Free Republic

The FBI has blocked two of its veteran counterterrorism agents from going public with accusations that the CIA deliberately withheld crucial intelligence before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. FBI Special Agents Mark Rossini and Douglas Miller have asked for permission to appear in an upcoming public television documentary, scheduled to air in January, on pre-9/11 rivalries between the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency. The program is a spin-off from The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America, by acclaimed investigative reporter James Bamford, due out in a matter of days. The FBI denied Rossini...

7:45am - Victoria Toensing, Former Deputy Assistant Attorney General, 1984-88, & James Bamford, Author, “The Puzzle Palace” Looks like they're on until 8:30 or so.

In addition Bamford suggests that the CIA caved in to pressure from hard-liners. He quotes a CIA case officer who says that in January 2003, one of the agency's higher-ups called a meeting and said, "If Bush wants to go to war, it's your job to give him a reason to do so." Bamford is highly persuasive in recounting how U.S. intelligence agencies lacked specialists in many key Middle Eastern languages and a sufficient number of analysts to grapple with an avalanche of cyber-age data, and shows how even though Americans like John Walker Lindh had been secretly joining Al...

"Liberty" Posted: 2003-12-19 Thirty-six years ago, the Israelis attacked a U.S. Navy ship sailing near the Sinai Peninsula. 34 American sailors were killed, and 172 others were wounded. The Israelis said the attack was a tragic mistake, and the U.S. government's official ruling was that the attack was an accident. Yet all the evidence says the attack was deliberate. First, a little bit of background. In 1967, the USS Liberty was a lightly armed National Security Agency intelligence ship in charge of gathering information and keeping an eye on Egyptian and Israeli actions during the Six-Day War. One could call...