18 ms·
FBI agents accuse CIA of 9/11 coverup
- tsunamifury 3y agoI get the idea as a layman from the outside that spies all sort of run in the same circles for obvious reasons, they are getting and exchanging value with eachother and constantly trying to recruit eachother etc. So yesterdays recruit is tomorrows terrorist. And if you’re a spy who is actually connected you’ve likely met with them and used them for info in the past. I assume it’s just how spycraft works. It’s likely a deeply unpleasant and not generally understandable business. I don’t say that as an excuse rather that it’s just who gets attracted to and works in the scene and how they network.
- ethbr0 3y agoThat sounds a lot like corporate leadership.
- tboyd47 3y ago> So yesterdays recruit is tomorrows terrorist. Or perhaps they are all terrorists.
- giraffe_lady 3y ago"Terrorism" is a political label defined by relationship to state power. From a state perspective a terrorist you support or endorse is simply an ally or asset. Your support is what makes them definitionally not a terrorist, and by removing it you change the category of their actions to terrorism.
- dexwiz 3y agoSounds very similar to privateers.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- phpisthebest 3y ago>So yesterdays recruit is tomorrows terrorist. That is a by product of the decades old, failed, and terrible US Policy of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" which has causes more global destabilization, and hardship worldwide than anything since Communism left the world stage.
- dragonwriter 3y ago> Communism left the world stage. That... didn’t happen.
- anonymousiam 3y agoI imagine this sort of thing happened all the time. Look at it this way: If the CIA had provided the FBI with information on Bayoumi when the FBI requested it, their target might have been arrested/prosecuted/deported and they would lose the lead. Also, back in that era, information sharing between CIA and FBI was not even permitted. https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/CRPT-107srpt351-5.pdf https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu... https://irp.fas.org/congress/2004_cr/s042804b.html https://irp.fas.org/congress/2004_cr/s042804b.html "On Monday, Senator Lindsey Graham and I asked the Justice Department to produce any documents they may have in their possession relating to Jamie Gorelick's involvement in establishing policies preventing the sharing of critical terrorism-related information between intelligence and law enforcement officials. It is the fact that those have now been made public and, indeed, posted on the Department of Justice's Web site at www.usdoj.gov which brings me back to the Senate floor to briefly mention why I think Ms. Gorelick's testimony is even more important to explaining what she did as a member of the Justice Department under Janet Reno to erect and buttress this wall that has been the subject of so much conversation and why it is so much more important that she do so because the 9/11 Commission's credibility is at stake."
- capableweb 3y ago> Also, back in that era, information sharing between CIA and FBI was not even permitted. What possible reason could there be for this? Both are supposed to serve the same government, one domestic and the other foreign. What would be the negatives with sharing information with each other?
- anonymousiam 3y agoThis was before the CIA and FBI were given a path for cooperation under the newly created DHS. See the second link above (added after your comment, sorry.)
- capableweb 3y agoI guess there is a lot of context missing for me, as I'm not super well-read when it comes to the interdealings of US government agencies. Could you maybe give a short summary of the reasons for the restriction of information sharing between the FBI and CIA?
- MuffinFlavored 3y ago[flagged]
- shadowgovt 3y agoThis piece of the story I do not understand. "People in a position to know have suggested that the CIA concealed information about Hazmi and Mihdhar’s travel because the CIA wanted to recruit them through Saudi intelligence, which would go a long way to support the defense theory that the United States and Al Qaeda are not at war..." I don't grasp how showing the CIA was attempting to recruit these people as operatives proves we are not currently at war with Al Qaeda; intelligence services try to recruit operatives in an opposing force's camp all the time.
- nashashmi 3y agoThat would be as a counter intelligence purpose. Here the CIA wanted to befriend alqaeda. But not directly. So they went through an ally intelligence route.
- shadowgovt 3y agoEven still, I think as a defense the argument that this is evidence of lack of a state of war is easily countered by "but then what happened?"
- ChrisKnott 3y agoYou're not wrong, it's a ludicrously weak defence, probably designed precisely to cast as wide a discovery net as possible
- vuln 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- pessimizer 3y agoI think that's a stretch, but Al Qaeda was basically eradicated or forced into hiding between 9/11 and the beginning of the Afghan invasion in a desperate attempt to keep the US from attacking. Al Qaeda was in essence a name for bin Ladin's bank account, because he was doing VC funding for training fighters and making audacious attacks against the US and the Saudi royals. That financing source was cut immediately, and Ladin-financed people trapped in Afghanistan had to figure out how to escape a country filled with locals who thought (correctly) that the US was going to come and murder everybody because of what these foreign fighters had been doing. After that, the US called everything in the Middle East that it wanted to kill "Al Qaeda" and made "The Taliban," i.e. the local government, somehow "Al Qaeda" too, or maybe even worse. What was "Al Qaeda" and what was "Freedom Fighter" was based on whether we wanted to topple the government or not and unrelated to any qualities or beliefs of the groups. We poured money and weapons into some radical Islamist groups while executing others.
- lizhang 3y agoAnyone see parallels to software eng: Proactively identify and fix a software bug: your work will probably go unnoticed, and no one will understand the impact of what you did. Leave the bug until it causes a huge sev/outage: you become the hero when you fix the issue and gain tons of positive recognition.
- hereforphone 3y ago[flagged]
- berkle4455 3y agoStop responding to chatGPT pastes. That’s probably why it was deleted.
- politician 3y agoWhen asking ChatGPT to write comments, consider using the SmartGPT approach and break up the task into two prompts. The first prompt should generate options to be evaluated by the second prompt. Prompt #1 "Let's write a comment for Hacker News. The title of the article is {XXX}. You didn't click on the link, so you don't know what the article is actually about. The current top comment is {YYY} by user {bar} with karma {83939}. I want you to write a comment in response to {ZZZ} by user {foo} with karma {9001}. Keep your comment in a single long paragraph and use jargon. Write two comments one supporting user {foo} and one as a rebuttal." Prompt #2 "You are a resolver tasked with picking which of two comments will earn the most karma on Hacker News. The first comment is in support of the comment {ZZZ} by user {foo} with karma {9001}. The second comment is a rebuttal. Pick one and explain step-by-step why you believe the comment would receive more karma than the alternative." /s
- George83728 3y ago1. al-Qaeda leadership fled Afghanistan for Pakistan before the US invasion, and the US knew it but invaded Afghanistan anyway. 2. Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons were well known to America, because American intelligence helped him acquire and target those chemical weapons against Iran in the Iraq-Iran War. Even going so far as to provide him with satellite intelligence for this purpose. 3. The "WMDs" used to justify the invasion of Iraq to the public were not chemical gasses. The US government claimed Iraq had a nuclear weapons program in advanced stages of development. This was never true and they knew it.
- hereforphone 3y agoThere are truths on both sides of the argument IMO. It's not black and white. But it's hard to seriously consider the opinions of those who haven't participated in it in any way (government, contractor, military...) and may not even have been born when these things kicked off. Media is a very biased filter.
- temptemptemp111 3y ago[dead]
- transfire 3y agoI think rather the CIA did in fact recruit them.
- 1letterunixname 3y agoBackground of spytalk.co: https://foreignpolicy.com/author/jeff-stein/ https://foreignpolicy.com/author/jeff-stein/ Background of the article's author: 1. https://sethhettena.com/about/ https://sethhettena.com/about/ 2. https://muckrack.com/seth-hettena https://muckrack.com/seth-hettena
- samstave 3y ago[flagged]
- 1letterunixname 3y ago[flagged]
- r721 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Stein_(author) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Stein_(author)
- csours 3y ago"Coverup" seems like "Lab Leak" in that anyone can project as much evil intent onto the phrase as they want. Did they coverup a failure? Did they coverup their own involvement? I realize that I'm only discussing the headline, and that the article goes into detail, but I think the headline is intentionally vague to allow this projection.
- VagueMag 3y agoThe headline did not sit well with me either, maybe something like "coverup related to 9/11" would be better? It's funny, I have a very different take on the use of the phrasing "lab leak," since to me it seems intended to preempt any consideration of an intentional release.
- AlbertCory 3y agoSince I just watched Chinatown for the nth time, this is fresh on my mind. Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown. applies here. We don't know what really happened and we can't. These are people who lie and cover up for a living, even to each other. Even under oath.
- pyth0 3y agoI watched it for the first time a month back and was blown away. And the central conflict around water scarcity in CA is still incredibly relevant today. What a movie!
- AlbertCory 3y agoIt really IS the perfect movie.
- coliveira 3y agoExactly, every time you deal with info from CIA and related orgs, you need to understand that their job is to lie and deceive for a particular goal. There is no reason whatsoever to think that what they're saying is true, unless it is strongly corroborated by other facts and reports.
- TechBro8615 3y agoThat may be how they interpret their job description, but it's not the job the taxpayer pays them to do, certainly not when it comes to lying domestically.
- fit2rule 3y ago[dead]
- esotericimpl 3y ago[dead]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- babelthuap 3y agoTenet declared WMD in Iraq was a slam dunk. I don't know what evidence he presented but my military source in Iraq told me the chemical weapons they found and disposed of had US nomenclature which would make sense since we were helping Iraq deal with Iran in the 80's: "According to Iraqi documents, assistance in the development of chemical weapons was obtained from firms in many countries, including the United States, West Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and France. A report stated that Dutch, Australian, Italian, French and both West and East German companies were involved in the export of raw materials to Iraqi chemical weapons factories.." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_chemical_attacks_against_Iran https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_chemical_attacks_against... End of the day the CIA operates way outside the lines on the field. Like not even inside the stadium. Tenet and his counterpart however did end up resigning for a series of screw ups which is about as far as it goes on that level.
- dylan604 3y agoThe easiest way to ensure your target of investigation has the items you want to say they have is to sell it to them first.
- pastacacioepepe 3y ago[flagged]
- orwin 3y agoI mean, at least Ukrainian nazis are not leaders of the country? Nor leaders of the strongest merc company in the word? And quite the minority in the country considering how high their Jewish president poll right now.
- asveikau 3y agoI think the tone of this article shifted quite a bit when it mentioned the context that CIA was trying to infiltrate Al Qaeda. Before that point, it sounds like some kind of mkultra style conspiracy where they are actively malicious. After that point, it creates the impression that they were trying to do their job in good faith.
- z3c0 3y agoOr just trying to do their job. Their whole MO flies in the face of "good faith". Even when telling the truth, its always done so strategically. Like many foreign intelligence agencies, the CIA are the organizational equivalent of a sociopath and should be regarded as such, even by Americans.
- asveikau 3y agoI think a lot of CIA scandals over the decades do involve good faith, but also stupidity. They've sometimes been warped enough to think that doing obviously wrong stuff is good for the country and the world. The cold war in particular had a ton of this distorted thinking.
- kranke155 3y agoPretty much. It’s not an “inside job” as much as it was a tragedy of errors. The CIA having a double agent inside Al Qaeda sounds like a great plan… until you find out these men were involved in a terrorist plot that succeeded in killing thousands. But no one has ever done what they did before.
- StanislavPetrov 3y ago>Before that point, it sounds like some kind of mkultra style conspiracy where they are actively malicious. The CIA MKULTRA program was a fact, not a conspiracy. Evidence of this program was discovered when the CIA inadvertently failed to illegally destroy documentation detailing the program. The known fallout from this program includes the Unabomber. https://www.npr.org/2019/09/09/758989641/the-cias-secret-quest-for-mind-control-torture-lsd-and-a-poisoner-in-chief https://www.npr.org/2019/09/09/758989641/the-cias-secret-que... The entire history of the CIA is actively malicious. "Their job" is to lie, murder, kidnap, torture and otherwise manipulate every nation on the planet (including our own) in order to maintain their own power and US global hegemony. Anyone who doubts this should look into MKULTRA, Operation Northwoods, Operation Chaos, Operation Mockingbird, The Phoenix Program, Operation Paperclip - and these are just some of the CIA activities we know about.
- antidaily 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- xtian 3y ago[flagged]
- dj_gitmo 3y agoThis is pretty mainstream. The problem isn't even necessarily that they were trying to recruit these guys. The problem is that they covered it up.
- Sporktacular 3y agoYes. It's depressing but from forums you'd never know how few they actually number.
- xtian 3y agoYeah the American people outnumber the FBI by a huge margin
- Sporktacular 3y agoThey also outnumber the crank conspiracy theorising quacks who've hijacked entire national conversations. Outnumber in population, but not volume.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- xtian 3y agoYou think so? According to the media your description would apply to everyone who voted for Trump.
- Sporktacular 3y agoI know so - by definition a crank must be in some minority. What I think is this dumb subset shouts above its weight. Not is every Trump voter is a crank (there are multiple reasons people vote for a fascist). But "the media" isn't against either of them. They are both minorities that Fox News amplified to make money over the past two decades.
- ypeterholmes 3y ago[flagged]
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y agoWould've been pretty tricky having demolition crews placing explosives in 3 buildings in NYC for weeks without anyone noticing.
- Riseed 3y agoA construction crew completed a retrofit on Citicorp Center in NYC over a few months, and the project was kept secret for almost 20 years after its completion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citicorp_Center_engineering_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citicorp_Center_engineering_cr...
- drexlspivey 3y agoWhy does this defy physics? How are buildings supposed to collapse?
- hn_throawlles 3y agouff, I had been somewhat (worriedly) expecting another american civil war. what is unexpected about it, that it not going to be California Vs Georgia, or the Virginias Vs Florida (I don't know enough about state-politics within the USA so disregard my specific examples) the surprise for me is that it will (already is but whatever) be things like this, "department of commerce" Vs "securities exchange comission" or things like this... the Federal Bureau of Investigation is FIGHTING the Central Intelligence Agency! wow
- xtian 3y agoYou can’t understand the US government without recognizing it as a substrate for inter-factional conflict between different segments of the ruling class. It’s organized crime and gang warfare all the way down.
- hn_throawlles 3y ago...all the way down to the top.
- dragonwriter 3y ago“My agency” infighting by largely ex-officers based on actions where the leadership of the involved agency were on the same page highlighted because it relates to a issue raised in a court case is... A very different thing than a civil war.
- cududa 3y agoThis isn't particularly news. It was well known shortly after 9/11 that the FBI and CIA did not cooperate, fought with eachother (they still do), but most of all, by law, they couldn't communicate with eachother. It's not really a particular bombshell.
- oatmeal1 3y agoIf anyone is curious about 9/11 and wants to learn more, I highly recommend September 11: The New Pearl Harbor: https://youtu.be/8DOnAn_PX6M?t=655 https://youtu.be/8DOnAn_PX6M?t=655 It's great because it doesn't attempt to provide explanations on its own, it simply asks questions based on text from the commission report, and news footage and documentaries you find on CNN, NBC, etc.
- webinvest 3y agoI remember the Documentary “Loose Change” about this.
- LooseMarmoset 3y ago<insert spider-men pointing at each other meme>
- junglistguy 3y agoand then an *** appears and publishes everything on discord to the game boys
- cududa 3y agoDid anyone actually read the article or is everyone just upvoting this because of the title? It says nothing about the CIA covering up an involvement in 9/11, and talks about covering up intelligence blunders.
- cogitoergofutuo 3y ago> It says nothing about the CIA covering up an involvement in 9/11 The title doesn’t say that the CIA was involved in 9/11.
- jborden13 3y agoBut it's implied. Should be rewritten to '9/11 mishandling coverup' or some other noun to negate the click bait.
- philosopher1234 3y agobut lets not pretend that's not on peoples minds when they read the title. it seems like it ought to be going out of its way to avoid that implication.
- cogitoergofutuo 3y agoI did not interpret the headline that way. I’m not sure why someone would jump straight to that aside from the “Bush did 9/11” memes that get circulated every now and then.
- philosopher1234 3y agoYa thats one reason. It's an incredibly well known conspiracy theory. I think most readers would've passed over the thought when reading the title and assumed thats what it was referencing.
- cogitoergofutuo 3y agoI’m still not buying that “most readers” are so familiar with that conspiracy theory that they would jump to “FBI agents have taken it upon themselves to publicly accuse the CIA in involvement in 9/11” There is so much room for discussion about incompetence and bad systems when talking about 9/11. There was even a whole tv show with Jeff Daniels a few years ago that managed to talk about it without reading like lyrics from an Anti Flag album.
- c3534l 3y agoSounds like a minor dispute blown up into something sinister.
- incomingpain 3y ago[flagged]
- KoftaBob 3y agoWhenever 9/11 and the followup "War on Terror" comes up, I remember this: "In 1998, Kristol and Kagan advocated regime change in Iraq throughout the Iraq disarmament process through articles that were published in the New York Times. Following perceived Iraqi unwillingness to co-operate with UN weapons inspections, core members of the PNAC including Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, R. James Woolsey, Elliott Abrams, Donald Rumsfeld, Robert Zoellick, and John Bolton were among the signatories of an open letter initiated by the PNAC to President Bill Clinton calling for the removal of Saddam Hussein.Portraying Saddam Hussein as a threat to the United States, its Middle East allies, and oil resources in the region. Shortly after the September 11 attacks, the PNAC sent a letter to President George W. Bush, specifically advocating regime change through "a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq." The letter suggested that "any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq," even if no evidence surfaced linking Iraq to the September 11 attacks." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century#Calls_for_regime_change_in_Iraq https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_C...
- potatototoo99 3y agoEverybody knows that everyone lied, that there were no WMD, that all is an excuse to kill and profit, that the real culprits got await scot free. It all comes down to the US being a failed democracy. It does not matter if it's all lies, the people in power cannot be prosecuted, the secret agencies cannot be shut down. The beast is too big, we just have to live with the tyranny hoping it doesn't turn on us next.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- chasd00 3y agodon't the FBI and CIA fight all the time? I think the FBI is just jealous they're constrained (or at least suppose to be constrained) by the US constitution where the CIA gets to do whatever they want and play with the best toys.
- tootie 3y agoI can't believe it wasn't more explosive at the time, but this whole tale from Ali Soufan of the FBI that he told the New Yorker in 2006 is absolutely harrowing. The CIA explicitly withheld a single piece of intel that he had requested that could have lead them to prevent 9/11. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/07/10/the-agent https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/07/10/the-agent
- wahnfrieden 3y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35841537 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35841537