Leopold's New Scoop

Is just like his old scoop, which came from the kitty litter box. This is getting highlighted over at 9-11 Flogger:

For many Americans, the emotional reaction to President Barack Obama's announcement last month that a Navy Seal team had killed Osama bin Laden during a raid at his compound in Pakistan was celebratory. But for others, like the mysterious Iron Man, who has spent his career lurking in the shadows, the death of the late al-Qaeda leader is a painful reminder of what could have been avoided had the government heeded numerous early warnings of an impending attack against the very targets terrorists struck on 9/11.

Yes, the usual, "if they'd only listened to me," crap. Get the early warning:

For example, Iron Man states in his letter that in the summer of 2000, DO5 briefed USJFCOM senior intelligence officials and staffers, including the deputy commander in chief, on the "WMD Threat to the U.S."

Iron Man describes a "sensitive," "oral briefing" that took place that summer "indicating that the World Trade Centers #1 and #2 were the most likely buildings to be attacked [by al-Qaeda], followed closely by the Pentagon. The briefer indicated that the worst case scenario would be one tower collapsed onto another."

Wow, talk about prescient! Somebody actually predicted that al Qaeda would topple one building into another! It's a miraculous bit of intelligence.

Well, except for one little thing. It's the exact plot that Ramsi Yousef attempted in 1993 with his bomb in the parking garage.

Furthermore, as he states in his letter, Iron Man was certain that such a scenario was part of a "red cell analysis" discussion that took place prior to the intelligence briefing and included a finding that the buildings "could be struck by a jetliner." He wrote that there was a suggestion about alerting WTC security and engineering or architectural staff, "but the idea was not further explored because of a command climate discouraging contact with the civilian community."

The part about struck by a jetliner is indeed interesting and would actually be prescient. But Leopold does not include that portion of the letter, and of course, this is somewhat like Able Danger; a claim made after the fact with no evidence other than the claim that, "Iron Man was certain." Oh, and that bit about warning the WTC security and engineering or architectural staff is priceless. What were they supposed to do, mount anti-aircraft guns on the sides of the buildings?

Given Leopold's history--he notoriously claimed that Karl Rove had been indicted for perjury in the Valerie Plame case, which never happened--he doesn't get the benefit of the doubt.

As usual, the real hilarity is in the comments:

The real story of what happened on 9-11 will be revealed. Right after they tell us what happened at Pearl Harbor in 1943 and what happened in Dallas in 1963.

Embarrassing indeed but there are about 10 comments in reply to that thread before somebody notices that 1943 is the wrong year for Pearl Harbor. My favorite is this guy:

I can tell you what happened in Dallas. and I was not even born until 2 weeks after it happened.

Egged on, he elaborates:

Four teams of shooters. Oswald Brading Fratiano and Roselli who fired the fatal shots. Oswald was a willing participant but did not know he was being set up. Reasons he was chosen as the patsy was the Russian wife and little known fact Oswald was working for JFK under Hoover closing down the anti-Castro training camps in the Gulf region of the US. Each team had a timer and supervisor whose responsibility was to pick up the weapons and casings. They threw Oswalds rifle behind the boxes on the sixth floor and his fate was sealed. E Howard Hunt and GW Bush were the planners along with G Ford who planned the route. Failed BOP invasion codename Zapata same as HWs offshore oil co. Ruby was small time mafia as was most of the Dallas PD thats why Brading was able to fire from the Dal Tex building w/o fear of prosecution. Several of the operatives were arrested and released. Motives for JFKs murder were numerous. Exec orders abolishing the FED the firing of Allan Dulles for carrying out the failed Bay of Pigs invasion against his orders. The fact JFK would not sign on to Northwoods and JFK refused to be controlled by the Jesuits and the Vatican. Now take that info and research for yourself our collective intelligence will thank you when youve caught up. Or drink the koolaid.

And:

Great...

.....but
.
you left out the Israeli Mossad Connection. All the underworld guys you mentioned even the dallas police and prosecutors office worked for the Syndicate, i.e Meyer Lansky, the capo of capo's, little Big Man, the dude who told everyone in US organized crime what to do. Why the Israeli connection? Because (1) the CIA and the Mossad have been coonected at the hip since their respective births following WWII. Here the OSS used organized crime in europe and the US to support wartime operations. That brought the OSS into contact with Lansky who brought them into contact with the Jewish underwold in Europe which would later form the foundations of Mossad.

Marvin Bush, Dubya's brother worked for the security company that guarded the World Trade Center.

And for many weeks, before 9/11, massive "construction" was performed on these buildings, with armed guards stationed to keep curious people out.

Sarshar's Incredible Expanding Story

Sibel Edmonds gives us what Behrooz Sarshar supposedly told to the 9-11 Commission. Taken at face value it's a pretty explosive story:

1. Reasonably specific warnings of the terrorist attacks of 9-11, including mention of specific US cities:

‘According to my guys, Bin Laden’s group is planning a massive terrorist attack in the United States. The order has been issued. They are targeting major cities, big metropolitan cities; they think four or five cities; New York City, Chicago, Washington DC, and San Francisco; possibly Los Angeles or Las Vegas. They will use airplanes to carry out the attacks. They said that some of the individuals involved in carrying this out are already in the United States. They are here in the U.S.; living among us, and I believe some in US government already know about all of this (I assumed he meant the CIA or the White House).’

2. Mention of tall buildings possibly as targets:

‘I’ve been thinking about this; trying to make more sense out of it myself. The source mumbled something about tall buildings. Maybe they will blow up the plane over some tall buildings; I don’t know.

3. That the attack was imminent (as of the Spring of 2001):

‘No specific dates; not any that they were aware of. However, they said the general timeframe was characterized as ‘very soon.’ They think within the next two or three months.’

There's just one little problem with the above; Sarshar has already discussed much of what he had to say with the Chicago Tribune way back in 2004 (around the time of his testimony) and none of those allegations appeared in that story.

Specific US cities? Nope:

According to the law enforcement official, "there was talk about terrorists and planes," but no mention of when or where the attacks might take place.

It was the FBI agents' impression, the official said, that the target of the attacks could be "possibly here, but more probably overseas." The Asset also reported having heard a rumor that a plane would be hijacked to Afghanistan, the official said.

The FBI's translator, a former Iranian police colonel named Behrooz Sarshar, does not recall any mention of a hijacking to Afghanistan. But Sarshar, then a career FBI employee assigned to the translation section of the bureau's Washington field office, does remember the Asset saying the attacks might take place in the U.S. or Europe, and also that the terrorist-pilots were "under training."

Note that the current article does not mention Europe at all as a possible target; Texas sharpshooter fallacy, anybody? The 2004 article does not mention tall buildings at all, although obviously this would have been a spectacular revelation. And the specific time frame mentioned in the current article? The Tribune piece is quite adamant about that:

According to the law enforcement official, "there was talk about terrorists and planes," but no mention of when or where the attacks might take place.

Note as well the dramatic point in the piece on Sibel's site:

Now the informant had our full attention; the agents seemed very alarmed, since their main unit of operation was under the WFO Counterterrorism division. They asked the guy to stop, asked him to repeat that again, and ordered me to take verbatim notes as I translated.

But that's not what Sarshar himself reported in 2004

According to Sarshar, the two FBI agents who interviewed the Asset were not visibly surprised by his report. It was his impression, Sarshar said, that the agents weren't sure whether to believe their informant, and that even the Asset wasn't convinced his information was true.

Note as well that in the current article, Sarshar names the two FBI agents who were with him as "Tony and John". But in one of the few unredacted portions of Sarshar's interview:

He couldn't remember the name of one of the agents.

I would love to see Sarshar's testimony unredacted; based on what we already know there is no real good reason for keeping it secret. But I'm guessing that it bears little resemblance to the account at Sibel Edmonds' site.

Coleen Rowley Makes Some Sense

In this interview at Antiwar.com. I've slammed her a few times for failing to articulate clearly that she doesn't believe that the government allowed the 9-11 attacks to happen, but here at least it is clear that what she is talking about is how some incompetence (particularly at the CIA) resulted in the attacks not being stopped.

And there I find it hard to disagree with her. She points out that the Moussaoui case was brought to DCI George Tenet's attention in August of 2001, in a Power Point presentation entitled "Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly". She makes the interesting point that it was not Moussaoui's laptop computer that contained the information that would have linked him back to KSM and Ramzi Bin-al-Shibh; rather items in his personal possession.

I suspect her case on the preventable nature of 9-11 is weaker than she claims; even if they had traced Moussaoui back to KSM, would that have revealed the hijacking teams? I don't know, but certainly it would have resulted in a lot of attention being given to Muslims learning to fly in the US.

We spend a lot of time here debunking the 9-11 Truthers for their fantasies of controlled demolition and the missile at the Pentagon. So I was disappointed that Coleen showed up at a 9-11 Truth conference to lend them some of her credibility. But after listening to this interview, my sense is that Rowley's no kook. She's clearly very much anti-war, but that's not a kook position, even if it's not my position.

Olbermann Buys Into Warnings Conspiracy Theory

The worst political commentator in the world on the supposed warnings that Bush received:

Olbermann then ran through a list of pre-9/11 warnings of potential al Qaeda hijackings, noting, "A president's daily brief as far back as December 1998 said bin Laden was 'preparing to hijack US aircraft in hopes of trading hostages for jailed radicals.' ... The August 6, 2001 brief, of course, told President Bush -- if he read it -- that there were 'patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings.'"

Olbermann did not mention either the use of airplanes as weapons by the Japanese kamikaze suicide pilots during World War II or the abortive al Qaeda plot of the 1990's known as Project Bojinka, which would have involved both blowing up airliners and crashing a plane into CIA headquarters in Virginia and which may have been the inspiration for 9/11.

Hmmmm, if there was a 1998 PDB on hijackings, didn't that come during the Clinton Administration? And given that Operation Bojinka was uncovered in 1995, shouldn't the Clinton people have required the airlines to reinforce the cockpit doors? Aren't they to blame?

And the answer is no, not any more than the Bush Administration is to blame. Hindsight is 20/20. It is easy to see the warnings that should have been heeded, after the fact. Richard Clarke (no Bush apologist) pointed out in his book Against All Enemies that the counter-terrorism unit receives information about thousands of threats in a year. Obviously only a tiny percentage turn out to be real.

If you're searching for someone to blame for 9-11, start with guys like KSM, Mohamed Atta, Ramzi Bin-al-Shibh, Osama Bin Laden.

Debunking the Warnings

Richard Miniter points out that the recent Scripps poll simply reveals that 62% of the American public are wrong about the specificity of the warnings received:

Richard Clarke, the hard-driving “counter-terrorism czar,” testified before the 9-11 commission about pre-September 11 intelligence. He said that the number of “al Qaeda threats and other terrorist threats was in the tens of thousands—probably hundreds of thousands.” But none of it contained specific information that could be used to stop the 9-11 plot. Clarke is even more emphatic in his book, Against All Enemies: “Had we had any chance of stopping it, had we the knowledge we needed to prevent that day, those of us sitting as members of CSG [Counterterrorism Security Group] would literally have given our lives to do so; many of those around the CSG table had already put their lives at risk for their country.”

What was lacking was “actionable intelligence.” To prevent the 9-11 attacks (or any terrorist attack), intelligence officials need to know the target, timing, and type of attack, what counterterrorism researcher Kevin Michael Derksen calls “the three T’s of tactical intelligence.” Without knowing all three elements—when, where, and how—an attack cannot be stopped. If you knew that al Qaeda was going to attack the World Trade Center on September 11, but assumed a truck bomb attack, you would be inspecting cars while the planes crashed overhead.

Jon Gold steps boldly into the comments section with Patty Casazza's claim that some whistleblower she met along the side of the road in Maryland told her that the government knew the exact date, the method and the targets; what a shame she neglected to mention this "evidence" in 9-11 Press for Truth.

Terrific article by Miniter; lame comments by the Troofers.

Warnings: Operation Bojinka

In keeping with my new determination to debunk the "real" 9-11 Truthers, not these strawmen inside-job kooks, I will be taking a closer look at some of the "warnings" the US government supposedly had prior to 9-11.

Operation Bojinka was a plot hatched by Ramzi Yousef (who had executed the WTC bombing in 1993) and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (who plotted the 9-11 attacks). The plan was for Yousef and others to board the first leg of two-leg flights to the United States, getting off at the first stop and leaving behind bombs that would destroy the planes over the Pacific.

Reportedly a second phase of the plot would involve renting a light aircraft, loading it with explosives, and crashing it deliberately into CIA headquarters in Langley, VA. Others have claimed this later plot included plane crashes into the WTC, Sears Tower, and the Library Tower in Los Angeles.

However, the man who reportedly extracted this second phase of the plot from a Yousef associate, Chief Superintendent Avelino Razon of the Philippines' police, indicates otherwise is this September 14, 2001 article:

"When we interrogated Murad, he mentioned that he was a skilled pilot, trained in the US, in Afghanistan and also here in the Philippines, who was recruited to undertake a suicide mission," Razon said.

"He was committed to ... fly a plane and ram it into some targets," Razon said, adding that information from a laptop computer seized from Murad indicated one target was CIA headquarters. "There was mention of about a dozen" trained pilots to be recruited for such attacks.

"I didn't imagine that they would ram a 757 aircraft into the World Trade Center. I thought the suicide mission [would involve] a Cessna light aircraft loaded with several kilos of explosives, like a Japanese Kamikaze World War II pilot diving into a target," he said.

The Bojinka plot was foiled when Yousef's apartment was searched by police in the Philippines responding to a fire.

Grading:

Specificity: Operation Bojinka is hard to rate on specificity. The main part of the plan, which was ready to go operational, involved blowing up airliners, not hijacking them. On the other hand, supposedly a planned later phase involved crashing a plane into CIA headquarters, but not an airliner but a small plane loaded with explosives. However, it was a plot planned by many of the people involved with 9-11. I'm going to give it 20 of 40 possible points.

Timeliness: Another tough one to gauge. Some have argued that earlier warnings are actually more timely than warnings close to the actual event, on the basis that larger, institutional level changes could have been made. The problem with this is that it becomes more difficult to figure out who should have made the changes. Is this a warning that the Clinton Administration ignored? Should the Bush Administration have taken it up upon gaining office? I'm going to give it 10 points for timeliness.

Credibility: Not much doubt that this actual plot occurred; Yousef was sentenced to 240 years for his part. Clearly this plot receives the full 40 points for credibility.

Overall, this warning grades out at 70. Note that this number doesn't mean it's a "Low C"; the purpose of the numeric scale is to compare the relative significance of 9-11 warnings. Until we've analyzed a number of warnings, the numeric grades mean little.

Rating Scale for Warnings of 9-11

I am going to try to come up with a rating scale to use as a measuring stick against which we can place the various claims of warnings about 9-11. I would also invite your comments and suggestions for other elements that might be considered relevant to an analysis of which claims are credible and worthy of further investigations, and which seem to be just the usual nonsense.

The way I see it, for a warning to be considered extremely relevant to 9-11, it has to score well in all of the following categories:

1. It has to be specific. A warning that "a terrorist attack is coming" is less specific than warnings of airplane hijackings, is less specific than warnings of aircraft hijackings with the planes then aimed at US landmarks.
2. It has to be timely. A warning in 1998 is less timely than one in March of 2001, is less timely than one in early September of that year.
3. It has to come from credible sources. Note that this applies both to the media outlet for the story and the actual sources that media outlook used to get the story. Raw Story is less credible than The New Republic is less credible than the New York Times. And for sources, an unnamed source is less credible than a former member of the Kazahkstan intelligence service is less credible than the British Prime Minister. The gold standard of credibility for warnings should be considered acknowledgment by the US government.

I'm sure I'll get a lot of flak about that last part, but the reason why the government's acknowledgment is the gold standard is simple: It's an admission against interest. I think we'd all agree (even the CTers) that the government has a vested interest in denying or minimizing any prior warnings, so if they 'fess up about some, those have to be considered very credible.

I'm thinking of a 100-point scale, with 40 possible points for 1 & 3, and 20 possible points for #2. Since there will probably be no warnings that score a perfect 100, we'll be generous and say that 50 is the minimum threshold for giving some credence to the warning.

Thoughts/comments?