Comment by maybelsyrup | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maybelsyrup | Hacker News Reader

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Never forget: the CIA, at the highest levels, knew that two of the 9/11 hijackers had multiple-entry visas to the US and were living in the country in the year before the attacks. They knew they were al-Qaeda, and they knew they were important enough to have been at a big AQ powwow in Kuala Lumpur in 2000.

CIA management prevented this information from being disseminated by FBI agents posted inside "Alec Station", the CIA's Bin Laden group, several times, and they later lied about doing so. All this according to, among other extremely mainstream sources (in addition to the documentary record), Richard Clarke, who would know -- he was the Federal "Terrorism Czar" on 9/11 and has been fuming pissed about this since he found [1][2]. You don't need to be a whack job, a conspiracist, to be angry and mystified by this.

In many instances like this one, cursory investigation into claims of intelligence community "mistakes" or "incompetence" in these matters gives the lie to claims that these institutions somehow "dropped the ball" or "got it wrong" on 9/11, and are thus not to blame (either partly or fully) for the attacks. It's impossible to square such claims with a lot of the official paper trail. One can reasonably conclude that some of this stuff was not accidental. We hire these people to lie - why should we ever assume they're not?

(The best part? Many of the people involved in the events I describe were promoted in the years post-9/11!)

[1] https://abcnews.go.com/International/28-pages-questions-alle...

[2] https://www.doubleasteriskmedia.com/rich-blee-podcast

Bill Binney (Tech Director/NSA) wasn't promoted. He quit just after 9/11 after He leaked that we had all of the intel to discover and piece together 9/11 in our systems, but the administration was prioritizing bulk collecting data over actually analyzing it.

> In September 2002, he, along with J. Kirk Wiebe and Edward Loomis, asked the U.S. Defense Department Inspector General (DoD IG) to investigate the NSA for allegedly wasting "millions and millions of dollars" on Trailblazer, a system intended to analyze mass collection of data carried on communications networks such as the Internet. Binney had been one of the inventors of an alternative system, ThinThread, which was shelved when Trailblazer was chosen instead. Binney has also been publicly critical of the NSA for spying on U.S. citizens, saying of its expanded surveillance after the September 11, 2001 attacks that "it's better than anything that the KGB, the Stasi, or the Gestapo and SS ever had"[11] as well as noting Trailblazer's ineffectiveness and unjustified high cost compared to the far less intrusive ThinThread.[12] He was furious that the NSA hadn't uncovered the 9/11 plot and stated that intercepts it had collected but not analyzed likely would have garnered timely attention with his leaner more focused system.[9]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_(intelligence_o...

Here's a really good interview with him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3owk7vEEOvs

Thanks for posting this. Binney is really an unknown who deserves more recognition than we could probably give him -- at least as much as Snowden, if not more.

I'm slightly more inclined to believe that the NSA's pre-9/11 behavior was actually "negligence" (as opposed to something else) than the CIA's, but it's still terrifying that these people missed what they missed. I've been pulled over by the cops on less than the hijackers had during their many, many months in the US.

You're welcome. I'd highly recommend watching the interview I posted, as well as any interview you can find with him or Thomas Drake, who Binney mentions. Both of their handlings have been cited by Snowden as one of the main reasons why he leaked his info to the press vs "officially" going up the chain of command. I wouldn't want to be taking a shower in my house and have them pull the curtain open with a gun pointed to my head, either.

I'm with you on being outraged, but organizational dysfunction is the norm and not reigning it in is one way of "dropping the ball".

There wasn't, like, one single person who had all this information and he was personally stopped by the head of the CIA from telling the executive branch. It was a SNAFU of competing interests and stupid bureaucracy.

The fact that these people were promoted afterwards, however.. yeah, my blood boils.

> It was a SNAFU of competing interests and stupid bureaucracy.

I hear where you're coming from, but after 20 years, there are several parts of the story for which I can no longer believe this was the case, or use this explanation to give the benefit of the doubt. (There are many other parts for which it does make sense.) I'll save myself looking like an internet crank and just suggest you give the podcast I linked to in [2] above an earnest listen. If you do, you may, like me, wonder from how high up the order came to personally stop the FBI man in question, Mark Rossini, from telling his superiors at the Bureau. It's at least George Tenet's former assistant, sent down to run Alec in '99.

I'm not sure what "all this information" refers to - no one knows exactly how much the institutions in question knew beforehand - but it's there in Chapter 6 of the 9/11 Commission Report (albeit buried in a footnote) that 40-50 people at Langley knew enough to stop the resulting plot had they wanted to, that senior CIA employees prevented the FBI from knowing about 2 Al Qaeda terrorists coming to and living in the US, and that specific upper management (whose names are now publicly known) told lower-level personnel that the FBI had been told when it's known that they hadn't. This is corroborated by serious, non-crank public servants who were there in the room when this stuff went down.

The result, for me, is that my default position on issues of war, terror, and other bloodshed has moved from "organizational dysfunction is the norm" to "I may never truly know, but these people are likely acting maliciously (to some degree) and/or lying about it (to some degree)". It's like, these people have jobs, and they do stuff. They're serious people, like many of us on HN, and they're competent a lot of the time. To the extent that we even know their track record, they have a track record: Iran, Chile, Guatemala, Congo, Iran again (Stuxnet), etc., etc.

So it's reversed the Sagan standard for me, in other words: if "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence", the idea that the professionals to whom we give vast sums to be excellent at lying, cheating, stealing, killing, and betrayal - spies, in other words - should be given a sort of "Mister Magoo" benefit of the doubt when lots of people die -- that's, for me these days, the more extraordinary claim.

> the idea that the professionals to whom we give vast sums to be excellent at lying, cheating, stealing, killing, and betrayal - spies, in other words - should be given a sort of "Mister Magoo" benefit of the doubt when lots of people die -- that's, for me these days, the more extraordinary claim.

That's where we differ. They're Mr. Magoo with money in my opinion. How many brilliant exploits have they ever had? Even their wins are, like, "we sponsored some death squads who killed the opposition and eventually the anti-communist guy won due to having overwhelming resources".

The CIA is called 'the company' in DC and it's apparently a super-corporate environment. I've worked in corporate. It's stupid. A big part of the stupid is the local ideology, which is a multiplier effect on the general 'none of us is as dumb as all of us' effect, and I could probably go a long ways with you critiquing the CIA's default and unspoken ideology. But I still think 'organizational stupid' is such an absolute..

Yeah, a lot of this comes down to your epistemic position. Agree to disagree then. Thanks for sharing your perspective!

Cheers!

I guess most people think that they are doing the right thing. But organisational politics and human weakness can just mangle that into something that is actively counte productive. Do you think that is the case here? Or is there a deeper psychological force at work in people that pushed them towards this? Given the craziness of some of the neocon foreign policy types this certainly seems possible.

And perhaps most disquieting, the rectification for the SNAFUs was to consolidate these organizations, breaking down the walls that traditionally separated domestic policing from international espionage.

And I can't even say they were wrong. I don't have better answers. The threat model is a porous-border threat.

There were numerous grounds for investigation beforehand. Example, had we not been so careful not to offend, Atta's attempt to get a $650k loan to make a crop duster might have aroused wider suspiction. When denied the loan ..

>He asked me what would prevent him from going behind my desk and cutting my throat, and making off with the millions of dollars of cash in that safe. And, I told him that, well I kind of laughed. I mean I didn't laugh at him. But I chuckled a little bit about it.

https://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=130304&page=1

Also good read: https://www.abcactionnews.com/news/local-news/i-team-investi...

Atta rapping about being an assassin.

> CIA management prevented this information from being disseminated by FBI agents

This was at least partly due to the Freeh / Reno policy of limiting info sharing between the agencies.

I mean, yes and no.

In the article I linked to, Clarke cites that information sharing in the IC was widespread, and you see in other sources that the idea of warring bureaucratic fiefdoms was in some cases very true (Freeh / Reno being great examples, as you say) and in other cases not true whatsoever. To me this means that it's tougher to generalize from a trend to any one case.

The Midhar and Hamzi visa and known entry into the US stuff doesn't look at all like simple tit-for-tat or institutional possessiveness, mainly because the FBI agents posted to the CIA precisely to "phone home" about AQ and Bin Laden had been doing so regularly for 18 months and had yet to be overruled on something they were going to share with the FBI. So why was that specific piece of info ordered not shared and then lied about?

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