| If you don't get MER, you just don't
get it! 22 Oct 2004 - MiddleEast.Org -  MER is
Free |
||
| News,
Views, &
Analysis Governments,
Lobbies, & the Corporate Media Don't Want You To Know The most honest, most comprehensive, and most mobilizing news and analysis on the Middle East always comes from MER. It is indispensable!" Robert Silverman - Salamanca, Spain MER - We Never Stop Working For You! |
NEW "SHOCKING"
CIA COVER-UP
MIDDLEEAST.ORG - MER - Washington - 22 Oct: This is a very important story, but it's one being pushed under in the heat of the political campaign in the U.S. as well as by the powers that be.
It's one more example of the gross deception and manipulation of which the Bush/Cheney/neocon adminstration is more guilty than any before.
It also helps explain why the White House pushed so hard to rush their new man, Porter Goss, into George Tenet's old chair at CIA Headquarters at Langley. Tenet -- forced to resign though he insists he just wanted to 'spend more time with his family -- is soon to take up a new professorial chair at Georgetown University. This his reward for taking the fall after his big role in deceiving any and all, even if it should be Georgetown's shame.
But then the Democratics in a very real sense have only themselves to partially blame for how this 'damning report' is being kept secret until the election. They could have held up on confirming Goss. They could have at the very least required Goss to promise during his confirmation hearings that the report Congress itself had commissioned long ago would be made available, at least to the Congress if not to the public, as soon as Goss took up the new DCI job.
Just about everyone in official Washington is mightily complicitous in failing the public and the truth these days. And as long-time journalist Robert Scheer rightly points out, "it is shocking" what the Bush Administration and the CIA are doing further hiding this report...and shocking that the Congress 'of the people' keeps rolling over and so miserably failing in it's "oversight" responsibilities.
CIA COVER-UP
Completed in June, mandated by Congress nearly
two years ago, the CIA Report that names names
is being suppressed until after the election.
"What all the other reports on 9/11 did not do is point the
finger at individuals, and give the how and what of their
responsibility. This report does that," said the intelligence official.
"The report found very senior-level officials responsible."
two years ago, the CIA Report that names names
is being suppressed until after the election.
"What all the other reports on 9/11 did not do is point the
finger at individuals, and give the how and what of their
responsibility. This report does that," said the intelligence official.
"The report found very senior-level officials responsible."
MIDDLEEAST.ORG - MER - Washington - 22 Oct: This is a very important story, but it's one being pushed under in the heat of the political campaign in the U.S. as well as by the powers that be.
It's one more example of the gross deception and manipulation of which the Bush/Cheney/neocon adminstration is more guilty than any before.
It also helps explain why the White House pushed so hard to rush their new man, Porter Goss, into George Tenet's old chair at CIA Headquarters at Langley. Tenet -- forced to resign though he insists he just wanted to 'spend more time with his family -- is soon to take up a new professorial chair at Georgetown University. This his reward for taking the fall after his big role in deceiving any and all, even if it should be Georgetown's shame.
But then the Democratics in a very real sense have only themselves to partially blame for how this 'damning report' is being kept secret until the election. They could have held up on confirming Goss. They could have at the very least required Goss to promise during his confirmation hearings that the report Congress itself had commissioned long ago would be made available, at least to the Congress if not to the public, as soon as Goss took up the new DCI job.
Just about everyone in official Washington is mightily complicitous in failing the public and the truth these days. And as long-time journalist Robert Scheer rightly points out, "it is shocking" what the Bush Administration and the CIA are doing further hiding this report...and shocking that the Congress 'of the people' keeps rolling over and so miserably failing in it's "oversight" responsibilities.
The 9/11 Secret in the CIA's Back Pocket
The agency is withholding a damning
report that points at senior officials.
report that points at senior officials.
By Robert Scheer
L.A.Times - October 19, 2004: It is shocking: The Bush administration is suppressing a CIA report on 9/11 until after the election, and this one names names. Although the report by the inspector general's office of the CIA was completed in June, it has not been made available to the congressional intelligence committees that mandated the study almost two years ago.
"It is infuriating that a report which shows that high-level people were not doing their jobs in a satisfactory manner before 9/11 is being suppressed," an intelligence official who has read the report told me, adding that "the report is potentially very embarrassing for the administration, because it makes it look like they weren't interested in terrorism before 9/11, or in holding people in the government responsible afterward."
When I asked about the report, Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice), ranking Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee, said she and committee Chairman Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.) sent a letter 14 days ago asking for it to be delivered. "We believe that the CIA has been told not to distribute the report," she said. "We are very concerned."
According to the intelligence official, who spoke to me on condition of anonymity, release of the report, which represents an exhaustive 17-month investigation by an 11-member team within the agency, has been "stalled." First by acting CIA Director John McLaughlin and now by Porter J. Goss, the former Republican House member (and chairman of the Intelligence Committee) who recently was appointed CIA chief by President Bush.
The official stressed that the report was more blunt and more specific than the earlier bipartisan reports produced by the Bush-appointed Sept. 11 commission and Congress.
"What all the other reports on 9/11 did not do is point the finger at individuals, and give the how and what of their responsibility. This report does that," said the intelligence official. "The report found very senior-level officials responsible."
By law, the only legitimate reason the CIA director has for holding back such a report is national security. Yet neither Goss nor McLaughlin has invoked national security as an explanation for not delivering the report to Congress.
"It surely does not involve issues of national security," said the intelligence official.
"The agency directorate is basically sitting on the report until after the election," the official continued. "No previous director of CIA has ever tried to stop the inspector general from releasing a report to the Congress, in this case a report requested by Congress."
None of this should surprise us given the Bush administration's great determination since 9/11 to resist any serious investigation into how the security of this nation was so easily breached. In Bush's much ballyhooed war on terror, ignorance has been bliss.
The president fought against the creation of the Sept. 11 commission, for example, agreeing only after enormous political pressure was applied by a grass-roots movement led by the families of those slain.
And then Bush refused to testify to the commission under oath, or on the record. Instead he deigned only to chat with the commission members, with Vice President Dick Cheney present, in a White House meeting in which commission members were not allowed to take notes. All in all, strange behavior for a man who seeks reelection to the top office in the land based on his handling of the so-called war on terror.
In September, the New York Times reported that several family members met with Goss privately to demand the release of the CIA inspector general's report. "Three thousand people were killed on 9/11, and no one has been held accountable," 9/11 widow Kristen Breitweiser told the paper.
The failure to furnish the report to Congress, said Harman, "fuels the perception that no one is being held accountable. It is unacceptable that we don't have [the report]; it not only disrespects Congress but it disrespects the American people."
The stonewalling by the Bush administration and the failure of Congress to gain release of the report have, said the intelligence source, "led the management of the CIA to believe it can engage in a cover-up with impunity. Unless the public demands an accounting, the administration and CIA's leadership will have won and the nation will have lost."
|
|
 MID-EAST REALITIES - www.MiddleEast.Org Phone: (202) 362-5266 Fax: (815) 366-0800 Email: MER@MiddleEast.Org Copyright © 2004 Mid-East Realities, All rights reserved |