Recently by Tom Burghardt: Big Brother FBI
New revelations about the failed Christmas Day attack on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 continue to emerge as does evidence of a systematic cover-up.
With the White House in crisis mode since the attempted bombing, President Obama met for two hours January 5 with top security and intelligence officials. Obama said that secret state agencies "had sufficient information to uncover the terror plot … but that intelligence officials had ‘failed to connect those dots’," The New York Times reports.
The latest iteration of the "dot theory" floated by the President, aided and abetted by a compliant media, claims "this was not a failure to collect intelligence" but rather, "a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had."
"Mr. Obama’s stark assessment that the government failed to properly analyze and integrate intelligence served as a sharp rebuke of the country’s intelligence agencies," declared the Times uncritically.
While the President’s remarks may have offered a "sharp [rhetorical] rebuke," Obama’s statement suggests that no one will be held accountable. Indeed, the President "was standing by his top national security advisers, including those whose agencies failed to communicate with one another."
While the President may be "standing by" his national security advisers, the question is, are the denizens of America’s secret state standing by him? One well-connected Washington insider, MSNBC pundit Richard Wolffe, isn’t so sure.
Renegade: The Making o...
Best Price: $0.25
Buy New $1.86
(as of 12:25 UTC - Details)
Wolffe, the author of a flattering portrait of Obama, Renegade: The Making of a President, when asked on MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann January 4 what is the White House "focus here right now?" Wolffe’s startling reply: "Is this conspiracy or cock up? It seems that the president is leaning very much towards thinking this was a systemic failure by individuals who maybe had an alternative agenda." (emphasis added)
"I will accept that intelligence by its nature is imperfect" the President said, "but it is increasingly clear that intelligence was not fully analyzed or fully leveraged."
The question is why? And more pertinently from a parapolitical perspective, what "alternative agenda" is playing out here that would put the lives of nearly 300 air passengers at risk?
British Evidence: Down the Memory Hole
As Antifascist Calling reported last week, The Sunday Times and The Observer newspapers disclosed that MI5 had built a dossier on Abdulmutallab which showed "his repeated contacts with MI5 targets who were subject to phone taps, email intercepts and other forms of surveillance."
It has since emerged, the Associated Press reported January 4, that British authorities began assembling a security file on Abdulmutallab shortly after his arrival the UK in 2005 when officials claimed he was in contact with "known radicals."
Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s spokesperson Simon Lewis said on Monday, "Clearly there was security information about this individual’s activities, and that was information that was shared with the U.S. authorities. That is the key point."
In a climb-down from Lewis’s admission, The Wall Street Journal reported that Home Secretary Alan Johnson, whose brief includes MI5, said in an appearance before Parliament Tuesday, "Whilst we did provide information to the U.S., according to standard operational practices, linked to the wider aspect of this case, none of the information we held or shared indicated that Abdulmutallab was about to attempt a terrorist attack against the U.S."
The Brown government has steadfastly refused to say just when the file on Abdulmutallab was passed to the U.S., letting stand the implication it was sent before the aborted Christmas Day attack.
The Road to 9/11: Weal...
Best Price: $4.42
Buy New $19.52
(as of 12:30 UTC - Details)
The cover story being floated by MI5 now mendaciously claims the agency did not send Abdulmutallab’s security dossier on to American officials "because of concerns about breaching his human rights and privacy," The Sunday Times reported January 10.
"MI5 has privately conceded that as early as 2006 its surveillance operations had picked up ‘multiple communications’ between the 23-year-old Nigerian student and suspected terrorists in Britain," The Sunday Times disclosed.
Despite these concessions, we’re now to accept at face value the absurd claim that information on a terrorist suspect wasn’t passed along by British spooks to their closest ally "because of guidance from [MI5’s] legal department."
Trying selling that fairy tale to Republican victims of the secret state’s "human rights and privacy" campaign in Northern Ireland as The Sunday Herald revealed during their multiyear investigation into Britain’s dirty war!
Under intense pressure by the United States about these disclosures, the Brown government has gone to great lengths to stress "the importance to Britain of close intelligence cooperation with the United States."
Still reeling however, from U.S. threats to cut-off intelligence sharing last summer if torture evidence was disclosed to the public by the British High Court, the government is moving to avoid a similar controversy over the Abdulmutallab affair.
Spying Blind: The CIA,...
Best Price: $5.77
Buy New $20.16
(as of 10:37 UTC - Details)
In late July, The Guardian revealed that "Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, personally intervened to suppress evidence of CIA collusion in the torture of a British resident, the high court heard today." The Guardian also reported that MI5 chief Jonathan Evans said in a speech in October that the "Security Service had been ‘slow to detect the emerging pattern of US practice in the period after 9/11’."
While the torture files were eventually released in late October by a High Court order, it is certainly reasonable to ask: what other "U.S. practice(s)" are being suppressed today by the Brown government?
The Independent confirms this and states, "The Downing Street comments were reported to have angered the US government, but after talks with the White House, Mr Brown’s spokesman tried to lower the diplomatic temperature. He said relations remained ‘excellent’ between the two countries."
As part of a new and improved sanitized narrative, the Home Office now claims that Abdulmutallab’s transformation into an erstwhile suicide bomber began only after he left Britain. This, despite revelations by The Sunday Times last week, that he stoked MI5’s interest precisely because of his repeated contacts with individuals "who were subject to phone taps, email intercepts and other forms of surveillance."
FBI, CIA, the Mob, and...
Best Price: $12.00
Buy New $27.99
(as of 11:35 UTC - Details)
In a further development that can’t please the British state, The Guardian reported January 7, that Yemen’s Deputy Prime Minister for Defense and Security, Rashad al-Alimi, told a news conference that "information provided to us is that Umar Farouk joined al-Qaida in London."
The Wall Street Journal reports that al-Alimi said Thursday, that Abdulmutallab had "no links" to al-Qaeda "when he first came to Yemen in 2004 and 2005 to study Arabic" and that he "was radicalized during his time in the U.K., where he had studied between his two stints in Yemen," charges that "senior British counterterrorism officials" dismiss, claiming "there was no evidence to back them up."
Why then, would Abdulmutallab’s web-browsing habits, cell phone conversations as well as "other forms of surveillance" on "targets of interest" to British spooks indicate a "lack of evidence"? It would seem to suggest just the opposite.
Indeed, Abdulmutallab had been in "close contact" with "a key suspect in an Al-Qaeda plot to murder British citizens," according to MP Patrick Mercer, the chairman of the parliamentary counter-terrorism committee. Mercer told The Sunday Times January 10, that the alleged airline bomber "had been in touch" with the suspect, currently a resident in a high-security British prison awaiting trial, "while both men were students in London."
January 15, 2010
Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly and Global Research, an independent research and media group of writers, scholars, journalists and activists based in Montreal, his articles can be read on Dissident Voice, The Intelligence Daily, Pacific Free Press and the whistleblowing website Wikileaks. He is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military “Civil Disturbance” Planning, distributed by AK Press.
