Schneier on Security

Adjuvant • January 14, 2014 11:56 PM

@Mark Lindauer

I strongly second everything you’ve written, apart from the first recommendation.

I’ve not followed all of the best evidence that has developed within the past year or two, but I believe I can still make some sound recommendations, particularly with regard to names. (With luck the crockery won’t suddenly start flying… ducks pre-emptively)

This recent interview with Jon Gold is, the venue notwithstanding, a good place to start. I’ve always found him to be a grounded and reasonable observer.

My general recommendations are not dissimilar to his. Look to the work of John Duffy, Ray Nowosielski and Rory O’Connor (including this bombshell interview with Richard Clarke as debuted on Colorado Public Television and the companion podcast outing key figures involved in obstructing the expected flow of information that could have prevented 9/11. (podcast summarized in this Gawker piece), as well as this follow-up Gawker piece where we hear from the FBI elements who were kept in the dark.

Also take a look at Kevin Fenton’s work in Disconnecting the Dots , important elements of which have been summarized in, inter alia, this piece by Peter Dale Scott and also expanded upon in Prof. Scott’s address to the Toronto Hearings in 2011.

Finally, I can’t address this topic without recommending Prof. Peter Dale Scott’s own work, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (University of California Press, 2008). Read it for the background into how things could possibly have become as they apparently have. And although this takes us slightly off topic, for an even broader background on how deep and wide the rot has gone, read also his more recent American War Machine (Rowman & Littlefield, 2010). I’ve highlighted elsewhere a review of this title from Revue Defense Nationale, but here’s Daniel Ellsberg’s take:

“I said of Scott’s last brilliant take on this subject, Drugs, Oil and War, that ‘It makes most academic and journalistic explanations of our past and current interventions read like government propaganda written for children.’ Now Scott has written an even better book. Read it!” –Ellsberg

OK, I’ve done my bit. Let the woodwork start moving and the ad-hominems commence!

Adjuvant • January 16, 2014 5:26 PM

@Autolykos You, too, need to watch (and absorb the import of) the interview with Clarke that I have posted. It’s not that the information “got lost” in the bureaucracy. That was Clarke’s initial assumption, and he was shocked to discover clear evidence to the contrary. There was a deliberate, high-level decision in the CIA — presumably at the level of the DCI, George Tenet — to withhold information over a period of longer than a year that would otherwise have been automatically shared as a matter of course. This information would, as Clarke states, have automatically popped up on his computer screen without the need for anyone to call him or any active intervention whatsoever, unless there were deliberate orders to keep him out of the loop. This withholding was from both the FBI (tasked with domestic counterterrorism) and Clarke’s (counter-terrorism) office in the White House.

The withholding from Clarke was in the context of a personal relationship with Tenet where Tenet would often call him at 7:30 in the morning to discuss the latest raw intelligence take before the analysts even got to it. These details were even specifically omitted from a top-level meeting that nominally attempted to lay out the strongest possible case for action against Al Qaeda, even though they constituted the most urgent impetus for action. Clarke has stated all of these things on the record. You may watch him do so.

Unless you doubt Clarke’s judgement or honesty on this point, it must be considered a fact of the case. For some reason, no matter how many times that fact is aired, it never seems to achieve penetration. Cognitive dissonance much? Naturally, media coverage of these revelations has been sparse: I suppose saturation bombing is the only way to get anything through to the public consciousness these days.

Still, enough with the hand-waving and rationalizations. Let us deal with the record.

Adjuvant • January 16, 2014 6:56 PM

Also, for the record lest someone mistake my words :”saturation bombing” was intended here as a metaphorical expression for media coverage saturation and nothing else.