a guess.)

Five days later, a spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence responded to the complaints. A statement to the Associated Press said that the intelligence behind the earlier administration assertions was not known at the time of the attack, but recovered only subsequently: ‘Let’s be clear, the United States did not watch, in real time, as this horrible attack took place. The intelligence community was able to gather and analyse information after the fact and determine that elements of the Assad regime had in fact taken steps to prepare prior to using chemical weapons.’ But since the American press corps had their story, the retraction received scant attention. On 31 August the Washington Post, relying on the government assessment, had vividly reported on its front page that American intelligence was able to record ‘each step’ of the Syrian army attack in real time, ‘from the extensive preparations to the launching of rockets to the after-action assessments by Syrian officials’. It did not publish the AP corrective, and the White House maintained control of the narrative.

So when Obama said on 10 September that his administration knew Assad’s chemical weapons personnel had prepared the attack in advance, he was basing the statement not on an intercept caught as it happened, but on communications analysed days after 21 August. The former senior intelligence official explained that the hunt for relevant chatter went back to the exercise detected the previous December, in which, as Obama later said to the public, the Syrian army mobilised chemical weapons personnel and distributed gas masks to its troops. The White House’s government assessment and Obama’s speech were not descriptions of the specific events leading up to the 21 August attack, but an account of the sequence the Syrian military would have followed for any chemical attack. ‘They put together a back story,’ the former official said, ‘and there are lots of different pieces and parts. The template they used was the template that goes back to December.’ It is possible, of course, that Obama was unaware that this account was obtained from an analysis of Syrian army protocol for conducting a gas attack, rather than from direct evidence. Either way he had come to a hasty judgment.

The press would follow suit. The UN report on 16 September confirming the use of sarin was careful to note that its investigators’ access to the attack sites, which came five days after the gassing, had been controlled by rebel forces. ‘As with other sites,’ the report warned, ‘the locations have been well travelled by other individuals prior to the arrival of the mission … During the time spent at these locations, individuals arrived carrying other suspected munitions indicating that such potential evidence is being moved and possibly manipulated.’ Still, the New York Times seized on the report, as did American and British officials, and claimed that it provided crucial evidence backing up the administration’s assertions. An annex to the UN report reproduced YouTube photographs of some recovered munitions, including a rocket that ‘indicatively matches’ the specifics of a 330mm calibre artillery rocket. The New York Times wrote that the existence of the rockets essentially proved that the Syrian government was responsible for the attack ‘because the weapons in question had not been previously documented or reported to be in possession of the insurgency’.

Theodore Postol, a professor of technology and national security at MIT, reviewed the UN photos with a group of his colleagues and concluded that the large calibre rocket was an improvised munition that was very likely manufactured locally. He told me that it was ‘something you could produce in a modestly capable machine shop’. The rocket in the photos, he added, fails to match the specifications of a similar but smaller rocket known to be in the Syrian arsenal. The New York Times, again relying on data in the UN report, also analysed the flight path of two of the spent rockets that were believed to have carried sarin, and concluded that the angle of descent ‘pointed directly’ to their being fired from a Syrian army base more than nine kilometres from the landing zone. Postol, who has served as the scientific adviser to the chief of naval operations in the Pentagon, said that the assertions in the Times and elsewhere ‘were not based on actual observations’. He concluded that the flight path analyses in particular were, as he put it in an email, ‘totally nuts’ because a thorough study demonstrated that the range of the improvised rockets was ‘unlikely’ to be more than two kilometres. Postol and a colleague, Richard M. Lloyd, published an analysis two weeks after 21 August in which they correctly assessed that the rockets involved carried a far greater payload of sarin than previously estimated. The Times reported on that analysis at length, describing Postol and Lloyd as ‘leading weapons experts’. The pair’s later study about the rockets’ flight paths and range, which contradicted previous Times reporting, was emailed to the newspaper last week; it has so far gone unreported.

*

The White House’s misrepresentation of what it knew about the attack, and when, was matched by its readiness to ignore intelligence that could undermine the narrative. That information concerned al-Nusra, the Islamist rebel group designated by the US and the UN as a terrorist organisation. Al-Nusra is known to have carried out scores of suicide bombings against Christians and other non-Sunni Muslim sects inside Syria, and to have attacked its nominal ally in the civil war, the secular Free Syrian Army (FSA). Its stated goal is to overthrow the Assad regime and establish sharia law. (On 25 September al-Nusra joined several other Islamist rebel groups in repudiating the FSA and another secular faction, the Syrian National Coalition.)
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The flurry of American interest in al-Nusra and sarin stemmed from a series of small-scale chemical weapons attacks in March and April; at the time, the Syrian government and the rebels each insisted the other was responsible. The UN eventually concluded that four chemical attacks had been carried out, but did not assign responsibility. A White House official told the press in late April that the intelligence community had assessed ‘with varying degrees of confidence’ that the Syrian government was responsible for the attacks. Assad had crossed Obama’s ‘red line’. The April assessment made headlines, but some significant caveats were lost in translation. The unnamed official conducting the briefing acknowledged that intelligence community assessments ‘are not alone sufficient’. ‘We want,’ he said, ‘to investigate above and beyond those intelligence assessments to gather facts so that we can establish a credible and corroborated set of information that can then inform our decision-making.’ In other words, the White House had no direct evidence of Syrian army or government involvement, a fact that was only occasionally noted in the press coverage. Obama’s tough talk played well with the public and Congress, who view Assad as a ruthless murderer.

Two months later, a White House statement announced a change in the assessment of Syrian culpability and declared that the intelligence community now had ‘high confidence’ that the Assad government was responsible for as many as 150 deaths from attacks with sarin. More headlines were generated and the press was told that Obama, in response to the new intelligence, had ordered an increase in non-lethal aid to the Syrian opposition. But once again there were significant caveats. The new intelligence included a report that Syrian officials had planned and executed the attacks. No specifics were provided, nor were those who provided the reports identified. The White House statement said that laboratory analysis had confirmed the use of sarin, but also that a positive finding of the nerve agent ‘does not tell us how or where the individuals were exposed or who was responsible for the dissemination’. The White House further declared: ‘We have no reliable corroborated reporting to indicate that the opposition in Syria has acquired or used chemical weapons.’ The statement contradicted evidence that at the time was streaming into US intelligence agencies.

Already by late May, the senior intelligence consultant told me, the CIA had briefed the Obama administration on al-Nusra and its work with sarin, and had sent alarming reports that another Sunni fundamentalist group active in Syria, al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI), also understood the science of producing sarin. At the time, al-Nusra was operating in areas close to Damascus, including Eastern Ghouta. An intelligence document issued in mid-summer dealt extensively with Ziyaad Tariq Ahmed, a chemical weapons expert formerly of the Iraqi military, who was said to have moved into Syria and to be operating in Eastern Ghouta. The consultant told me that Tariq had been identified ‘as an al-Nusra guy with a track record of making mustard gas in Iraq and someone who is implicated in making and using sarin’. He is regarded as a high-profile target by the American military.

On 20 June a four-page top secret cable summarising what had been learned about al-Nusra’s nerve gas capabilities was forwarded to David R. Shedd, deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. ‘What Shedd was briefed on was extensive and comprehensive,’ the consultant said. ‘It was not a bunch of “we believes”.’ He told me that the cable made no assessment as to whether the rebels or the Syrian army had initiated the attacks in March and April, but it did confirm previous reports that al-Nusra had the ability to acquire and use sarin. A sample of the sarin that had been used was also recovered – with the help of an Israeli agent – but, according to the consultant, no further reporting about the sample showed up in cable traffic.

Independently of these assessments, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, assuming that US troops might be ordered into Syria to seize the government’s stockpile of chemical agents, called for an all-source analysis of the potential threat. ‘The Op Order provides the basis of execution of a military mission, if so ordered,’ the former senior intelligence official explained. ‘This includes the possible need to send American soldiers to a Syrian chemical site to defend it against rebel seizure. If the jihadist rebels were going to overrun the site, the assumption is that Assad would not fight us because we were protecting the chemical from the rebels. All Op Orders contain an intelligence threat component. We had technical analysts from the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, weapons people, and I & W [indications and warnings] people working on the problem … They concluded that the rebel forces were capable of attacking an American force with sarin because they were able to produce the lethal gas. The examination relied on signals and human intelligence, as well as the expressed intention and technical capability of the rebels.’

There is evidence that during the summer some members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were troubled by the prospect of a ground invasion of Syria as well as by Obama’s professed desire to give rebel factions non-lethal support. In July, General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, provided a gloomy assessment, telling the Senate Armed Services Committee in public testimony that ‘thousands of special operations forces and other ground forces’ would be needed to seize Syria’s widely dispersed chemical warfare arsenal, along with ‘hundreds of aircraft, ships, submarines and other enablers’. Pentagon estimates put the number of troops at seventy thousand, in part because US forces would also have to guard the Syrian rocket fleet: accessing large volumes of the chemicals that create sarin without the means to deliver it would be of little value to a rebel force. In a letter to Senator Carl Levin, Dempsey cautioned that a decision to grab the Syrian arsenal could have unintended consequences: ‘We have learned from the past ten years, however, that it is not enough to simply alter the balance of military power without careful consideration of what is necessary in order to preserve a functioning state … Should the regime’s institutions collapse in the absence of a viable opposition, we could inadvertently empower extremists or unleash the very chemical weapons we seek to control.’

The CIA declined to comment for this article. Spokesmen for the DIA and Office of the Director of National Intelligence said they were not aware of the report to Shedd and, when provided with specific cable markings for the document, said they were unable to find it. Shawn Turner, head of public affairs for the ODNI, said that no American intelligence agency, including the DIA, ‘assesses that the al-Nusra Front has succeeded in developing a capacity to manufacture sarin’.

The administration’s public affairs officials are not as concerned about al-Nusra’s military potential as Shedd has been in his public statements. In late July, he gave an alarming account of al-Nusra’s strength at the annual Aspen Security Forum in Colorado. ‘I count no less than 1200 disparate groups in the opposition,’ Shedd said, according to a recording of his presentation. ‘And within the opposition, the al-Nusra Front is … most effective and is gaining in strength.’ This, he said, ‘is of serious concern to us. If left unchecked, I am very concerned that the most radical elements’ – he also cited al-Qaida in Iraq – ‘will take over.’ The civil war, he went on, ‘will only grow worse over time … Unfathomable violence is yet to come.’ Shedd made no mention of chemical weapons in his talk, but he was not allowed to: the reports his office received were highly classified.

*

A series of secret dispatches from Syria over the summer reported that members of the FSA were complaining to American intelligence operatives about repeated attacks on their forces by al-Nusra and al-Qaida fighters. The reports, according to the senior intelligence consultant who read them, provided evidence that the FSA is ‘more worried about the crazies than it is about Assad’. The FSA is largely composed of defectors from the Syrian army. The Obama administration, committed to the end of the Assad regime and continued support for the rebels, has sought in its public statements since the attack to downplay the influence of Salafist and Wahhabist factions. In early September, John Kerry dumbfounded a Congressional hearing with a sudden claim that al-Nusra and other Islamist groups were minority players in the Syrian opposition. He later withdrew the claim.

In both its public and private briefings after 21 August, the administration disregarded the available intelligence about al-Nusra’s potential access to sarin and continued to claim that the Assad government was in sole possession of chemical weapons. This was the message conveyed in the various secret briefings that members of Congress received in the days after the attack, when Obama was seeking support for his planned missile offensive against Syrian military installations. One legislator with more than two decades of experience in military affairs told me that he came away from one such briefing persuaded that ‘only the Assad government had sarin and the rebels did not.’ Similarly, following the release of the UN report on 16 September confirming that sarin was used on 21 August, Samantha Power, the US ambassador to the UN, told a press conference: ‘It’s very important to note that only the [Assad] regime possesses sarin, and we have no evidence that the opposition possesses sarin.’

It is not known whether the highly classified reporting on al-Nusra was made available to Power’s office, but her comment was a reflection of the attitude that swept through the administration. ‘The immediate assumption was that Assad had done it,’ the former senior intelligence official told me. ‘The new director of the CIA, [John] Brennan, jumped to that conclusion … drives to the White House and says: “Look at what I’ve got!” It was all verbal; they just waved the bloody shirt. There was a lot of political pressure to bring Obama to the table to help the rebels, and there was wishful thinking that this [tying Assad to the sarin attack] would force Obama’s hand: “This is the Zimmermann telegram of the Syrian rebellion and now Obama can react.” Wishful thinking by the Samantha Power wing within the administration. Unfortunately, some members of the Joint Chiefs who were alerted that he was going to attack weren’t so sure it was a good thing.’

The proposed American missile attack on Syria never won public support and Obama turned quickly to the UN and the Russian proposal for dismantling the Syrian chemical warfare complex. Any possibility of military action was definitively averted on 26 September when the administration joined Russia in approving a draft UN resolution calling on the Assad government to get rid of its chemical arsenal. Obama’s retreat brought relief to many senior military officers. (One high-level special operations adviser told me that the ill-conceived American missile attack on Syrian military airfields and missile emplacements, as initially envisaged by the White House, would have been ‘like providing close air support for al-Nusra’.)

The administration’s distortion of the facts surrounding the sarin attack raises an unavoidable question: do we have the whole story of Obama’s willingness to walk away from his ‘red line’ threat to bomb Syria? He had claimed to have an iron-clad case but suddenly agreed to take the issue to Congress, and later to accept Assad’s offer to relinquish his chemical weapons. It appears possible that at some point he was directly confronted with contradictory information: evidence strong enough to persuade him to cancel his attack plan, and take the criticism sure to come from Republicans.

The UN resolution, which was adopted on 27 September by the Security Council, dealt indirectly with the notion that rebel forces such as al-Nusra would also be obliged to disarm: ‘no party in Syria should use, develop, produce, acquire, stockpile, retain or transfer [chemical] weapons.’ The resolution also calls for the immediate notification of the Security Council in the event that any ‘non-state actors’ acquire chemical weapons. No group was cited by name. While the Syrian regime continues the process of eliminating its chemical arsenal, the irony is that, after Assad’s stockpile of precursor agents is destroyed, al-Nusra and its Islamist allies could end up as the only faction inside Syria with access to the ingredients that can create sarin, a strategic weapon that would be unlike any other in the war zone. There may be more to negotiate.

Deseret News : In our opinion: Letting Afghanistan revert to pre-9/11 condition would be dangerous

In our opinion: Letting Afghanistan revert to pre-9/11 condition would be dangerous

December 5, 2013

Twelve years of U.S.-led fighting in Afghanistan is on the verge of being wasted because of the pride of one man.

Hamid Karzai convened a council of respected elders, known as a Loya Jirga, to advise him on a proposed agreement with the United States to allow a residual force to remain in place after 2014. The council advised him to sign it. And yet now Karzai is saying he will let Afghanistan’s next president decide whether to sign after elections in April.

But even that deadline now seems uncertain, given that Karzai said this week he would like to postpone April’s elections in order to avoid heavy snowfall.

The Obama administration has said that without an agreement in place by the end of this year, it would pull out all troops and let the Afghan security forces fend for themselves. Meanwhile, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen has said he will have no choice but to also withdraw forces from a training and advisory mission unless an agreement is reached with the Americans.

No doubt the United States would feel somewhat of a sense of relief if it no longer had to worry about losing lives in what has become an unpopular conflict in a far-away land. But the United States has lost more than 2,200 of its people in Afghanistan since the conflict began following the 9/11 attacks in 2001. They should not be allowed to have died in vain.

The conflict was waged to overthrow the Taliban — the ruling party that had terrorized Afghan citizens and created a safe haven for terrorists. The 9/11 terror attacks were plotted there under Taliban cover. And while the United States and coalition forces succeeded in forcing the Taliban from power, they never have succeeded in forcing a surrender. Nor has Afghanistan’s new government, led by Karzai, succeeded in gaining sufficient strength to withstand Taliban insurgents on its own.

An agreement with the United States had snagged over U.S. demands that its soldiers be granted immunity from Afghan laws. U.S. soldiers would remain subject to U.S. laws and justice for any crimes committed. That conflict seemed to have been settled to the satisfaction of both sides before Karzai suddenly decided to be stubborn.

Many observers believe Karzai still holds a grudge for what he feels was a lack of U.S. support for his re-election 2009. His behavior lately, however, seems to cross the line into petulance. Reports over the weekend said he was accusing U.S. forces of withholding fuel supplies from Afghan forces.

Without the help of U.S. and coalition forces, Afghanistan’s army has little chance against the Taliban. The Loya Jirga understands this, as do many Afghanis. Were the Taliban to regain control of Afghanistan, there is little reason to believe it would not simply pick up where it left off before 9/11, reinstating harsh laws and harboring terrorists.

More than just a sad failure for the West, that would put the United States at risk.

FOX CT : In A Reversal, Terror Suspects Agree To Plead Guilty

In A Reversal, Terror Suspects Agree To Plead Guilty

By EDMUND H. MAHONY | emahony@courant.com | The Hartford Courant | December 5, 2013

NEW HAVEN -— Two British nationals have agreed to plead guilty next week to terror-related charges accusing them of developing a ground-breaking Internet network to raise money, recruits and equipment for groups waging holy war in the Middle East.

The decisions to admit guilt by Babar Ahmad, 38, and Syed Talha Ahsan, 34, both of London, appear to end a decade-long legal fight by the two. They challenged extradition to the U.S., first in the British courts and later in the European Court of Human Rights, arguing that long sentences in high-security U.S. prisons would violate their human rights.

Ahmad and Ahsan are accused of operating a groundbreaking network of Internet sites known as Azzam publications that attracted sympathizers and support to the jihadist cause from around the world. Terror experts said the operators of the Azzam sites had direct access to leaders of the Chechen mujahedeen, the Taliban in Afghanistan and associated groups, and used it to support radical holy warriors.

Among other things, U.S. and British authorities found a document describing the classified movements of a U.S. Navy battle group operating in the Middle East during a search of Ahmad's home in London in 2003.

Ahmad and Ahsan are being prosecuted in the U.S. and, in particular, Connecticut, because of the role U.S. authorities played in closing the Azzam network and because the computer network's electronic communications passed through a Connecticut-based Internet service provider.

They were extradited to the U.S. a year ago, with three other men suspected of terror plots in the U.S. or targeting U.S. citizens abroad,

Ahmad and Ahsan faced life sentences if convicted after a trial. In their agreements with federal prosecutors, the two agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists and providing material support to terrorists. The charges carry maximum sentences of 15 years.

Indictments in the case accuse the two, through their network of Azzam websites, of promoting violent jihad and distributing jihadi training manuals, interviews with al-Qaida and Chechen leaders and martyrdom videos of fallen jihadists.

Azzam also raised money through the sale of violent video recordings, filmed by jihadists, of battle scenes and the executions of Russian prisoners in Chechnya, formerly part of the Soviet Union.

Ahmad and Ahsan are accused of providing, directly or through the Azzam network, military equipment, communications equipment, lodging, training, safe houses, transportation, false identity documents and other supplies to terrorists and their recruits.

The Azzam network previously was a subject of a federal terror trial in New Haven in 2008, in a case that resulted in the conviction of Hassan Abu-jihaad, a Californian and convert to Islam. While serving as a signalman in the U.S. Navy, Abu-jihaad transmitted to Azzam the anticipated movements of U.S. warships as they moved through the 21-mile-wide Strait of Hormuz in 2001.

Abu-jihaad, drawn to Azzam through its bloody battlefield videos, was convicted of providing material support to terrorists and disclosing national defense information. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

A government terror expert who testified against Abu-jihaad said that Azzam was the premier jihadist site on the Internet while it operated.

"The reason the website was so credible was that it had real access," said Evan Kohlmann, a terror consultant who has worked with the U.S. government. "It wasn't just reprocessing material that it had gotten elsewhere. It was generating original jihadist content and it was incredibly powerful material."

Ahmad and Ahsan, computer engineers in London before their arrests, are accused of working on the Azzam network from about 1997 until authorities closed it in 2004. Before that, Ahmad fought with Islamist forces in Bosnia.

Tens of thousands of Britons joined their fight against extradition to the U.S. The men and their supporters believe that the two should be tried in the United Kingdom because that is where they are accused of committing offenses.

Copyright © 2013, The Hartford Courant

Wichita Eagle : Billboard sparks debate, shows 9/11 feelings still raw

Billboard sparks debate, shows 9/11 feelings still raw

By James Rosen | McClatchy Washington Bureau | December 5, 2013

WASHINGTON — If there’s such a thing as an old-fashioned billboard going viral, it’s happened to a poster ad showing a U.S. soldier and a Muslim woman embracing.

After weeks of slowing traffic on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, the billboard is now up in downtown Chicago, where cars honk and passersby stop to stare.

But there will be no similar sensation in New York City.

Clear Channel, citing “community standards” at a site not far from the Ground Zero memorial to the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, refused to let the photo run on its billboard at Times Square. An ad agency could not find other billboard owners willing to display the controversial image near the spot where the illuminated ball slowly drops every New Year’s Eve to a throng at Broadway and Seventh Avenue.

The place where most people have seen the billboard is online. With widely divergent responses ranging from praise for its diversity to derisive and, at times, disturbing anti-Islam slurs, the striking photo has sparked thousands of digital postings, tweets, comments, Facebook entries and other expressions in the Internet universe.

The billboard, which advertises an anti-snoring device made by a California company, shows a soldier in an Army camouflage uniform with an American flag patch on his right shoulder and a black beret on his head. His left arm is draped around the shoulders of a woman wearing a black niqab headdress that reveals only her eyes. Her left hand is on his chest, a wedding band on her ring finger.

Next to the couple is the product name SnoreStop, with the slogan, “Keeping you together,” beneath. The Twitter hashtag #betogether floats alongside the soldier’s beret in the billboard’s left corner.

William Andres, an Iraq war veteran who now lives in Clinton, Ill., believes that the billboard’s message is important, and he reached out to the company to applaud its efforts

“It brings to life some of the issues Muslims face here in America,” Andres told McClatchy. “A lot of people associate Muslims with terrorists. They have the wrong idea.”

McClatchy e-mailed, tweeted or called a dozen people who’d criticized the billboard, some of them in overtly racist terms, but none responded.

A typical negative comment, posted on the company’s website at snorestop.com, reads: “If you were the LAST company on F––– EARTH , I would not buy from you. I hope a Muslim cuts your head off.”

A positive comment reads: “I am a lesbian, been with my partner for 33 years now, and it is so nice to see an ad with diversity, and making it OK. Thank you so much!!!”

Ibrahim Hooper, national communications director for the American-Muslim Council, an Islamic civil rights group in Washington, said the billboard has evoked a fascinating mix of reactions in his religious and ethnic community.

“Those who support it see it as a Muslim soldier and his wife and say, `What could be wrong with that?'“ Hooper said. “Those who are critical view it as an exploitation of the shock value of seeing this juxtaposition of a soldier and a Muslim woman. We’re choosing to take the most positive interpretation of the ad.”

Christian de Rivel, marketing director for SnoreStop, based in Camarillo, Calif., northwest of Los Angeles, came up with the idea for the billboard.

“We want to show that we are embracing diversity,” he said. “We wanted something unique. This is the ultimate diversity.”

Boston : Lawmakers: Declassify documents detailing foreign support for 9/11 hijackers

Lawmakers: Declassify documents detailing foreign support for 9/11 hijackers

By Bryan Bender, Globe Staff | December 3, 2013

WASHINGTON — Representative Stephen F. Lynch introduced a resolution Monday urging President Obama to make public 28 pages from a congressional investigation of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that remain secret.

Lynch said he believes it will shed new light on the worst terrorist assault in US history. The South Boston Democrat, along with Representative Walter B. Jones, a Republican from North Carolina, recently reviewed the findings, which were almost entirely blacked out when the panel issued its final report in December 2002.

“These pages contain information that is vital to a full understanding of the events and circumstances surrounding this tragedy,” the South Boston Democrat said in a statement Tuesday.

The withheld pages have long been a source of controversy and have fueled conspiracy theories that the US government covered up certain aspects of the plot to fly hijacked civilian airliners into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania, killing nearly 3,000 people.

The final report of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees — called the Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 2001 — did give some indication of what was contained.

The introduction stated the investigation uncovered “information suggesting specific sources of foreign support for some of the September 11 hijackers while they were in the United States.”

Many specialists have suggested that those sources of support for the Al Qaeda terrorists, most of whom were from Saudi Arabia, could have come from their home governments. But all the details were withheld on national security grounds.

Eleanor Hill, who served as the staff director of the inquiry and is now a Washington-based attorney, recalled Tuesday that the findings, gleaned through a combination of interviews at the time with FBI and CIA officials and a review of agency files, were alarming.

“It was disturbing,” she said. “Even back then I personally felt they could have released more of it. Somebody needs to look at it again.”

The Blaze : CIA Turned Gitmo Prisoners Into Double Agents After 9/11

CIA Turned Gitmo Prisoners Into Double Agents After 9/11

Associated Press | November 26, 2013

WASHINGTON (AP) — In the early years after 9/11, the CIA turned some Guantanamo Bay prisoners into double agents then sent them home to help the U.S. kill terrorists, current and former U.S. officials said.

The CIA promised the prisoners freedom, safety for their families and millions of dollars from the agency’s secret accounts.

It was a risky gamble. Officials knew there was a chance that some prisoners might quickly spurn their deal and kill Americans.

For the CIA, that was an acceptable risk in a dangerous business. For the American public, which was never told, the program was one of the many secret trade-offs the government made on its behalf. At the same time the government used the risk of terrorism to justify imprisoning people indefinitely, it was releasing dangerous people from prison to work for the CIA.

The program was carried out in a secret facility built a few hundred yards from the administrative offices of the prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The eight small cottages were hidden behind a ridge covered in thick scrub and cactus.

The program and the handful of men who passed through these cottages had various official CIA code names.

But those who were aware of the cluster of cottages knew it best by its sobriquet: Penny Lane.

It was a nod to the classic Beatles song and a riff on the CIA’s other secret facility at Guantanamo Bay, a prison known as Strawberry Fields.

Nearly a dozen current and former U.S officials described aspects of the program to The Associated Press. All spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the secret program publicly by name, even though it ended in about 2006.

Some of the men who passed through Penny Lane helped the CIA find and kill many top al-Qaida operatives, current and former U.S. officials said. Others stopped providing useful information and the CIA lost touch with them.

When prisoners began streaming into Guantanamo Bay in January 2002, the CIA recognized it as an unprecedented opportunity to identify sources. That year, 632 detainees arrived at the detention center. The following year 117 more arrived.

“Of course that would be an objective,” said Emile Nakhleh, a former top CIA analyst who spent time in 2002 assessing detainees but who did not discuss Penny Lane. “It’s the job of intelligence to recruit sources.”

By early 2003, Penny Lane was open for business.

Candidates were ushered from the confines of prison to Penny Lane’s relative hominess, officials said. The cottages had private kitchens, showers and televisions. Each had a small patio.

Some prisoners asked for and received pornography. One official said the biggest luxury in each cottage was the bed – not a military-issued cot but a real bed with a mattress.

The cottages were designed to feel more like hotel rooms than prison cells, and some CIA officials jokingly referred to them collectively as the Marriott.

Current and former officials said dozens of prisoners were evaluated but only a handful, from a variety of countries, were turned into spies who signed agreements to work for the CIA.

CIA spokesman Dean Boyd declined to comment.

The U.S. government says it has confirmed that about 16 percent of former Guantanamo Bay detainees rejoined the fight against America. Officials suspect but have not confirmed that 12 percent more rejoined.

It’s not clear whether the men from Penny Lane are included in those figures. But because only a small number of people went through the program, it would not likely change the figures significantly either way. None of the officials interviewed by the AP knew of an instance in which any double agent killed Americans.

Though the number of double agents recruited through Penny Lane was small, the program was significant enough to draw keen attention from President George W. Bush, one former official said. Bush personally interviewed a junior CIA case officer who had just returned home from Afghanistan, where the agency typically met with the agents.

President Barack Obama took an interest the program for a different reason. Shortly after taking office in 2009, he ordered a review of the former detainees working as double agents because they were providing information used in Predator drone strikes, one of the officials said.

Infiltrating al-Qaida has been one of the CIA’s most sought-after but difficult goals, something that other foreign intelligence services have only occasionally accomplished. Candidates for Penny Lane needed legitimate terrorist connections. To be valuable to the CIA, the men had to be able to reconnect with al-Qaida.

From the Bush administration descriptions of Guantanamo Bay prisoners at the time, the CIA would have seemingly had a large pool to draw from. Vice President Dick Cheney called the prisoners “the worst of a very bad lot.” Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said they were “among the most dangerous, best trained, vicious killers on the face of the Earth.”

In reality, many were held on flimsy evidence and were of little use to the CIA.

While the agency looked for viable candidates, those with no terrorism ties sat in limbo. It would take years before the majority of detainees were set free, having never been charged. Of the 779 people who were taken to Guantanamo Bay, more than three-fourths have been released, mostly during the Bush administration.

Many others remain at Guantanamo Bay, having been cleared for release by the military but with no hope for freedom in sight.

“I do see the irony on the surface of letting some really very bad guys go,” said David Remes, an American lawyer who has represented about a dozen Yemeni detainees at Guantanamo.

But Remes, who was not aware of Penny Lane, said he understands its attraction.

“The men we were sending back as agents were thought to be able to provide value to us,” he said.

Prisoners agreed to cooperate for a variety of reasons, officials said. Some received assurances that the U.S. would resettle their families. Another thought al-Qaida had perverted Islam and believed it was his duty as a Muslim to help the CIA destroy it. One detainee agreed to cooperate after the CIA insinuated it would harm his children, a former official said, similar to the threats interrogators had made to admitted 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

All were promised money. Exactly how much each was paid remains unclear. But altogether, the government paid millions of dollars for their services, officials said. The money came from a secret CIA account, codenamed Pledge, that’s used to pay informants, officials said.

The arrangement led to strategic discussions inside the CIA: If the agency’s drones had a shot at Osama bin Laden or his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, would officials take the shot if it meant killing a double agent on the American payroll?

It never came to that.

The biggest fear, former officials involved with the program recalled, was that a former detainee would attack Americans then publicly announce that he had been on the CIA payroll.

Al-Qaida suspected the CIA would attempt a program like this and its operatives have been very suspicious of former Guantanamo Bay detainees, intelligence officials and experts said.

In one case, a former official recalled, al-Qaida came close to discovering one of the double agents in its midst.

The U.S. government had such high hopes for Penny Lane that one former intelligence official recalled discussions about whether to secretly release a pair of Pakistani men into the United States on student or business visas. The hope was that they would connect with al-Qaida and lead authorities to members of a U.S. cell.

Another former senior intelligence official said that never happened.

Officials said the program ended in 2006, as the flow of detainees to Guantanamo Bay slowed to a trickle. The last prisoner arrived there in 2008.

Penny Lane still stands and can be seen in satellite photos. A dirt road winds its way to a clearing. The special detachment of Marines that once provided security is gone. The complex is surrounded by two fences and hidden among the trees and shrubs of Guantanamo Bay.

It has long been abandoned.

—-

Associated Press writer Ben Fox in San Juan, Puerto Rico, contributed to this report.

Boston Globe : Troves of files on JFK assassination remain secret

Troves of files on JFK assassination remain secret

By Bryan Bender | Globe Staff | November 25, 2013

WASHINGTON — There were the Pentagon’s top-secret reviews of Lee Harvey Oswald, the former US Marine — before and after the assassination. The files about the CIA operative who monitored the alleged assassin and whose knowledge of him was purposely hidden from congressional investigators. The sworn testimony of dozens of intelligence officials and organized crime figures dating back nearly four decades. And the government personnel files of multiple figures officially designated as relevant to the investigation.

The documents, which could amount to tens of thousands of pages, are just some of the collections that government archivists acknowledge have still not been released a half-century after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

As the nation marks the anniversary of JFK’s murder, there is a new push, including lawsuits filed under the Freedom of Information Act, to shake loose these and other classified materials that may shed light on one of the most unsettled debates of modern history: Was the murder of the nation’s 35th president the work of a lone assassin or a conspiracy, and did elements of the US government know about it, or cover it up, or knowingly destroy evidence to prevent other dirty laundry from being aired?

“A lot of questions remain,” said John R. Tunheim, a federal judge in Minnesota who chaired the Assassination Records Review Board, which oversaw the review and disclosure of some five million records related to the JFK assassination in the 1990s. “We only put a few pieces of the puzzle together. Lots of the jigsaw is missing.”

The National Archives and Records Administration, which is tasked with working with the agencies that originally generated the files, reports that some 1,100 distinct documents that Tunheim and his team did not have access to remain shielded from public view.

The so-called 1992 JFK Records Act, the law that established Tunheim’s records review board, stipulated that all the files have to be released by October 2017 unless the president of the United States grants permission to keep them secret — something many researchers fear could happen if there isn’t more public pressure.

“There is no mechanism to implement the JFK Records Act,” said Jefferson Morley, a former Washington Post reporter and author who is suing the CIA to release more documents. The National Archives, he said, “has little leverage with the CIA to release stuff.”

Morley and others advocate an additional step that could help dislodge the remaining JFK assassination materials: allow any former government officials with direct knowledge of the secret records to discuss them publicly without the threat of jail.

“We need to make sure disclosure is legal,” Morley told a conference of JFK assassination researchers at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh last month. “That should be part of the agenda going forward.”

Just like the competing theories of who was responsible for JFK’s assassination — whether pro-communist or anti-communist Cubans; members of the American Mafia; elements of US intelligence; or some murky amalgam of all three — assassination researchers disagree on which of the withheld files could prove most illuminating.

Some believe it is the files on US attempts to launch a coup in Cuba with the help of Castro’s internal opponents in late 1963. Others say it is the files on leading Mafia figures who were previously hired by the CIA to kill Castro but never testified before congressional investigations because they were slain just before they were about to appear.

But there are several categories of files that they agree offer the prospect of bringing into better focus a plot that most Americans believe involved more than Oswald acting alone. Just as importantly, researchers say, the files could clear some individuals or agencies that have been suspected of involvement.

Among them are the repeated references to a pair of security reviews that were conducted by the Navy on Oswald, a former Marine who defected to Russia before returning to the United States.

The information is considered by researchers to be critical to understanding what the military discovered about Oswald before and immediately after the assassination.

In the 1990s the Assassination Records Review Board interviewed former military investigators who said they were involved in investigating Oswald. One former official reported that among the findings were that “Oswald was incapable of committing the assassination alone,” according to the board’s final report, issued in 1998 when the congressionally mandated panel expired.

Tunheim said he thought he had been making progress in getting the information. Indeed, the Navy at the time told the board that it had located more than 1,000 cubic feet of documents that might be relevant — including, according to a memo drafted by the review board staff, a box of files that “has to do with defections, both Cuban and Soviet; they plan on turning this box over ‘in toto.’ ”

Soon after, however, the Navy officer tasked with responding to the review board’s requests was removed from her position, and Tunheim confirmed in an interview that his group ultimately received nothing.

A spokesman for the Office of Naval Intelligence told the Globe that the agency does not keep records that old but said he would make additional inquiries. Repeated follow-up calls were not returned.

Yet it is the CIA that remains the major focus of most disclosure efforts by journalists, scholars, and other researchers.

“Most sealed records belong to the CIA,” said Miriam Kleinman, a spokeswoman for the National Archives and Records Administration.

One category of records that researchers are anxious to see are the files related to George Joannides, a CIA officer who came to public light when he served as the agency’s liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978, which concluded the president’s death was likely the result of a conspiracy.

But what the CIA didn’t tell the oversight panel was that Joannides had been monitoring Oswald when was living in New Orleans prior to the assassination and was involved with a series of Cuban exile groups with ties to the CIA as well as leftist organizations sympathetic to Castro.

“It really was an example of treachery,” Tunheim said in a recent interview of the CIA’s handling of the Joannides affair. “If [the CIA] fooled us on that, they may have fooled us on other things.”

He called on the agency to make public everything it knows about the Joannides, who is now dead.

“I think they should release them now because they clearly have become relevant to the assassination,” Tunheim said.

The CIA maintains that it has provided all relevant documents to the Archives.

“CIA has followed the provisions of the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act, and the National Archives has all of the agency’s documents and files on the Kennedy assassination,” said CIA spokesman Todd D. Ebitz. “The classified information contained in the files remains subject to the declassification provisions of the act.”

Other withheld records, according to the National Archives, are from the files of several congressional inquiries of the assassination, beginning with a small number of documents from the original Warren Commission investigation that fingered Oswald as the sole suspect.

More are from the so-called Church Committee that investigated CIA abuses in 1975 and in the process stumbled upon several JFK-related revelations, including that the CIA hired the Mafia to assist in his war against Cuban leader Fidel Castro and that the president was sharing the same girlfriend as a leading Mafia figure involved in those plots.

Rex Bradford, who runs the Mary Ferrell Foundation in Ipswich and has digitized more than one million records related to the JFK case, has identified numerous depositions before the Church Committee that are referenced in the panel’s final report but have yet to be made public.

They include the testimony on secret plots to assassinate Castro from CIA officers; Kennedy’s national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy; and the head of the CIA, John McCone.

Also withheld are the panel’s interviews with CIA officials about “JM/WAVE,” the code name for the secret CIA station overseeing covert operations in Cuba that was located on the campus of the University of Miami.

Other still-secret files were compiled in the late 1970s by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which concluded there was a conspiracy to kill JFK.

“The [withheld] collection includes records from Church Committee and House Select Committee on Assassination — there are records from both series that are withheld either in part or in full,” the National Archives’ Kleinman said in response to Globe queries.

Longtime researchers of the Kennedy assassination assert that the fact that the files remain secret doesn’t mean the government wants to protect those who might have been responsible for the assassination.

“There are plenty of documented reasons that agencies like the CIA, FBI, and Naval Intelligence would cover up material from investigators or other agencies,” said Lamar Waldron, author of several books on the Kennedy assassination. “Some crucial information . . . was covered up for reasons of national security. Other times agencies were hiding intelligence failures that could have embarrassed their organization or even cost some officials their careers. On other occasions, officials were hiding unauthorized operations.”

Still, Waldron and many other researchers believe that what is left to be learned just might shed new light on a case that has been picked apart like virtually no other.

“This is not a fishing expedition,” Morley said. “These are records that we know exist. There isn’t going to be a big smoking gun. But there might be a small one.”

Mark Lane, author of “Rush to Judgment,” one of the first books to question the official narrative that Oswald was the lone assassin, also believes there still could be useful information hidden in government vaults.

“The government says, ‘Oswald did it and did it alone. But we can’t show you everything for national security,’ ” offers Lane. “Which one of those statements is true?”

Bryan Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com.

Boston Herald : Cohen: Military hub works to prevent the next 9/11

Cohen: Military hub works to prevent the next 9/11

Rachelle Cohen | November 25, 2013

COLORADO SPRINGS — “A great wrong was perpetrated in our homeland. We will never forget.”

The words are inscribed on the walls where no one reporting for duty here can miss them. They drive everything that is done here at the joint headquarters of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and the U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM).

NORTHCOM was born out of 9/11 — out of the government’s failure to “connect the dots,” a failure that allowed a terrorist attack on American soil.

Today it is the mission of NORTHCOM and its commander, Gen. Charles J. Jacoby Jr., to day in, day out, 24/7 connect the dots — bringing together the resources of the Pentagon, Homeland Security and working with civilian authorities in every community that calls on them for help.

“We’re stuck with the reality that we can be touched in the homeland,” Jacoby told a group of journalists and security experts in a visit arranged by the Heritage Foundation.

Then the briefing room grows dark and the screen fills with an all-too-familiar image — that of two explosions at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. The moment is as real for this general and his operations staff 2,000 miles away as it was for those of us who lived through it that day.

“You couldn’t have had a better [local] response,” Jacoby assures.

But when the “incident” showed up on NORTHCOM’s systems — one of about a thousand such “incidents” that get their attention each year — Jacoby’s team went to work.

The initial reports of as many as seven possible bombs in the area set off a chain reaction of checks with both military and civilian partners. Was there any further activity on the air or the ground? Was this part of something larger? Was the homeland once again under attack?

Ruling that out was what they did here.

“Ten years ago we didn’t have that capacity,” he adds, and 10 years ago Boston’s own response teams would not have been bolstered by a decade of Homeland Security grants and training.

Sure this time it was homegrown terrorists — or at least adopted ones. But what about the next time?

“I’m often asked what keeps me up at night,” Jacoby said, “In the end what keeps me up at night is being late.

“I want to know about that threat before the finish line at the Boston Marathon.”

And so, ahead of next April’s Marathon, NORTHCOM is likely to play a supporting role. It does, after all, have the resources to keep watch on no-fly lists, and along with the FBI check networks of known terrorists. And if a surveillance drone or two would help, why NORTHCOM could do that too — if asked.

“Our job is to get left of the boom on this one,” he adds, using a military expression for prevention and for disrupting insurgents before they can do their dirty work.

And NORTHCOM does this all while helping interdict drugs, provide relief during natural disasters — fires, hurricanes, floods — and keeping the skies safe.

Oh and keeping an eye on some particularly bad actors like, say, North Korea, recently upgraded from a “theoretical threat” to a “practical threat” in the minds and operations of our military.

And right now all that is being done in an era of sequestration-mandated budget cuts.

It’s a blending of what Jacoby called the “home game and the away game.” Because that’s what it takes now.

So here in the shadow of Cheyenne Mountain a twisted girder from the World Trade Center rises from a Pentagon-shaped planter anchored in soil from a Shanksville, Pa., field. It provides a reminder — as if one were needed — that constant vigilance is the price we pay for our freedom. There’s no longer room for error.

Rachelle Cohen is editor of the editorial pages.