FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Published at Colorado911Visibility.org
Press Contact: Robert Boutton (323) 300-5376 www.SecrecyKills.com
In a never-before-seen interview, Richard Clarke, former White House Counterterror “Tsar” to Presidents Clinton and Bush, goes on record about what he believes happened at CIA in the run-up to the 9/11 attacks, accusing then-CIA Director George Tenet and two of his deputies of deliberately not informing the White House, FBI, and Defense Department about two future hijackers inside U.S., then covering up from the 9/11 investigations. His comments air and stream Thursday, August 11, 2010 at 7 p.m. MDT on Colorado Public Television (CPT12) and simultaneously go live on SecrecyKills.com , along with CIA reaction.
News of the premiere set off attacks on Clarke from three of those he singled out. Tenet and former CIA officials Cofer Black and Richard Blee, chiefs of CounterTerrorist Center and Bin Laden Station respectively on 9/11, have issued a one-page joint statement to the producers calling Clarke’s comments “reckless and profoundly wrong.” Significantly, this is the only statement Blee has issued publicly since the intelligence failure of September 11th and, indeed, the first time his real name has been made public in the major media.
Filmmaker-journalists John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski conducted the interview in 2009 for a documentary to be released on the 9/11 tenth anniversary entitled “Who Is Rich Blee?”, promising further revelations from Commission Chairman Tom Kean and other government insiders, produced by transparency advocates SecrecyKills.com in association with media company Globalvision, winner of the George Polk Journalism Award. They will be appearing live in-studio on Thursday night to introduce the footage and discuss.
CPT12 obtained world premiere rights after being the first PBS affiliate to air the filmmakers’ 2006 documentary Press For Truth, an event that brought the station both controversy and national attention. That movie received favorable reviews during its brief theatrical run and has aired on national public television in Spain, Norway, and Poland, also Al Jazeera and Australia’s History Channel, telling the story of four Sept 11th widows who battled the Bush White House for the creation of the 9/11 Commission.
CIA’s failure to tell FBI about the Jan. 2000 U.S. entry of Khalid Al-Mihdhar and Nawaf Al-Hazmi has been well-known since the Congressional Inquiry of 2002. Hazmi and Mihdhar allegedly served a leadership role in the 9/11 plot and were on the plane that crashed into the Pentagon. Richard Clarke now sheds considerable new light on the incident.
“To this day it is inexplicable why, when I had every other detail about everything related to terrorism, the Director [Tenet] didn’t tell me, the Director of CounterTerrorism Center [Black] didn’t tell me, the other forty-eight people at CIA who knew about it never mentioned it to me or anyone in my staff in a period of over twelve months,” explains Clarke. “We therefore conclude that there was a high level decision in the CIA ordering people not to share that information.”
Tenet, Black, and Blee were each promoted or awarded after the attacks and went on to be connected to various Bush-era scandals. All have so far refused the producers’ requests to detail their sides of the story.
END
Related:
Published at Secrecykills.com : Joint statement in response to the video by CIA Director George Tenet, CTC Director J. Cofer Black, and Richard Blee of Alec Station.
Joint Statement from George J. Tenet, Cofer Black and Richard Blee August 3, 2011
Richard Clarke was an able public servant who served his country well for many years. But his recently released comments about the run up to 9/11 are reckless and profoundly wrong.
Clarke starts with the presumption that important information on the travel of future hijackers to the United States was intentionally withheld from him in early 2000. It was not.
He wildly speculates that it must have been the CIA Director who could have ordered the information withheld. There was no such order. In fact, the record shows that the Director and other senior CIA officials were unaware of the information until after 9/11.
The handling of the information in question was exhaustively looked at by the 9/11 Commission, the Congressional Joint Inquiry, the CIA Inspector General and other groups.
The 9/11 Commission quite correctly concluded that “…no one informed higher levels of management in either the FBI or CIA about the case.”
In early 2000, a number of more junior personnel (including FBI agents on detail to CIA) did see travel information on individuals who later became hijackers but the significance of the data was not adequately recognized at the time.
Since 9/11 many systemic changes have been made to improve the watchlisting process and enhance information sharing within and across agencies.
Building on his false notion that information was intentionally withheld, Mr. Clarke went on to speculate–which he admits is based on nothing other than his imagination–that the CIA might have been trying to recruit these two future hijackers as agents. This, like much of what Mr. Clarke said in his interview, is utterly without foundation.
Many years after testifying himself at length before the 9/11 Commission and writing several books but making no mention of his wild theory, Mr. Clarke has suddenly invented baseless allegations which are belied by the record and unworthy of serious consideration.
We testified under oath about what we did, what we knew and what we didn’t know. We stand by that testimony.
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