The title of this post would make it seem as though I’m an idiot who doesn’t know right from wrong, so please allow me to explain.

First of all, I have no idea what conclusions will be drawn by 60 Minutes on this report scheduled for Sunday evening.

If someone you trust comes to you and vouches for the truth of a report by a spy and you use that information as the basis of a claim of WMD held by Iraq, if you believe what was told and you repeat it only to find out later it was not reliable information, are you guilty of telling a lie? Or are you guilty of trusting your security people to tell you the straight facts?

He eventually wound up in the care of German intelligence officials to whom he continued to spin his tale of biological weapons. His plan succeeded partially because he had worked briefly at the plant outside Baghdad and his descriptions of it were mostly accurate. He embellished his account by saying 12 workers had been killed by biological agents in an accident at the plant.

More than a hundred summaries of his debriefings were sent to the CIA, which then became a pillar - along with the now-disproved Iraqi quest for uranium for nuclear weapons - for the U.S. decision to bomb and then invade Iraq. The CIA-director George Tenet gave Alwan’s information to Secretary of State Colin Powell to use at the U.N. in his speech justifying military action against Iraq.

Tenet gave the information to Powell despite a letter - a copy of which 60 Minutes obtained - addressed to him by the head of German intelligence stating that Alwan appeared to be believable, but there was no evidence to verify his story.

Through a spokesman, Tenet denies ever seeing the letter. “[Tenet] needs to talk to his special assistants if he didn’t see it,” says Tyler Drumheller, a former CIA senior official. “I am sure they showed it to him and I am sure … it wasn’t what they wanted to see,” he tells Simon.

Other CIA officials doubted Curve Ball’s authenticity, including former Central Group Chief Margaret Henoch, who speaks publicly for the first time, telling Simon she openly refuted Alwan’s story. “And it was like ‘Whack a Mole.’ He just popped right back up. It was unbelievable.”

Alwan was caught when CIA interrogators were finally allowed to question him and confronted him with evidence that his story could not be as he described it. Weapons inspectors had examined the plant at Djerf al Nadaf before the fall of Baghdad and found no evidence of biological agents.

Obviously someone lied, but was it the President of the United States or the CIA Director at the time, Bill Clinton’s appointee George Tenet, who said the information was a “slam dunk”?

Whatever the case, I hope 60 Minutes can be fair and objective in this story and point the finger of blame where it belongs. Wherever it may point.

I do not normally watch 60 Minutes but I will set my TiVo to record it this week to see this report.

This guy was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

A CIA inquiry has accused the agency’s ex-chief George Tenet and his aides of failing to prepare for al-Qaeda threats before the 9/11 attacks on the US.
“The agency and its officers did not discharge their responsibilities in a satisfactory manner,” the CIA inspector general wrote in a scathing report.

The document was completed in June 2005 and kept classified until now. Its release was ordered by Congress.

Mr Tenet, former CIA director, said the inspector general was “flat wrong”.

But some former CIA employees have told the BBC that the criticisms are justified.

Mr Tenet, who enjoyed strong support from President George W Bush, resigned in 2004 citing “personal reasons”.

The review team led by Inspector General John Helgerson found no “single point of failure” that would have stopped the attacks on 11 September 2001.

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May be we’ll have mini protests.

A day after George Bush compared the potential consequences of exiting Iraq to the aftermath of the Vietnam conflict, US intelligence will today warn that extremists could create a “mini-Tet” in the country, an official revealed.
The defence official said the national intelligence assessment, due to be released later today, warned extremists could attempt sensational attacks in an attempt to replicate the 1968 Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Tet offensive, which decisively undermined public support for the Vietnam war in the US.

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Speaks for itself

WASHINGTON — National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell pulled the curtain back on previously classified details of government surveillance and of a secretive court whose recent rulings created new hurdles for the Bush administration as it tries to prevent terrorism.

McConnell’s comments _ made in an interview with the El Paso Times last week and posted as a transcript on the newspaper’s web site Wednesday _ raised eyebrows for their frank discussion of previously classified eavesdropping work conducted under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA. Among the disclosures:

_ McConnell confirmed for the first time that the private sector assisted with President Bush’s warrantless surveillance program. AT&T, Verizon and other telecommunications companies are being sued for their cooperation. “Now if you play out the suits at the value they’re claimed, it would bankrupt these companies,” McConnell said, arguing that they deserve immunity for their help.

_ He provided new details on court rulings handed down by the 11-member Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which approves classified eavesdropping operations and whose proceedings are almost always entirely secret. McConnell said a ruling that went into effect May 31 required the government to get court warrants to monitor communications between two foreigners if the conversation travels on a wire in the U.S. network. Millions of calls each day do, because of the robust nature of the U.S. systems.

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Must be talking about some of that actionable intelligence that candidates keep talking about needing before going to war. This is just plain crazy.

As many as 60 people within the CIA read a cable referring to two of the 19 hijackers involved in the attacks on America on September 11 2001 before the event, yet the information was not shared with the parts of the organisation able to do anything about it, according to the agency’s own internal investigation.
The revelation is one of several damning findings from the CIA’s own watchdog, the inspector general, drawn up in June 2005. He accuses the CIA’s top officials in the run-up to 9/11, including the then director, George Tenet, of failure to devise a strategic plan to counter Osama bin Laden in advance of the attacks.

A 19-page summary of the inspector’s report was published yesterday under a new congressional law passed earlier this month, having been kept secret since it was written. It underlines the depth of infighting between the CIA and the National Security Agency which prevented clear lines of responsibility in the fight against al-Qaida.

Though the report found no evidence of misconduct or illegality, it bluntly stated that CIA officers “did not discharge their responsibilities in a satisfactory manner”. The inspector, John Helgerson, went as far as to recommend further panels of inquiry into the conduct of key individuals within the agency to see whether disciplinary action should be taken against them.

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Here is one for you.

A new court decision could begin to roll back some post-9/11 government secrecy that has forced nearly two dozen intelligence-related cases out of federal courts without rulings.

In a ruling unsealed last month, a federal appeals court questioned the application of the so-called “state secrets” privilege, which government lawyers can use to encourage a judge to drop a case by arguing it jeopardizes national security.

By using the privilege, government lawyers assert that if the case were to continue, they could be forced to divulge secrets that are vital to the nation’s security. If judges agree — as they nearly always do — they dismiss the case.

In a secret June ruling, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the dismissal on those grounds of a 1994 suit by a former Drug Enforcement Administration official who claimed the U.S. government had illegally wiretapped his communications when he was working out of Rangoon, Burma.

The state secrets privilege was not broad enough to throw out the entire case, the court ruled. With sufficient unclassified evidence already on hand, the court determined the case should be allowed to proceed.

The ruling could have an impact on current lawsuits involving classified programs, including suits against AT&T and the National Security Agency over the Terrorist Surveillance Program (TSP), which is alleged to have involved data and communications of Americans, according to experts.

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The CIA is going to declassify hundreds of pages of skeletons in its closet next week.

The CIA will declassify hundreds of pages of long-secret records detailing some of the intelligence agency’s worst illegal abuses — the so-called “family jewels” documenting a quarter-century of overseas assassination attempts, domestic spying, kidnapping and infiltration of leftist groups from the 1950s to the 1970s, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said yesterday.

The documents, to be publicly released next week, also include accounts of break-ins and theft, the agency’s opening of private mail to and from China and the Soviet Union, wiretaps and surveillance of journalists, and a series of “unwitting” tests on U.S. civilians, including the use of drugs.

“Most of it is unflattering, but it is CIA’s history,” Hayden said in a speech to a conference of foreign policy historians. The documents have been sought for decades by historians, journalists and conspiracy theorists and have been the subject of many fruitless Freedom of Information Act requests.

In anticipation of the CIA’s release, the National Security Archive at George Washington University yesterday published a separate set of documents from January 1975 detailing internal government discussions of the abuses. Those documents portray a rising sense of panic within the administration of President Gerald R. Ford that what then-CIA Director William E. Colby called “skeletons” in the CIA’s closet had begun to be revealed in news accounts.

A New York Times article by reporter Seymour Hersh about the CIA’s infiltration of antiwar groups, published in December 1974, was “just the tip of the iceberg,” then-Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger warned Ford, according to a Jan. 3 memorandum of their conversation.

Kissinger warned that if other operations were divulged, “blood will flow,” saying, “For example, Robert Kennedy personally managed the operation on the assassination of [Cuban President Fidel] Castro.” Kennedy was the attorney general from 1961 to 1964.

We’ll get to see how history really was made I guess.

The Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday questioned the continuing value of the Central Intelligence Agency’s secret interrogation program for terrorism suspects, suggesting that international condemnation and the obstacles it has created to criminal prosecution may outweigh its worth in gathering information.

The committee rejected by one vote a Democratic proposal that would essentially have cut money for the program by banning harsh interrogation techniques except in dire emergencies, a committee report revealed.

“More than five years after the decision to start the program,” the report said, “the committee believes that consideration should be given to whether it is the best means to obtain a full and reliable intelligence debriefing of a detainee.”

It added: “Both the Congress and the administration must continue to evaluate whether having a separate C.I.A. detention program that operates under different interrogation rules than those applicable to military and law enforcement officers is necessary, lawful and in the best interests of the United States.”

The sweeping report, which accompanies the annual bill authorizing the activities of all of the spy agencies, reflects a striking reassertion of aggressive oversight since Democrats took control of Congress this year. Some Republicans joined in the skeptical language about several spying programs, and the report as a whole was approved 12 to 3, with the backing of all eight Democrats and four of the seven Republicans.

Story here