Sandy Bergerterrific point.
NSA '97-'01. ATC board of directors. Civitas. Stonebridge International.
Hides classified documents under construction trailers?
The blogs are all over the partisan angle. I would venture to say this goes beyond the age old Dems vs. Repubs dispute.
Friday, December 22, 2006
the Sandy Berger shenanigans
* Noise on the Sandy Berger shenanigans:
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3 comments:
Stonebridge International sure sounds a lot like the Cohen Group.
I've read lots of speculation about Berger's actions. Two of the more incredible assertions are that he simply wanted the material to prepare for his testimony. Right. The other was the concern that his actions might prevent the 9/11 Commission from "getting to bottom of things." Uh huh.
He apparently swiped some COPIES of documents, returning some and cutting some into pieces. Several news stories suggest that no original documents were lost. Is this true? Who knows.
So WTF was he doing? If he took some documents related to the Millenium Plot after action report, what was so important about that information? Again, who knows. One thing of note is that Berger as NSA would be in position to possibly know more than CIA Director George Tenet since the NSA is supposedly not subject to turf battles. A key meeting was the Al Qaeda terrorist summit in Malaysia January 5-8, 2000. Two of the supposed hijackers attended that meeting...Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar. In Joe and Susan Trento's latest book Unsafe At Any Altititude they suggest that these two men may have been GID agents. What I realized recently is that Paul Thompson (in his timeline) had linked a Trento article from 2003 with this information. Trento's source is an unidentified former CIA official who also claims that Bin Laden once worked for Saudi intelligence.
Here is the paragragh from Trento's '03 article:
(Written 8/6/03) There was another problem: Two of the hijackers—part of the team that flew a plane into the Pentagon—had very visible connections to Saudi intelligence and the CIA. Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar were well known to the CIA and FBI. The claim that an FBI informant in San Diego who knew the men and assisted them but never mentioned any of this to his FBI handlers has another, darker explanation. A former CIA officer who worked in Saudi Arabia described what he says happened: "We had been unable to penetrate al-Qaeda. The Saudi's claimed that they had done it successfully. Both al-Hazimi and al-Mihdhar were Saudi agents. We thought they had been screened. It turned out the man responsible for recruiting them had been loyal to Osama bin Laden. The truth is bin Laden himself was a Saudi agent at one time. He successfully penetrated Saudi intelligence and created his own operation inside. The CIA relied on the Saudis vetting their own agents. It was a huge mistake. The reason the FBI was not given any information about either man is because they were Saudi assets operating with CIA knowledge in the United States." (1)
Or perhaps they were Al Qaeda operatives. After 9/11 the failure of US intel to explain how these two men were not apprehended was a big problem. I would guess Sandy Berger was worried about this as well.
This page on Paul Thompson's timeline is all events surrounding the Malaysian summit (1)
What is shows is that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was at the meeting. He was wanted by US intelligence for involvement in the Bojinka plot with Ramzi Yousef. Also at the meeting were Fahad Al-Quso and Tawfiq bin Attash...both later involved in the Cole attack (October 2000).
Three men implicated in terror attacks yet US intelligence fails to track the other two men (al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar) at the very same meeting? Yes, these are the same two men who lived in San Diego with an FBI informant AND reserved and purchased tickets on Flight 77 using their real names. Not only that but nobody in US intel bothered to give their names to the FAA.
Inexcusable? Yes.
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