All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
We're on chaos in Austin and the Liberty Radio Network.
And our next guest on the show today is Jason Leopold, reporter from Truthout.org.
Welcome back to the show, Jason.
How are you doing?
Hey, Scott, great to be with you.
How are you?
I'm doing all right.
Thanks for joining us today on the show.
So explosive news story here.
Actually, you have a couple of them I want to talk to you about.
But first of all, the one from this morning here, a former counterterrorism czar accuses tenant other CIA officials of cover up.
Give us the lowdown.
Yeah, it's pretty stunning.
This is an interview that Richard Clarke did back in October of 2009, which is going to be aired this evening on a local PBS affiliate in Colorado, also available online.
And and it revolves around a specific case in which two of the 9-11 hijackers made their way to the U.S. and the CIA having full knowledge of it and not sharing the information.
This is the 9-11 Commission report looked at this or the panel looked at this.
But for the first time, Clark actually says, look, George Tenet, Kofa Black, who is the director of the Counterterrorism Center and a figure that has not really been discussed before, an individual named Richard Blee.
You really can't find much on him.
A couple of years ago, a blogger for the website History Commons unmasked him and he was the head of the Bin Laden Issues Station, also known as Alex Station.
And collectively, Richard Clarke says that they were involved in a cover up in which they knew that these two hijackers were in the U.S., that they did not share the information with him or the FBI or any of the other government agencies.
And they also misled, may have lied to, you know, the various government committees that were investigating this, including the 9-11 Commission.
And as a result, you know, Clark lays much of the blame on, you know, on the fact that they were successful in hijacking American Airlines Flight 77 that crashed into the Pentagon on their shoulders.
Now, you know, with somebody like Zacharias Moussaoui or whatever, maybe it wasn't immediately apparent that he would be tied to al Qaeda, although they had lots of information from the French pretty quick, I think, on that.
But with these two guys, one of these guys, I forget now from James Bamford's book, whether it was Hosni or Midhar, one of them, I think it was Hosni's father-in-law, owned the house in Yemen that served as the switchboard for al Qaeda, that was the exchange for all the calls from Afghanistan, America and everywhere else in the world.
Right.
And they did have, you know, as Bamford indicated, they had, you know, NSA had, you know, picked up some communications there.
And they had attended the Malaysia meeting and the CIA knew it.
So there was no question that these guys are real al Qaeda here.
Oh, they knew it.
They were monitoring that meeting and they were well aware of what was happening.
They knew that they had visas.
You know, Clark actually goes into something that was discussed in Lawrence Wright's book, in which Lawrence Wright wrote about the looming tower, that the CIA may have been interested and may have even attempted to recruit these, you know, these hijackers because they were so interested in or rather desperate to get an insider in al Qaeda.
They had, they did not have, you know, anyone really on the inside.
And so, you know, Clark is sort of, you know, bringing that back up again.
In his book, his most recent book, which came out a few years ago, Your Government Failed You, you know, you could tell that this specific incident, this case, you know, a year and a half that these guys have been in the US, you know, has been dogging him, has been bugging him, that he can't figure out why the CIA wouldn't share this information with him when they were sharing, you know, everything else.
And, you know, he does acknowledge that he does not have any evidence to back up what he, you know, what he's stating, what he's claiming.
But, you know, as he says, he's like, look, I'm presented with a set of facts.
I'm trying to make sense of that.
And this is the only thing I could come up with, because it just doesn't make sense.
He goes through in this interview, and I will hand it to the, you know, to the filmmakers here who were incredibly knowledgeable about, you know, the circumstances, you know, regarding the intelligence failures leading up to 9-11.
So they were really able to ask Clark some very pointed questions and get Clark to open up and discuss this.
And, you know, Clark's saying, look, you know, George Tenet, Richard Lee, Cofer Black, these were hands-on intelligence officials.
These were guys who read the raw intelligence reports before the analysts did.
There's just no explanation for why this was not shared.
And, you know, obviously the timing of this, Scott, we're coming up on the 10th anniversary of 9-11.
We both know, and your listeners know, that we have been told this is what the official narrative is, and more or less you should accept it.
But there are, you know, there are questions about that.
There are the holes in that official narrative are becoming bigger.
And, you know, with the passage of time, people like Clark and even some other counterterrorism officials are starting to take a second look and, you know, we're starting to see some documents surface that, you know, really do call into question the veracity of the testimony of people like Tenet and others.
And just, you know, what the 9-11 Commission and other bodies failed to do in terms of, you know, getting to the truth.
Well, you know, I'm glad you mentioned Lawrence Wright.
And I guess I'm glad I mentioned James Bamford, because, you know, I never made the mistake of reading the 9-11 Commission report.
So I'm not very thoroughly versed on what their official story is.
It's like Ron Paul.
They asked him in 2002, do you attend the intelligence briefings about Iraq?
And he said, well, I don't want to be confused by their propaganda, you know, so he just didn't go to them.
Well, that's my thing, too.
I just never read the 9-11 Commission report.
But I did read Lawrence Wright and I did read James Bamford and Terry McDermott and good old, what's his name, obviously, Michael Scheuer, and I read Ghost Wars and one of those by Bergen, I forget now.
So this is the official story, as far as I can tell, is the best I can tell from all of this great independent journalism, these books and these articles, and, you know, try to separate the wheat from the chaff myself.
And there's certainly, from the very beginning, you know, William Grigg wrote a piece called Did We Know What Was Coming?
Like three weeks later or something that had the name of the intelligence briefing from August 6th, Al-Qaeda determined to attack inside the United States.
And there were all kinds of questions as to how is it you can have 20 Al-Qaeda in the country and not have the FBI all over them and not have the NSA and the CIA and whatever with squads of goons with guns going around these people up?
How did they slip through?
And the, you know, the media, the mainstream media didn't even ask that question for nine months.
And then when they did, it was all part of the Rovian script that, yeah, you're right, we need a Department of Homeland Security.
Right.
Exactly.
But they never wanted to get to the truth of the matter.
Even the 9-11 Commission, they said, this is an outcome based commission.
It will recommend a Department of Homeland Security on the last day.
Right.
Yeah, I think that it's true.
And even now, you know, these questions are important to ask.
And, you know, when we had a previous conversation, you know, revolving around intelligence regarding 9-11 and the fact that, you know, another claim by a high ranking counterterrorism official that, you know, certain intelligence was withheld.
The media in general fears, they're fearful about taking on this massive subject.
And then on the other side are a bunch of kooks who take, you know, every half a sentence that they can and cherry pick it into some incredible narrative that there was no Flight 77 that hit the Pentagon.
What are you talking about?
And, you know, there's going to be a ton of that in the comments section.
Anyway, we'll be right back.
It's Jason Leopold from Truthout.org.
All right, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and on the line is Jason Leopold from Truthout.org, and we're talking about this explosive new piece he's got, former counterterrorism czar accuses Tenet, other CIA officials of cover up.
And he's written this because he got the leak from the producers of a new documentary that's airing on a PBS station and online.
You can find the link to the Colorado Public TV station.
It's going to be airing this documentary tonight, you said, Jason?
Yes, this evening, I believe it's at 9 p.m.
Mountain Standard Time, but there should be a link to that in the story.
And the documentary is called Secrecy Kills.
Actually, the documentary is Secrecy Kills is the website that these guys set up.
And it's basically a transparency website.
The documentary, this is going to be part of a larger or I should say, a lengthier documentary that's coming out on the actual anniversary of 9-11.
So this is just one excerpt of it.
These are the same producers that made 9-11 Press for Truth?
Yes, exactly.
That's the one 9-11 video that has my name on it as an endorsement.
Ah, very nice.
And the rest of them absolutely do not.
Yeah.
Well, by the way, same here.
I want to make that clear as well.
I think that, you know, I should say that they're so they're lengthier.
Documentary is revolving around this guy, this person who has never been really discussed before publicly or in any media report named Richard Blee.
And as I said, he was a B-L-E-E.
His father was also a major CIA figure official, passed away in 2000.
And he's identified in George Tenet's book at the center of the storm as Rich B.
In an old Harper's or Harper's Magazine article by Ken Silverstein, he was identified under an alias of James.
So, you know, the some folks over at, as I mentioned, the History Commons website, the you know, who have they've been doing their own research on these issues, unmasked him, you know, did their, you know, did their due diligence, unmasked him, found out who he was and, you know, put the pieces together.
And it turns out that this is a this is a real important figure in the intelligence failures.
And in the 9-11 Commission report, he's identified actually his name is redacted.
So their documentary is going to air on the anniversary of 9-11 and revolves around, you know, further unmasking Rich Blee.
And this is one excerpt from it that will air this evening, this full 13 minute interview with Richard Clark.
And it really is, you know, given Clark's, you know, stature and, you know, where he was at the time of what he was working on.
And it's pretty it's pretty explosive.
And I should also add that it obviously rankled George Tenet, Kofor Black and Rich Blee because they issued a joint statement last week that was harshly critical of the allegations that Clark, you know, leveled against them.
Right.
See, this is what I've wanted all along is let's get these guys fighting and pointing fingers at each other.
That's how we're going to find out because those accusations against each other will be true.
Yeah, I was actually, you know, I had that conversation yesterday, Scott, that's, you know, that's what indict Condoleezza Rice.
Let's flip her Turner State's witness and see where it goes from there.
Yeah, yeah.
And so they, you know, it upset them to the point where they issued a joint statement.
And, you know, as far as Rich Blee is concerned, I mean, he's never said anything.
This is a guy who has never said anything publicly before.
We've never heard from him.
So his inclusion in this joint statement is newsworthy in and of itself.
But let me let me reiterate the bottom line here for people just tuning in.
It's Jason Leopold from Truthout.org.
The article is called Former Counterterrorism Czar Accuses Tenet, Other CIA Officials of Cover Up.
It's at Truthout.org right now.
And you can find the link to the PBS station that's going to be airing this clip of this interview, this full interview with Richard Clarke tonight.
This will be very important.
I highly suggest you tune in if you can.
And the point of this is, you know, really you kind of bury the lead in this article a little bit.
At the very end here.
Clarke says, look, I mean, just in plain English, more or less, George Tenet, Kofor Black, this Blee guy, they must have known about these guys.
There's no doubt that they did.
And they sat right in front of me at the counterterrorism meeting and they didn't tell me about this.
And if they had, we would have dispatched, you know, the Waco killers or whatever to go out on a dragnet and find these guys immediately and given enough time, three weeks, four weeks, they could have done it.
No problem.
Instead, what happened was they notified a very low level group of FBI agents somewhere, I guess.
And I guess the best I understand, Jason, is that they sent one guy out, a rookie.
Hey, go look for this one guy or something without any of the importance behind it that belong there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's you know, I felt that that was a good way to sort of close it out just by sort of giving the backstory.
But, you know, I think we could have stopped these attacks.
Richard Clark is saying that, you know, he makes a good he doesn't he doesn't go to great detail on how to do it, but he does make a pretty he says a few things, one that, you know, that I didn't include the article.
He says, you know, we would have done this publicly.
We would have used the AP wire.
We would have used every every every public tool at our disposal, the media.
And he says we would have got that even with a week left.
And, you know, it's it's something that if you think about in hindsight, yeah, they probably could have.
So it does beg the question, why?
And the thing, too, though, it begs the question about what about the FBI, man?
They got a job to do regardless of what they get told by the CIA.
And wasn't Al-Bayoumi the guy that hooked these two up with a place to live in San Diego?
Wasn't that their informant?
Yes.
Yes, it's that's right.
And, you know, there were some FBI officials who were working with the CIA, with the Alex station.
And, you know, this is where it becomes so confusing because, you know, they went through CIA to say, hey, can we share this with the you know, with others at the FBI?
They were shut down.
So there were enough people in the know, Scott, that this should have gotten, you know, this this should have been shared and disseminated, you know, with with senior officials.
And, you know, Richard Clark says that his his feeling as to why this wasn't even at the very late date of September 4th, 2001, was that he would have immediately called for, you know, there would there would have been an investigation.
And it comes down to the CIA, you know, covering it up and, you know, putting the agency, you know, before the lives of the public.
And he really does say that doesn't say it in so many words, but there's no question that's what the implication is.
Right.
I mean, basically saying, you know, by the time, you know, the few weeks before the attacks, by then, probably any attempt to, you know, flip these guys was already over.
But at that point, they didn't want to admit that they knew that they were in the country or else they'd have to explain themselves why they didn't, you know, tell them before, why the CIA didn't tell Clark and the other people before.
And so they just sat there quiet.
They didn't even have a real purpose of protecting themselves in the weeks leading up to the attack.
Yeah, exactly.
And so, you know, when he said that, it's it doesn't make you think again.
Well, yeah.
Why wouldn't they have, you know, even at this late date, they have the, you know, the intelligence, they know what is, you know, they know what's happening.
They know that these guys are in the country.
Why didn't they, you know, they share it?
And, you know, the 9-11 Commission really didn't take a you know, they don't really flesh it out.
And, you know, Kenneth Cofer Black and Rich Blee really apparently just they did not ask them those, you know, those hard questions.
Well, now, August 6th, the PDB, the presidential daily brief that I think it's now all been published.
I don't remember anymore.
Yes, it has to say that we know there are at least a few of these guys in the country now.
Did where they was the CIA even that honest with the president of the United States?
You know, I don't I forgive me.
I don't recall that was that explicit.
I mean, you know, obviously, don't worry, you've covered your ass, Bush said to the brief.
Yeah, which, you know, I don't know.
That's kind of a nervous laugh.
What does that mean?
Yeah, we all know.
You just OK, you won't go to jail.
You tried to tell me.
Well, I did say bin Laden determined to strike in the US.
I think that was pretty explicit right there.
You'd think so.
All right.
Thanks very much for your time.
Jason Leopold, everybody.
Truthout.org.
Thank you, Scott.
