Iraq, Al Qaeda & 9/11: The Connection that Wasn’t

Robbyn Swan

In the early hours of March 19, 2003, a pair of F-117 fighters launched the first salvos of Operation Iraqi Freedom, their satellite guided missiles exploding into Dora Farm, one of Saddam Hussein’s private compounds. Over the coming days, much of the news-channel addicted world sat transfixed as waves of American Tomahawk missiles thundered into Baghdad. Polls suggested that, for many of the Americans viewing those events, Iraq’s role in the September 11 attacks made it an enemy deserving retribution.

Ten years on the events of 2003 have been marked by a flurry of articles justifiably revisiting the issue of whether or not the Bush administration lied – or was simply mistaken -   about Saddam’s WMD capability. These reports have missed the first falsehood that Bush and his people conjured up to justify war against Iraq – their attempt to link Saddam to the 9/11 attacks which they did from almost the night of September 11. In the context of those frightening days, that linkage was an emotive, powerful force in making war on Iraq acceptable to the American people and the U.S. Congress. The pursuit of that lie led to the forgery of incriminating evidence and became an element in the torture of U.S. detainees.

In the eighteen months before the war the Bush administration persistently seeded the notion that there was an Iraqi connection to 9/11. While never alleging a direct Iraqi role, President Bush repeatedly linked Hussein’s name to that of bin Laden.

In his address to the nation of October 7, 2002, for example, Bush said: “We know that Iraq and al Qaeda  have had high-level  contacts  that go back a decade. . . . After September 11, Saddam Hussein’s regime gleefully celebrated the terrorist attacks on America.” The President mentioned 9/11 eight times at his press conference just before the invasion of Iraq.

“The White House played endless semantic games on the issue,” The New York Times’ Philip Shenon later wrote.  “When pressed, Bush was careful not to allege that Iraq had any role in the 9/11 attacks, at least no direct role. But he insisted that if Saddam Hussein had remained in power, he…would have been tempted  to hand over [weapons of mass destruction]  to his supposed ally Osama bin Laden. Vice President Cheney went further…suggesting repeatedly, almost obsessively, that Iraq may in fact have been involved in the September 11 plot.”

Polls from the time reveal how effective the PR campaign was. One found that 57 percent of Americans believed Hussein had helped the 9/11 terrorists, another that 44 percent thought that “most” or “some” of the hijackers had been Iraqi. (In fact, none were.) Another, six months into the war, revealed that 69 percent of Americans believed Saddam Hussein had been personally involved in 9/11.

In his first address to the nation after the September 11 attacks, George W. Bush had hinted at what was to come.  “Evil, despicable acts of terror,” the President  had said, “have filled us with disbelief, terrible sadness, and a quiet, unyielding anger.” In a line the he himself scripted, Bush emphasized that the U.S. would henceforth make “no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbour them.”

Afterward, Bush met with key officials, the group he was to call his “war council.” The words “al Qaeda” and “Osama bin Laden” had been on everyone’s lips for hours. Amid the talk of reprisals and push-back, CIA director George Tenet stressed the link between al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Then, according to counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld came out with the comment.  “You know,” he said, “we’ve got to do Iraq.”

“Everyone looked at him…like, ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ ” Clarke was to recall. “And I made the point certainly that night…that Iraq had nothing  to do with 9/11.

“That didn’t seem to faze Rumsfeld…It shouldn’t have come as a surprise. It really didn’t, because from the first weeks of the administration they were talking about Iraq.”

On the evening of September 12th, Clarke recalled, Bush quietly took him aside to say, “Look . . . I want you, as soon as you can, to go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this. See if he’s linked in any way…Just look. I want to know any shred.”

“Absolutely, we will look . . .” Clarke responded.  “But, you know, we have looked several times for state sponsorship of al Qaeda and not  found  any real linkages to Iraq.”

“Look into Iraq, Saddam,” the President reiterated, and walked away.

In the days following the attack, a report linking Mohammed Atta to Iraqi intelligence made headlines. An informant had reported to Czech intelligence that photographs of lead hijacker Atta resembled a man he had seen meeting with an Iraqi diplomat  and suspected  spy, Ahmad al-Ani,  in Prague on April 9, 2001. Investigation indicated that neither Atta nor al-Ani had been in Prague  at the time alleged. Atta was recorded  on closed-circuit  TV  footage in Florida on April 4, and his cell phone was used in the state on the 6th, 9th, 10th, and 11th. Atta and fellow hijacker Marwan al-Shehhi, moreover, apparently signed a lease on an apartment on the 11th. This information, while not certain proof, strongly suggests that Atta was in the United States on date in question. CIA analysts characterized the alleged Prague sighting as “highly unlikely.”

“Unlikely” or not, the report crept into pre-war intelligence briefings as having been a “known contact” between al Qaeda and Iraq.

A second allegation, propagated by Laurie  Mylroie,  a scholar associated with the conservative American Enterprise Institute,  proposed that Ramzi Yousef – the terrorist responsible for the 1993 WorldTradeCenter  bombing – had been an Iraqi agent using a stolen  identity.  Investigation by the FBI and others indicates that the theory is unsupported by hard evidence. Nevertheless, the claim proved durable.

None of the leads suggesting an Iraqi link to the attacks proved out.  “We went back ten years,” said former CIA bin Laden unit chief Michael Scheuer, who looked into the matter at the request of Director Tenet. “We examined about 20,000 documents, probably something along the  line of 75,000 pages of information, and there was no connection between [al Qaeda] and Saddam.”

A January 2003 report entitled “Iraqi Support for Terrorism,” was the last in-depth analysis the CIA produced prior to the beginning of hostilities.  “The intelligence community,” it concluded, “has no credible information that Baghdad had foreknowledge of the 11 September  attacks…”

Nevertheless, on the weekend before the U.S. launched its attack on Iraq, Vice President Cheney appeared on “Meet the Press” to make a final pitch about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. “We know,” Cheney said, “he has a long standing relationship with various terrorist groups, including the al Qaeda organization.”

*          *            *

After exhaustive trawls of the record, official probes concluded that senior Bush administration officials applied inordinate pressure to try to establish that there was an Iraqi connection to 9/11, and that American torture of al Qaeda prisoners was a result of such pressure.  CIA  analysts noted  that  “questions  regarding  al Qaeda’s ties to the Iraqi regime were among the first presented  to senior operational  planner  Khalid Sheikh Mohammed  following his capture.” KSM, whose case  is currently before a military tribunal at Guantanamo, was one of those most persistently subjected to torture.

The  CIA’s Charles  Duelfer,  who was in charge of interrogations of Iraqi officials after the invasion, recalled being “asked if enhanced measures, such as waterboarding, should be used” on a detainee who might have knowledge of links between the Hussein regime and al Qaeda.

The  notion  was turned  down.  Duelfer  noted,  however,  that  it had originated “in Washington at very senior levels (not in the CIA).”  Two U.S. intelligence  officers, meanwhile,  have said flatly that the suggestion came from Vice President  Cheney’s office.

“There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent and why extreme methods  were used,” a former senior intelligence official said in 2009. “The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack [after 9/11]. But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney  and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between  al Qaeda  and Iraq….”

A former U.S. Army psychiatrist, Major Paul Burney, told military investigators  that  interrogators at Guantánamo were under “pressure to resort to measures that might produce” evidence of ties between al Qaeda  and Iraq.

In the absence of real evidence, according  to Pulitzer Prize winning author Ron Suskind’s 2008 book, The Way of the World, it was in one instance  fabricated.  Suskind has reported  that in fall 2003 – when the U.S. administration was struggling to justify the invasion of Iraq – the White  House asked the CIA to collaborate  in the forgery of a document  stating that hijacker leader Atta had spent time training in Iraq.

The forgery took the form of a purported memo to Saddam Hussein from the former head of the Iraqi intelligence service, Tahir Habbusch al-Tikriti, dated  two months  before  9/11.  Signed by Habbusch, the memo stated  that  Atta had spent  time  in Iraq learning “to lead the team which will be responsible  for attacking  the targets that we have agreed to destroy.”

The  story of fakery provoked vigorous  denials from the CIA. Rebuttals  included  a carefully phrased  statement  from Suskind’s  primary  source,  a former  head of the  CIA’s  Near  East  Division named Rob Richer – to  which Suskind responded  by publishing a transcript  of one of his interviews with Richer.

In contrast to Suskind’s allegation, CIA analyst Nada Bakos wrote in the March edition of Wired magazine, the Agency itself vigorously examined the Habbusch letter and concluded that it was a forgery. “Our Branch Chief, Karen, walked into Cheney’s office with everything we’d uncovered…It seemed airtight. These were forgeries.” Bakos recalled. “I wasn’t there, but I heard the vice president was gracious and thanked her.”

Another former CIA officer, Philip Giraldi, meanwhile, placed responsibility  for  the  fabrication  on  the  Pentagon’s  Office  of Special Plans, and said it had been done at the instigation  of Vice President  Cheney.  According to Giraldi, the Pentagon, unlike the CIA, had “no restrictions on it regarding  the  production of false information to mislead the  public” and had “its own false documents  center.”

If it happened, the forgery was the most flagrant attempt to blame 9/11  on Iraq.

In 2008, the Senate Intelligence Committee produced its “Report on Whether Public Statements  Regarding Iraq by U.S. Government Officials Were Substantiated by Intelligence  Information.” “It’s my belief that the Bush administration was fixated on Iraq and used the 9/11 attacks by al Qaeda as justification for overthrowing Saddam  Hussein,” said its chairman, John D. Rockefeller.  “To accomplish  this, top  administration officials made repeated statements  that falsely linked Iraq and al Qaeda as a single threat and insinuated that Iraq played a role in 9/11. Sadly, the Bush administration led the nation into war under false pretences.

In the ten years since the invasion of Iraq, reputable estimates indicate, almost 5,000 coalition servicemen and women have died. That number is dwarfed by the almost 150, 000 Iraqis – more than 80% of them civilians – who have also lost their lives. They died as the result of an attack on a nation that many Americans had been falsely led to believe bore some if not all of the responsibility for the attacks of September  11.

As former Bush speechwriter David Frum wrote in an article for the Daily Beast on March 18, “mobilizing Congress and the American people” to go to war against Iraq, “required a considerable messaging effort.” That messaging effort began with a spurious linkage to 9/11.

A 9/11 Update

October 4, 2012

The eleventh anniversary of the September 11 attacks passed with very little comment. There are still many questions that need to be answered, about the event itself and its aftermath. Former 9/11 Commission staff member Miles Kara is one of those who is still working quietly – on an almost daily basis – to ensure that the historical record is as complete and accurate as is possible. He has today posted a thought-provoking piece on how the nation responded while under attack that day, and how that response was spun by both officialdom and members of the 9/11 Truth community. Definitely worth a read.

The Pulitzer…and Those Lingering Questions About 9/11

April 19, 2012

Welcome news for us this week. Our 9/11 book, The Eleventh Day, is one of three finalists for this year’s Pulitzer Prize in History. The committee cites our “painstaking look at the catastrophic attacks and the nagging questions that have swirled around it.”

 Foremost, for us, of those remaining questions is: Was there foreign support for the 9/11 hijackers?

 That subject was blurred in the 9/11 Commission Report and hidden from the public by President Bush’s censorship of a key 28-page section of Congress’ earlier Joint Inquiry. We continue to pursue indications that elements of one Middle Eastern regime may have given the terrorists real assistance – a Saudi Arabia.

In The Eleventh Day, we raised some of the questions surrounding a San Diego-based Saudi named Omar al-Bayoumi. Bayoumi assisted future hijackers Nawaf al Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar in early 2000, within days of their arrival in the United States.  Bayoumi claimed to investigators that he became involved with the terrorists only because he heard them speaking Arabic in a Los Angeles-area restaurant. But did they really meet by chance? The Los Angeles Times has reported that the men began conversing after Bayoumi – like someone in a bad spy novel – dropped a newspaper on the floor and bent to retrieve it.

 The Bayoumi episode is shot through with oddities. The witness who said that, before the supposedly chance meeting, Bayoumi said he was on his way “to pick  up visitors”; the phone records that indicate frequent contact between Bayoumi and a Saudi diplomat – said to have arranged for the two future hijackers to take a car tour of the city; other phone records showing that the pair used Bayoumi’s cell phone for weeks; information indicating that Bayoumi’s salary – paid by a subsidiary of a contractor for the Saudi Civil Aviation Authority – was approved by the father of a man whose photo was found in a raid on a terrorist safe house in Afghanistan; a mark in Bayoumi’s passport that investigators associated with possible al Qaeda affiliation.   

 Omar al-Bayoumi left theUnited Statestwo months before the 9/11 attacks. He stuck to his “chance encounter” claim when, in 2003 and 2004, 9/11 Commission staff were allowed to interview him in Saudi Arabia – under the watchful eye of Saudi interior ministry officials. Commission memos show that staff who questioned Bayoumi and others linked to him – also under Saudi supervision – emerged from the interrogation sessions filled with suspicion. Fahad al-Thumairy, the Saudi diplomat in Los Angeles with whom Bayoumi was in touch, was thought to have been “deceptive in both interviews.” Osama Basnan, a close Bayoumi associate who at one point lived across the street from the two al Qaeda operatives, was held to have shown an “utter lack of credibility.”

 As recently reported in the Daily Beast, former Sen. Bob Graham has described California as “ground zero in terms of the connections between the terrorists and the Saudi government.”

 Though Graham was generous with his help while we were researching our book, it was clear that there were areas that he could not discuss freely. One appeared to concern a man named Dr Abdusattar Shaikh, in whose San Diego home both the first two terrorists to arrive lived after their early encounter with Bayoumi. Shaikh is not mentioned at all in published parts of either of the official reports on 9/11, and is identified in an internal Commission memo only as Dr. Xxxxxxxxxxx Xxxxxx. Keeping him unidentified was deemed important, it seems, because – astonishingly – Shaikh had all along been an FBI informant.

 In recent months we have further pursued information at which we could only hint in The Eleventh Day. With our colleague Dan Christensen of the Broward Bulldog, we have reported on it for the London Daily Telegraph and in a series of articles for MSNBC, (here, here, & here) and it further calls into question the behavior of the FBI. These latest developments link the hijackers to a Saudi family based in Sarasota, Florida and to purported al Qaeda operative Adnan Shukrijumah, in the months before the 9/11 attacks.

The FBI has claimed that it investigated these alleged links and passed on its findings to both Congress’ Joint Inquiry and to the 9/11 Commission. Graham, who as a two-time Florida governor has a special interest, maintains that the information never reached either him or his 9/11 Commission counterparts. A search of 9/11 Commission files this past month located no relevant FBI records.

Many more strands go to a putative Saudi connection to 9/11 – some so far flimsy, some highly disquieting. The recollection of a Miami immigration inspector that further supports the notion that the hijackers were in contact with suspect Shukrijumah. She thinks Atta was accompanied by Shukrijumah when he came to her office to discuss a visa problem; the interview with a former CIA officer who says a captured bin Laden aide, himself involved in 9/11, said – naming three princes – that he had official Saudi support; and hard evidence that, the very night before the attacks, a senior Saudi religious official stayed at the same Virginia hotel as Bayoumi’s two hijacker associates. An FBI attempt to interview the official, Saleh al-Hussayen, was cut short when – in the view of a Bureau agent – he “feigned a seizure.”

 We report in The Eleventh Day – naming names – claims that millions in Saudi official money flowed to Osama bin Laden over a period of years before 9/11. During the preceding half-century, oil-richSaudi Arabia had enjoyed a mutually beneficial friendship with theUnited States. What reason, then for powerful Saudis to make contributions that fueled bin Laden’s terrorist feud with America? Is the explanation that Saudi royals, fearing overthrow by bin Laden-inspired extremists, saw help for bin Laden before 9/11 as an insurance tactic, self-preservation. In the West, we call this paying protection money.

The censored 28-page section of Congress’ Joint Inquiry Report is still withheld, in spite of an outcry from senators and a decade-long effort to get it released. Graham, and others who were privy to the suppressed material when it was written have revealed that it concerns Saudi Arabia. President Obama was quoted as having said soon after taking office that he was prepared to have the material released. Even so, it still remains withheld. A National Security Council spokesperson, asked by a colleague of ours last year about the censored pages, came back with a novel response. “I have been asked to convey to you, off the record, that we decline comment.”

 There is a limit, one would like to think, to how long Americans are prepared to wait for their government to come clean about possible foreign involvement in 9/11 –  facts gathered by their elected representatives but withheld from them by order of former President Bush. President Obama should move promptly to release those 28 redacted pages – and to insist that the FBI makes public everything it learned about links between the terrorists and Saudi citizens in California and Florida.

“J. EDGAR”, from Clint Eastwood, and that cross dressing story…

November 8, 2011

During the  publicity campaign for the launch of the new Clint Eastwood movie J. EDGAR, there have been critical references to the account in my biography of J. Edgar Hoover - shortly to be republished. The criticism concerns the allegations I reported that Hoover, apparently a more or less repressed homosexual, also on occasion cross-dressed. I’ll here respond to such criticism. 

    The person principally cited on the cross-dressing is Susan Rosenstiel, a former wife of Lewis Rosenstiel, a millionaire distiller with close links to organized crime – and a longtime Hoover associate who contributed $1,000,000 to the J. Edgar Hoover Foundation. Those who suggest his former wife’s cross-dressing claim is not credible raise the fact that she had pled guilty in 1971 to an attempted perjury charge. I was aware of that, reported it in the original edition of my book Official and Confidential - and explained the circumstances. The charge was brought in connection with a civil suit and – I was told by New York State Legislative Committee on Crime interviewees – was thought by them to be unprecedented and bizarre. Noting that the charge was brought the very week the Committee intended to produce Susan Rosenstiel as a witness to her former husband’s Mafia links, the Committee sources said they believed the charge was instigated by Lewis, in an effort to discredit his former wife and thus obstruct the Committee’s inquiry. Court records showed that Lewis Rosentiel had used similar tactics to obstruct the course of justice in the past.

    During six years’ work on Official and Confidential, which included repeated interviews with Susan Rosenstiel, her account on various areas – including the sex allegation – remained consistent. She signed an affidavit asserting that the information she provided was true. I asked Mrs. Rosenstiel to agree to a television interview and to grant me exclusivity for a matter of years, and paid her a fee in that connection. I emphasize, however, that the matter of a fee came only after she had given me her lengthy initial interview, which was therefore not tainted by any payment.

    New York Judge Edward McLaughlin, former Chief Counsel of the Crime Committee, and Committee investigator William Gallinaro, told me Mrs Rosentiel had been an excellent witness. “I thought her absolutely truthful,” Judge McLauglin said. That too, was in my Hoover biography, and more – but was not quoted by any of those who assailed the passage on Susan Rosentiel in the book. Almost none of them noted, moreover, that a similar account of alleged cross-dressing came to me from two other interviewees, referring to a different location and a different timeframe. On the basis of all of this, and after discussion with my publishers, we included her account – which was broader than the cross-dressing allegation – in the book.

    I would note, finally, that the cross-dressing allegation is one passage in a biography of some 600 pages. The overall reporting on his sexuality is pertinent to any study of the man, not least in the context of his insistence on the ruthless pursuit of homosexuals. It is one element in the evidence of Director Hoover’s overall abuse of Americans’ rights and freedoms.

                                                                                                                                                    A.S.

Afghanistan: Back When It All Began

  October 11, 2011                                               

Retired U.S. Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who commanded coalition forces in 2009-10 in Afghanistan, caused a stir last week with his suggestion that the U.S. is only just past the 50% mark in terms of achieving its goals – particularly that of  “creating a legitimate government that the Afghan people believe in, and therefore providing a counterweight to the Taliban.” “I think that’s going to be a hard last percentage to close,” McChrystal added.

Speaking almost ten years to the day since the conflict began, McChrystal charged that the U.S. had gone into that conflict with a “very superficial understanding of the situation and history,” didn’t speak the language or adequately grasp either the number of “forces at play” or the “players”. To the catalogue of early mistakes McChrystal added the burden of having opened a second front in Iraq, which not only stretched resources but fundamentally “changed the Muslim world’s view of America’s effort… much of the Muslim world now questioned what we were doing…”

Really to understand where the general is coming from, it may be useful to turn back the calendar to the closing months of 2001, when the seeds of the  current U.S. predicament were sown.

                                                   *

           

The way America would react to the Al Qaeda assault on 9/11 had been immediately clear. Evident within forty-five minutes of the first strike on the World Trade Center, when Bush spoke to the nation from the schoolroom in Florida promising to “hunt down and to find those folks who committed this act.” Evident two hours later at an Air Force base in Louisiana, away from the microphones, when he told aides, “We’re gonna get the bastards.” By the end of September, when he addressed a joint session of Congress,  Bush was referring to the coming fight as the “war on terror”.

            The vast majority of the American people agreed that there had to be severe retribution. At a memorial service on September 14^th, with four U.S. presidents in the congregation, the National Cathedral had reverberated to the roar of almost a thousand people singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”: “He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword…the watch fires of a hundred circling camps…the trumpet that shall never call retreat…Let us die to make men free…”

The September 11 onslaught had been judged an act of war, and the response was to be war. Bush made clear from the start that bin Laden and his followers would not be the only targets. In his address to the nation on the night of the attacks, the President had said the U.S. would “make no distinction between those who planned these acts and those who harbor them.” Within an hour of the television appearance, he was discussing what that would mean with the group he was to call his “war council” – Cheney, Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Powell, CIA Director Tenet, Condoleeza Rice, Richard Clarke, FBI Director Robert Mueller, Attorney General John Ashcroft, and key generals.

The talk in the Situation Room at the White House was uncompromising. The Taliban were soon to propose trying bin Laden in Afghanistan or handing him over for trial in another Muslim country, but America would turn a deaf ear. “We’re not only going to strike the rattlesnake,” Bush said at this time, “We’re going to strike the rancher.”

The administration never even considered negotiating with the Taliban, Condoleezza Rice said later. Washington was eventually to issue a formal ultimatum – promptly rejected – demanding that Afghanistan hand over the Saudi exile or “share in his fate.”

The weekend following the attacks, after the frenzy of the first fraught days, Bush flew his war council to the calm of the presidential retreat at Camp David.  CIA Director Tenet and his Counterterrorism chief Cofer Black briefed Bush’s team on the Agency’s plan for “Destroying International Terrorism.” They described what they called the “Initial Hook,” an operation designed to trap Al Qaida inside Afghanistan and destroy it.

The objective was to be achieved by a numerically small CIA paramilitary component and U.S. Special Forces, working with Afghan forces that had long been fighting the Taliban. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Shelton, outlined the crucial bomb and missile strikes that would precede and support the operation. “When we’re through with them,” Black had assured Bush, the Al Qaeda terrorists would “have flies walking across their eyeballs.”

On September 20, the CIA’s Cofer Black gathered the team that was to spearhead the covert operation in Afghanistan. He dispensed with any notion of taking the terrorist leader alive. “Gentlemen, I want to give you your marching orders and I want to make them very clear. I have discussed this with the President, and he is in full agreement…I don’t want bin Laden and his thugs captured. I want them dead. Alive and in prison here in the United States, they’ll become a symbol, a rallying point…They must be killed. I want to see photos of their heads on pikes. I want bin Laden’s head shipped back in a box filled with dry ice. I want to be able to show bin Laden’s head to the President. I promised him I would do that.”

In the field, three men led the operations that targeted bin Laden, two veteran CIA officers, and a Special Forces officer with the unit popularly known as Delta Force. Their teams in the early months numbered only some seventy men, including a dozen Green Berets, Air Force tacticians, communications experts, and a small group of elite British commandos.

“The mission is straightforward,” Black told a colleague back in Washington,” “We locate the enemy wherever they are across the planet. We find them and we kill them.”

The first CIA team was on the ground in Afghanistan just two weeks after 9/11, armed with not only their weapons but three million dollars in $100 bills. The cash, lugged around in duffel bags, was used mostly to grease the palms of anti-Taliban warlords. For a mission that targeted the Taliban as much as bin Laden, buying their loyalty was essential. Brilliant American management of the warlords and their forces, combined with devastating use of airpower, would defeat and decimate the Taliban soldiers – though they were often valiant fighters – in little more than two months.

Getting Osama bin Laden was to prove another matter altogether.

In a letter to Taliban leader Mullah Omar written just before the American attack began, bin Laden forecast that the coming U.S. campaign in Afghanistan would cause “great long-term economic burdens”…force America to resort to the former Soviet Union’s only option: withdrawal from Afghanistan…” Two weeks on, with the bombing continuing, the Taliban’s military commander – a longtime bin Laden ally – claimed his soldiers were holding their ground. Bin Laden was “safe and sound…in good spirits.”

The CIA’s team had only poor intelligence on bin Laden’s whereabouts. There were attempts to persuade them that he had left the country soon after 9/11. Other reports put him either in the Afghan capital, Kabul, or at Jalalabad, nearer to the border with Pakistan. Bin Laden and a large group of fighters were seen arriving in Jalalabad in a convoy of white Toyota trucks. American bombs were already falling on the city, and their stay was brief.

Bin Laden apparently spoke of wanting to stay and fight. He was dissuaded. The convoy – some 300 vehicles – left soon afterward. At least one of those in the group said they were on their way “to their base at Tora Bora.”

Tora Bora, which translates as “Black Widow,” lies almost sixteen thousand feet above sea level on Towr Ghar – the “Black Dust” – a series of rocky ridges and peaks, ten precipitous miles from the border of Pakistan’s Tribal Areas. A legend now, it was at the time a media fantasy. By November 27^th a British newspaper was reporting that it was a “purpose-built guerrilla lair…350 yards beneath a solid mountain. There are small rooms and big rooms, and the wall and floor are cemented…It has its own ventilation system and its own power, created by a hydro-electric generator…driven by water from the peaks of the mountains.”

The reality was far more primitive. Bin Laden’s first wife, who had spent time there, remembered a place with no electricity and no running water, where life was hard at the best of times. In the early December of 2001, in the icy Afghan winter, it became a desolate killing ground.

From their base at an abandoned schoolhouse, the pursuing Americans struggled with multiple obstacles. Tora Bora is not one place but a series of natural ramparts and cave complexes, a frustratingly difficult place to attack. Afghan generals, whose troops were key to the mission, were often intransigent, rarely dependable, and partial to negotiating with an Al Qaeda enemy that the Delta Force and CIA commanders wanted only to destroy. The Afghan inhabitants of the mountains were at best uncertain sources of information. The Americans could dole out cash, but these were people who had enjoyed bin Laden’s largesse for years..

            Berntsen, heading the CIA detachment, encountered reluctance when he begged for more U.S. military support. The operation to hunt down bin Laden, the team was told, was “flawed,” too high risk. The reluctance to commit American ground forces was only going to get worse. What the United States did deliver was the bludgeon of pulverizing airpower. Often guided by forward observation teams, waves of bombers flew from bases in the U.S and carriers in the Persian Gulf to bombard the Al Qaeda positions. AC-130 Spectre gunships pounded them by night.

            Decimated but not yet finally broken, bin Laden’s defenders clung on. Intercepts picked up an Al Qaeda commander giving movement orders, ordering up land mines, exhorting his men to “victory or death.”  On the afternoon of December 13^th, Delta Force’s Major Fury and his men listened to a voice they were sure was that of bin Laden. “His Arabic prose sounded beautiful, soothing, and peaceful,” Fury recalled, “I paraphrase him…‘Our prayers have not been answered. Times are dire…Things might have been different…I’m sorry for getting you into this battle. If you can no longer resist, you may surrender with my blessing.’”

            According to the ex-Marine expert at recognizing the Saudi’s voice, bin Laden then gathered his men around him in prayer. There was the sound of mules, used for transport in the high mountains, and people moving around. Then silence.

By the time the bombing and the shooting stopped, Tora Bora was devastated, a wasteland of shattered rocks and broken trees. The detritus of war: spent ammunition, bloody bandages, torn fragments of documents in Arabic script – and not a trace of Osama bin Laden.

            Convinced that their quarry escaped, those who risked their lives to kill him cast bitter blame on those from whom they had taken their orders. The Delta Force operatives, Fury said, had not been allowed to engage in “real war fighting.” Had they been, he thought, things could have turned out differently. Being held back had been like “working in an invisible cage.”

The CIA’s Gary Berntsen had in vain requested a force of eight hundred U.S. troops – to block the “back door”, the mountain escape route to Pakistan. “We need Rangers [special operations combat troops] now!,” he had begged with ever-increasing urgency, “The opportunity to get bin Laden and his men is slipping away!” He had been rebuffed every time.

Why were the troops refused, and who was responsible for the refusal? Military decisions were transmitted by the generals, directly to Berntsen by the officer commanding Joint Special Operations Command, Major General Dell Dailey, who in turn answered to General Tommy Franks, Commander in Chief at U.S. Central Command, the man running the Afghanistan operation.

“We have not said,” Franks remarked at a press briefing just before the fighting at Tora Bora, “that Osama bin Laden is a target of this effort.” It was a strange comment, even taking into account security considerations, given what Fury and Berntsen have said of the explicit orders they had been given. In a 2004 memoir, Franks skirted any discussion of the decision not to use U.S. troops to trap bin Laden. As recently as 2009, the general said he had doubted whether bin Laden was even at Tora Bora. Notwithstanding the certainty expressed by the CIA and Delta Force commanders on the spot, he claimed the intelligence had been “conflicting.”

Delta Force’s Major Fury placed responsibility elsewhere. “The generals,” he said, “were not operating alone. Civilian political figures were also at the control panel….I was not in those air-conditioned rooms with leather chairs when they came up with some of the strangest decisions I have ever encountered…at times, we were micromanaged by higher-ups unknown, even to the point of being ordered to send the exact grid coordinates of our teams back to various folks in Washington.”

The two civilian higher-ups involved with Franks in the decision-making were Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and the man ultimately responsible as Commander-in-Chief, President Bush. Bush, who six days after 9/11 had indicated that he wanted bin Laden “dead or alive”.

The President “never took his eye off the ball when it came to bin Laden,” according to General Franks. Through October and into November, Bush had appeared still keen to “get” bin Laden. In late November, at a CIA briefing, he was told Tora Bora had become the focus, that Afghan forces were inadequate to do the job, that U.S. troops were required. “We’re going to lose our prey if we’re not careful,” the CIA briefer warned. The President seemed surprised. In Afghanistan in early December, shortly before the massive BLU-82 bomb was unleashed on Tora Bora, those heading the fight in the field were told that POTUS – the acronym for the President – had been personally “asking for details.”

According to CIA sources, Bush would reportedly remain “obsessed” with the hunt for bin Laden even months after Tora Bora. In public though, far from talking of getting him dead or alive, he seemed to downgrade his importance. “Terror’s bigger than one person,” the President said in March, 2002, “he’s a person who has been marginalized…I don’t know where he is. Nor, you know, I just don’t spend that much time on him really, to be honest with you…I truly am not that concerned about him.”

The record, perhaps, explains the sea change in the priority given to the hunt for Osama bin Laden. On November 21^st, a couple of weeks before the final battles in the mountains and bin Laden’s disappearance, the President had taken Rumsfeld aside for a conversation that he insisted must remain secret. He wanted a war plan forIraq, and insisted that General Franks get working on it immediately.

Franks, already up to his eyes dealing with the conflict inAfghanistan, could barely believe what he was hearing. “Goddamn!” he exclaimed to a fellow general, “What the fuck are they talking about?” The huge pressure he was under had been ratcheted up another notch. From then on, not least in early December, when there were repeated appeals for U.S. troops to block bin Laden’s escape route, the general was constantly plagued with requests for plans as to how to attack Iraq. At a crucial stage of the Tora Bora episode, Bush’s primary focus had begun to shift – and a shift in the Commander-in-Chief’s focus meant distracting the attention of his overworked general from the fight in Afghanistan.

 

                                                *

 

That’s the bungling with which the saga began.

The 140,000 strong U.S. led coalition combat forces are due to leave Afghanistan in 2014. It looks, however, as though this year may prove to be the costliest yet in terms of civilian lives lost. Some observers, moreover, suggest Afghanistan is again teetering on the brink of all-out civil war. If the U.S. is to meet its goal of presiding over an orderly transition and leaving with the hope of a secure future for ordinary Afghans, the problems of the past must be acknowledged and overcome. The omens, though, are poor.

 

 

 

A New Piece of the 9/11 Jigsaw

                                                                                                                                                                                                            September 20, 2011

An abbreviated version of this post appeared last week on Salon. We take this opportunity to fill in extra detail.

Two sentences in a 9/11 Commission document, previously withheld from the public but released in recent weeks, offer a tantalizing glimpse of a nugget of intelligence that has long been concealed from the public. The sentences read:

            “OnJuly 20, 2001, there was a call between KSM and Binalshibh.

              They used the codewords Teresa and Sally.”

            Those nineteen words, seen now for the first time, indicate that – just seven weeks before the attacks – a Western intelligence service intercepted  a coded phone call between two key 9/11 conspirators. The words now released appear in a three-page memorandum, in a passage describing an exchange between KSM – self-confessed mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed – and Ramzi Binalshibh, his go-between to the terrorists preparing the operation in the States. The pair discussed – improbably – sending “skirts” to “Sally.”

“Skirts,” according to the document, was a reference to money. “Sally,” the designated recipient, was their accomplice Zacarias Moussaoui, the would-be hijacker pilot apprehended before 9/11 for behaving suspiciously at a flying school – and since convicted and sentenced to life in prison. “Teresa,” investigators thought, referred to Ziad Jarrah, who was to pilot a hijacked airliner on 9/11 but who – the conspirators feared for some time – might drop out of the operation.

            It is not the detail of the exchange between the plotters that is striking today, though, so much as the revelation that someone was eavesdropping on it. The two telltale sentences, released to us by the National Archives shortly before publication of our book The Eleventh Day, throw up new questions about the role of Western intelligence agencies in the run-up to the attacks.

            Which intelligence service tapped the call? The agencies most likely to have made the intercept are those of theUnited States or Germany. While KSM was almost certainly in Afghanistanon July 20, Binalshibh is believed to have been in Hamburg.

            If the conversation was intercepted by the Germans, did they share it in timely fashion with their American counterparts? Whichever country’s service made the intercept, was work done promptly to translate it or figure out what it might mean? Was it apparent that the exchange related to terrorism, and if so what was done about it?

            As important, were other contacts between the two men monitored before 9/11?

            The search for answers to those questions means going back as far as 1998, when German federal and regional intelligence services were focusing on Islamic extremist activity. They were interested especially in a Syrian-born citizen named Mohammed Zammar, because he appeared to be facilitating jihadi travel to Afghanistan. Zammar was surveilled, his telephone tapped.

            At the start of 1999, calls on Zammar’s line in turn drew attention to aHamburgarea address that was to become infamous after 9/11, the first floor apartment at 54, Marienstrasse. Those who lived there or frequented it would include hijack leader Mohamed Atta, his companion and fellow future hijack pilot Marwan al-Shehhi, Mounir Motassadeq, who is today serving fifteen years inGermanyfor allegedly helping in the plot – and Ramzi Binalshibh himself.

            The first known call of relevance to the 9/11 plot came when a male caller identified at the time only as “Marwan” phoned Zammar’s number from the United Arab Emirates. Weeks later, a caller looking for Zammar was given the number of the Marienstrasse apartment – and both Atta and Binalshibh were mentioned by their first names. Later in the year, when Zammar phoned Marienstrasse, a transcript shows, he sent his regards to Atta.

            When the content of the “Marwan” call was revealed three years after 9/11, a senior German intelligence source described the information on the call as particularly valuable, and said it had been passed – along with the U.A.E. number from which the call had been made – to the CIA. U.A.E. security officials have said the number could have been traced in five minutes, but insisted the CIA never asked them to do so.

            Then CIA Director George Tenet, for his part, would tell the Senate Intelligence Committee, however, that “We didn’t sit on our hands” on receiving the information. “I’m not going to go through the rest of it in open session,” but “we did some things to go find out some things…Okay?…That’s all I want to say in open session.” Is it possible that one of the things done by the CIA was an attempt to monitor the number from which Shehhi called Germany?

            In Germany, meanwhile, the surveillance had expanded beyond Zammar’s phone. Two of the men who used the Marienstrasse apartment were surveilled and their names were put on a border watch list. If such attention was paid to their activity and movements, was none given to that of the apartment’s other denizens, Atta, Shehhi, and Binalshibh?

            An Islamic affairs specialist with German domestic intelligence inStuttgart, Dr. Herbert Müller, told us that Atta was “going through the focus of our colleagues…He came to their notice.”

            If Atta at some stage came to the Germans’ notice, was Binalshibh also in their sights? Can it be that he and the phone he used were being monitored when the July 2001 phone intercept was made? If so, then the July call – if recognized as a terrorists’ conspiratorial communication – could conceivably have begun a series of steps leading to the core of the plot.

            Whatever suspicions there may have been about Binalshibh, his telephone interlocutor KSM had been a wanted man since as early as 1996, when he had been indicted for his role in a plot to blow up airliners – an early concept of his that foreshadowed 9/11.

In June 2001, the month before the intercepted call with Binalshibh, a CIA cable from the field reported that a “Khaled” was “actively recruiting people to travel…including to theUnited Stateswhere colleagues were reportedly already in the country to meet them, to carry out terrorist-related activities for bin Laden.” Weeks later, just before the intercept that is the focus of this article, “Khaled” was identified as KSM.

            The information in that cable from the field was of course almost precisely accurate. Can it be that the July 20 Binalshibh-KSM intercept now in question was made by the Germans, shared with the CIA – and became part of the skein of intelligence that, Director Tenet has said, made summer 2001 a time when “the system was blinking red”?

            Approached by us for interview either on possible pre-9/11 monitoring of the terrorists or on the relations withU.S.intelligence agencies, German federal officials were unhelpful. “Sadly,” a Bundesnachrichtendienst official responded, “due to considerations of principle, your request cannot be granted.”

            The then and now deputy chief of domestic intelligence inHamburg, Manfred Murck, told in late August that it was not his Hamburg region agency that intercepted the Binalshibh/KSM call. The last contact his service had withU.S.officials relevant to 9/11 individuals and issues, he added, had been two years before the attacks.

            “Some countries,” a 9/11 Commission staff statement stated tartly, “did not support U.S.efforts to collect intelligence information on terrorist cells in their countries…This was especially true of some of the European countries.” The report of Congress’ Joint Inquiry, whose mandate it was to investigate the intelligence community’s pre-9/11 performance, stated that pressure had been brought on “foreign authorities” to target “Zammar and other radicals [REDACTION]…” but that “it became apparent only after September 11, 2001 that the foreign authorities had been watching some of those persons before that date.”

            The former U.S. deputy head of mission in Berlin Michael Polt, however, told the 9/11 Commission that his impression was always that “our level of interaction with counterterrorism and cooperation with the Germans was extremely high and well coordinated…the reason the Germans would want to share those concerns with us [was] because they were expecting from us some information that they could use to go after these people.”

            If the July 2001 intercept of the Binalshibh/KSM call was not made by a German agency, the most likely other service to have either made it or been privy to it isAmerica’s National Security Agency, whose remit includes the collection of telephonic traffic. Whether by eavesdropping on Osama bin Laden’s satellite phone, while he still risked using one, or by picking up calls between al Qaeda associates, the NSA had been listening in where possible on the terrorists for years.

The NSA willingly offered cooperation with the 9/11 Commission. Yet Philip Shenon, in his study of the investigation, reported that Commission staff conducted no thorough review of al Qaeda-related material supplied by the NSA. Though some were eager to delve more deeply, they ran out of time.

            That there were concerns within the NSA about its pre-9/11 performance, however, does surface in the record. Toward the end of her interview with Commission staff, a former NSA chief of counterintelligence said concerned agency staff “thought they might have been guilty of missing ‘warning’ information.” For that reason, she added, the NSA had done “a 9/11 retrospective [REDACTION] to insure they knew everything they had.”

            Approached for this article, the NSA did not respond to a request for comment. A Commission staffer present at the interview with the chief of counterintelligence, Lorry Fenner, said she could throw no further light on the nature of the “retrospective.”

            Miles Kara, an analyst for Congress’ Joint Inquiry, who spent dozens of hours reviewing the NSA Retrospective, told us in early September about what he saw of the agency’s post-9/11 trawl. Kara, himself a former senior intelligence officer, says the retrospective was created at the direction of then Director General Michael Hayden and signed by him. “It was delivered to us in a binder,” Kara recalls, “It was created to put in one place everything the agency knew about the warnings leading up to the attack…It sought no conclusions or inferences, it was simply a compilation of primary source (intercepted traffic) information.”

            Asked specifically whether he remembered reference to a July 20 intercept, Kara could say only that the “the ‘Sally’ and ‘Teresa’ language sounds familiar.” Asked whether the retrospective included intercepts made by agencies other than the NSA, he mentioned that there may have been foreign input. “I was focused on the content more than the originating agency, but I’m fairly confident,” Kara told us, “that I recall GCHQ [British communications intelligence] headers…I don’t specifically recall a German header.”

            “Nothing I’ve dredged up from my memory,” he added, “inclines me to support a real-time understanding [by NSA]. “No real-time understanding,” for those unfamiliar with the language of intelligence, suggests the possibility that the NSA – even if it did have the July 20 intercept of the two key 9/11 plotters – did not realize that it had drilled into the mother lode.

            Almost two months before 9/11, U.S intelligence may have had in its hands the treasure that the intercept represented – and simply not understood what it was.

Bush & Cheney: 9/11 Questions Still Unanswered

The next couple of weeks will be filled with 9/11 remembrances. Best to remind ourselves, though, that ten years after the fact they’re a poor substitute in evidential terms for the contemporary records of the day.  We’ve been giving this a lot of thought, wondering what, if anything, any of the talk will add to our understanding of the day’s events. Two of those notably doing the talking this past week were former President George W. Bush and his Vice President Dick Cheney – Bush in an “intimate” interview for National Geographic, Cheney in his just-released memoir, In My Time.

We blogged about this issue last week for The Daily Beast, before having heard Bush’s much-publicized 9/11 interview for National Geographic.  In our Beast piece we pointed out that neither Bush nor Cheney has ever submitted to questioning alone and under oath on the events of September 11.  Bush and Cheney instead granted a “private interview” to 9/11 Commission members but without recorders or stenographers present.

As a test, we’ve analysed their latest comments on one significant question about their own behaviour as the attacks unfolded – the matter of who authorized the shooting down of civilian airliners.

While the fire and smoke of the attacks was still in the air, top Bush administration officials hurried out statements on who issued that momentous order, and when. First there had been a flat statement  by Deputy  Defense  Secretary Wolfowitz that—had  United  93 not crashed—Air Force pilots had been poised to shoot it down. Next, on the Sunday after 9/11, had come Vice President Cheney’s account, in a Meet the Press interview, of how the shooting down of hijacked airliners had been authorized.  Cheney said the “horrendous decision” had been made—with his wholehearted agreement—by the President himself. There had been moments, he said, when he thought a shoot-down might be necessary

Bush took the decision during  one of their  phone  calls that day, Cheney told Newsweek’s Evan Thomas, “I recommended to the President that  we authorize . . . I said, ‘We’ve got to give the pilots rules of engagement, and I recommend we authorize  them  to shoot.’ We talked about it briefly, and he said, ‘OK, I’ll sign up to that.’ He made the decision.”

Bush himself, speaking with The Washington Post’s  Bob Woodward, said Cheney  had indeed suggested that he issue the order.  His response, as he remembered it in late 2001, had  been  monosyllabic.  Just, “You bet.” Later still, speaking with the 9/11 commissioners,  Bush recalled having discussed the matter in a call made to him by Cheney, and “emphasized”  that  it was he who authorized  the shootdown  of hijacked aircraft.

By the time the President wrote his 2010 memoir,  that call from the Vice President had become a call  he made to Cheney. Bush’s monosyllabic authorization, moreover, had transmogrified into a well thought-out plan.

“I called Dick Cheney as Air Force One climbed rapidly to forty-five thousand  feet . . . ,” the President  wrote. “He had been taken to the underground Presidential Emergency Operations Center—the PEOC—when the Secret Service thought a plane might be coming at the White  House. I told him that I would make decisions from the air and count on him to implement them on the ground.”

“Two big decisions came quickly. The military had dispatched Combat Air Patrols—teams of fighter  aircraft  assigned to intercept unresponsive  airplanes—over  Washington  and  New  York. . . .  We needed to clarify the rules of engagement. I told Dick that our pilots should contact suspicious planes and try to get them to land peace- fully. If that failed, they had my authority to shoot them down.”

Have Bush and Cheney’s most recent utterances shed any new light? In his Nat Geo interview this past week, President Bush gave a truncated account of the event, echoing the notion that it was “a decision” he alone had made, but this time entirely leaving out any mention of Cheney. Cheney, for his part, reiterates in his memoir that the President had “approved my recommendation” that the military be authorized to “fire on a civilian airliner if it had been hijacked and would not divert.” No clarity there.

It would have been unthinkable  for the  U.S.  military to  down a civilian airliner without a clear order from the President,  as commander-in-chief. In his absence, the authority belonged to the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld. “The operational chain of command,” relevant law decreed, ran “from the President  to the Secretary of Defense,” and on through the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to individual commanders.  The Vice President  was not in the chain of command.

That was well understood by U.S. military on September 11. In an earlier exercise, one that postulated a suicide mission involving a jet aimed at Washington, they had said shooting it down would require an “executive” order. The defense secretary’s authority, General Arnold told the Commission, was necessary to shoot down even a “derelict balloon.” Only the President, he thought, had the authority  to shoot down a civilian airliner.

The 9/11 Commission  made no overt statement  as to whether  it be- lieved Cheney’s assertion—that he recommended and Bush decided. Shown the final draft of the Report’s passage on the shoot-down decision, however, Cheney was furious. For all its careful language, the Report  dropped a clear hint that its staff had found Cheney’s account—and Bush’s—less than convincing.

“We  just didn’t  believe it,” general  counsel  Daniel  Marcus  de- clared long afterward. “The official version,” John Farmer would say, “insisted  that  President  Bush had  issued an authorization to  shoot down hijacked commercial flights, and that that order had been pro- cessed through the chain of command and passed to the fighters. This was untrue.”

Why  might a phony  scenario have been created? “The administration version,” Farmer  noted,  “implied, where it did not state explicitly, that  the chain of command  had been functioning on 9/11, and that the critical decisions had been made by the appropriate top officials. . . . None of this captures how things actually unfolded on the day.”

As we said in the Beast, we believe we come close in The Eleventh Day to establishing that shoot-down authorization originated not with Bush but with the Vice President. Nothing that either man has revealed in the past week changes that.

On Nixon’s Sanity…or Otherwise

August 18, 2011

I’ve  been hearing a lot about Nassir Ghaemi’s new book A First Rate Madness. Ghaemi, an academic psychiatrist with a string of prestigious teaching posts to his name.  He’s also the director of the Mood Disorders Clinic at Tufts University Medical Center.  Using the lives of such notable leaders as Lincoln, Churchill and Gandhi, Ghaemi argues that one “should accept, even celebrate” the possibility that our decision-makers have dealt with mental illnesses —  all of which he says foster in those who have them the qualities of “realism, resilience, empathy and creativity.”

It’s an intriguing and counter-intuitive theory – which should rise or fall on the strength of Ghaemi’s grasp of the personalities he’s chosen as his subjects. I cannot claim any special knowledge of Lincoln, Churchill or Gandhi. As one of the late President’s biographer’s, however, and the only one to have spent considerable time with his psychotherapist – I’ll be intrigued to see the case he makes for Richard Nixon. According to Newsweek, Ghaemi concludes, that Nixon’s failing was that he was “too sane” for the times he lived in, his handling of the Watergate crisis too much like that of an ordinary person.

Truthers and Consequences: The Trouble with Dean Hartwell’s “Perspective”

In his review of our book, The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden, 9/11 skeptic Dean Hartwell charges that we make “questionable assertions and omissions of fact.”

Any reading of Mr. Hartwell’s review, [which can be found on his website "Hartwell Perspective - Truth & Relevance"] however, must begin with the understanding that he himself is a “No Planer” – his own contribution to the canon of research on the attacks is a book entitled “Planes without Passengers: The Faked Hijackings of 9/11.”

In any event, Hartwell claims, in the first instance, that we have not analyzed the work of  AK Dewdney on the use of cell phones on airplanes. Not true. We deal specifically with Dewedney’s claims – at p. 113 and in two notes on p. 476.

Kicking and screaming!

That’s how Anthony, anyway, will be coming to this blog.

With more than 70 years of reporting and writing experience between us (eight books and more documentaries and articles than we can count), however, we think we have lots still to say. And this is going to be the place we say it.

We’ll be digging into our archives to share stories we’ve written nowhere else, fleshing out and elaborating on the revelations in our latest book, The Eleventh Day. We’ll also be commenting on stories and events that grab our attention – particularly from the worlds of politics, intelligence, and organized crime. Bear with us as we get the bugs out (that was not a jibe, Mr. Murdoch). We hope eventually to be worth the wait.

 Anthony Summers & Robbyn Swan