Hmmmm

[Nicole Dupre]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/08/11/september-11th-anniversary-richard-clarke-s-explosive-cia-cover-up-charge.html

Richard Clarke: “We would have conducted a massive sweep,” he said. “We would have conducted it publicly. We would have found those assholes. There’s no doubt in my mind, even with only a week left. They were using credit cards in their own names. They were staying in the Charles Hotel in Harvard Square, for heaven’s sake.” He said that “those guys would have been arrested within 24 hours.” (http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/08/11/september-11th-anniversary-richard-clarke-s-explosive-cia-cover-up-charge.html)

[Stavros]

This is not new, it was discussed by Lawrence Wright in The Looming Tower [2006], Chapter 18.

The contexts are 1) the inability of the CIA, the FBI and the National Security Agency to share information as all three believed their 'competitors' would screw up their own investigations, over-ride accepted rules and blow their intelligence sources. Also, for example the law makes it illegal for the CIA to operate on US soil, so they are always gnashing their teeth with the FBI. 2) the men in charge of these agencies and the units looking at terrorism often loathed each other; 3) by January 2001 there was a substantial volume of information on al-Qaeda, its comunications routes through the Yemen, its funding from the UAE, and so on. Khaled al-Mihdhar, as a Saudi citizen had multiple entry visas to the USA, but the CIA did not inform the State Department that he was suspected of being an al-Qaeda operative so he was not barred from entry on his final visit. The CIA also would have had to ask the FBI to arrest al-Mihdhar and that would have compromised their intelligence sources and also handed control of the case to the FBI (the FBI man in charge, John O'Neill died in the WTC on 9/11).

The CIA did consider recruiting him al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, because they were desperate to put flesh on the bones of the chatter that a follow-up attack on the USA (following the first World Trade Centre bombing in 1995) was imminent; chatter that intensified in 2001. According to Wright they might even have tried to mount a joint US-Saudi foreign intelligence unit in the USA using Mihdhar and Hazmi to out the al-Qaeda operatives in the US and Saudi Arabia, or known to be travelling to the USA to commit acts of terror: all illegal and this seems to have been the key sticking point, along with revealing what it knew to the FBI and blowing its covers.

Unfortunately, Clarke has a long history of rubbing people up the wrong way, he emerged from the NSA apparatus in the first Clinton administration (he even occupied Oliver North's old office), and was considered by some to be driven to the point of being a bully; so I don't know how much of this is personal.

Ultimately, the blizzard of information in 2001 meant that key agencies did not join the dots in time to see the full picture: it was a cock-up not a conspiracy.