ABC Mini-series - Path to 9/11

[TurnandBurn55]

No, I was asking him for references indicating that people actually knew that that particular scene was dramatized. He said that no one believed it; I was just asking for a link.

Feel free to read "Imperial Hubris" or "Through Our Enemies Eyes" by Anonymous (aka Michael Scheuer). The author was the head of the CIA's al-Qaeda unit... and he was very harsh and very specific on every opportunity missed. He was also ambivalent on Massoud's role, mentioning him several times. If there had been some phone call from Ahmed Shah Massoud to the CIA warning us of an al-Qaeda plot "involving aviation" prior to 9/11, you'd think that he would have mentioned it.

 

[Cate]

^^
Sigh.

Allow me to repeat, one last time, for those with reading comprehension issues: You referred to a specific "dramatized" scene in the movie. You indicated that no one actually believed that said scene was real. I asked you for evidence supporting your contention that no one actually believed said scene was real. The question isn't about the scene itself, but about people's perception of the scene, and your contention that said perception is accurate, a contention which you have yet to defend.

And, for the record, I'm still waiting.

Good lord. Hooked on phonics may well work for you.

 

[The Chief]

Based on my experience, the film contained very accurate depictions of events, but as some have pointed out, it was fiction. For example, it was not actually Ahmed Shah Massoud, it was an actor. Albright was not in the film, but rather someone dressed and with make-up to resemble Albright. All these points have been made, several times over. Another example, the alleged “Principal’s Meeting” scene was laughable. It was more like a Inter-agency Working Group Meeting. Principal nor Deputies Meetings are anything like what was portrayed. Some of less than average bears in the woods have a hard time dealing with this portrayal of events by actors, thus I can understand why they would call it fiction. Having said that the scenes were totally perdictable. The ususal individual agency positions were very life like: CIA - We know everything, but we cannot tell you, it is classified: State Dept: We must be careful. We will make (fill in the blank) angry, let us dialog with them. Defense Department: Let us bomb them back to the stone age. NSC - The latest polls say (fill in the blanks) At all costs we must protect our political structure. They are rather standard positions in almost any IAWG.

On the plus side, the portrayal of Sandy Berger was fantastic. I knew him back to his days at the US Chamber of Commerce. Yes, he even then had a bright brown ring around his nose, then. Related: When we heard of him in stuffing Top Secret/SCI documents down in his pants to steal them. Almost chocked with laughter. So ... well Sandy.

The portrayal of Albright was also very good. She appeared to be afraid of her shadow. More than one meeting on Embassy security, she wanted to have more “Morines”. I think she wanted a battalion at each Embassy.

George Tenet, in the film, while played by an actor, was vintage George Tenet. Truly a Stand up Guy, politically I would list him as a moderate independent. From a small town in Albania, Greek Heritage, worked for Sen Heinz, when went to the NSC. Nominated to CIA by Clinton after his nomination of Tony Lake died in committee.

The doubts about Al-Queda being responsible for WTC/Pentagon is on target. Initially, it was thought that it was the work of Saddam. It was about four hours, after we received the airlines manifests, reports from crew member on the flight as to the perp’s seating assignment, only then did we realize it was UBL.

The problem in many of the agencies, such as the State Department have nothing to do with political parties. State is ran by some very senior Foreign Service Officers who know the average Politico will only be on board an average of less than 2 years. They simply, stall, work the informal power structure and wait out who ever heads the Department to leave. In dire circumstances, they begin to leak information and dis-information.

The trouble with CIA is folks like Valerie Plame. She is not more an undercover CIA agent that they lady in the moon. She is the wife of an Ambassador who gets her way. The saying in the agency is “The Ambassador’s wife wants (fill in the blank). Not to pick on Valerie, so many of the executive layer of CIA is filled with wives of Senators, Congressmen, Judges, lobbyists and the rich and powerful of rich Washington suburbs. One of the reasons moral at the agency is so low. They even pushed through a law some years ago that protected them. Intended to protect undercover agents, that structure had themselves included, even though their job was simply to drive their desk down the road. Pitiful. But picking on Valerie, and she is by no means alone, where is the outrage that she hired her husband, with his admitted lack of any knowledge of WMB to go to Niger, paid him $250,000 for the trip, (bet the proceeds went directly to their joint bank account). That she only recommended is pig wash, the “Ambassador’s Wife Wants” and she gets.

I could go on and on, but gotta plane to catch. Hope my insight helps.

 

[Flash]

The trouble with CIA is folks like Valerie Plame. She is not more an undercover CIA agent that they lady in the moon. She is the wife of an Ambassador who gets her way. The saying in the agency is “The Ambassador’s wife wants (fill in the blank). Not to pick on Valerie, so many of the executive layer of CIA is filled with wives of Senators, Congressmen, Judges, lobbyists and the rich and powerful of rich Washington suburbs. One of the reasons moral at the agency is so low. They even pushed through a law some years ago that protected them. Intended to protect undercover agents, that structure had themselves included, even though their job was simply to drive their desk down the road. Pitiful. But picking on Valerie, and she is by no means alone, where is the outrage that she hired her husband, with his admitted lack of any knowledge of WMB to go to Niger, paid him $250,000 for the trip, (bet the proceeds went directly to their joint bank account). That she only recommended is pig wash, the “Ambassador’s Wife Wants” and she gets.

I could go on and on, but gotta plane to catch. Hope my insight helps.

Well, she is not an agent anymore since she just retired.

Valerie Plame Wilson was officially an undercover agent. It is an official designation and she had previously served as an agent in non-official cover in Europe. She was an undervcover agent before she met her husband and while she was driving a desk back in DC her association with the CIA was still classified.

And I don't know where you got your information about the Intelligence Identities Protection Act but it was written as a result of two infamous instances: the murder of Richard Welch, the CIA Station Chief in Athens whose identidy had been compromised http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/rwelch.htm and the publishing of a book by a former CIA agent, Phillip Agee, that listed the names of undercover CIA agents in Sotuh America.

There has only been one instance where it was used, when CIA agent Sharon Scranage revealed to her Ghanian boyfriend the names of 5 CIA agents. Not exactly the "wives of Senators, Congressmen, Judges, lobbyists and the rich and powerful of rich Washington suburbs". None of whom I have run into when I have dealt with CIA personnel. I must have missed that club meeting.......:icon_roll As for the broader political intrigues at the CIA and other agencies, I am not that high up the food chain.....

Here is the text of the law: http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/laws/iipa.html

 

[The Chief]

Beg to disagree. She was never an undercover agent, perhaps between the sheets, but not undercover. :icon_smil

 

[Flash]

Beg to disagree. She was never an undercover agent, perhaps between the sheets, but not undercover. :icon_smil

This is the best open source stuff I can find, good enough for you? Definitely not Jane Bond, apprently was not in a very deep non-official cover position, but not an Ambassadors' wife for most of her career.....

"Valerie Wilson was a CIA officer. In July 2003, the fact that Valerie Wilson was a CIA officer was classified. Not only was it classified, but it was not widely known outside the intelligence community.

Valerie Wilson's friends, neighbors, college classmates had no idea she had another life.

The fact that she was a CIA officer was not well- known, for her protection or for the benefit of all us. It's important that a CIA officer's identity be protected, that it be protected not just for the officer, but for the nation's security.

Valerie Wilson's cover was blown in July 2003. The first sign of that cover being blown was when Mr. Novak published a column on July 14th, 2003."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/28/AR2005102801340.html

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,524486-1,00.html

 

[TurnandBurn55]

Well, she is not an agent anymore since she just retired.

Valerie Plame Wilson was officially an undercover agent.

You may want to double-check your basic terminology first. The term "agent" is a one Hollywood and the liberal media uses for CIA case officers. It has no basis in reality. There's nothing "official" about her being an "agent" any more than you or me are officially Navy "navigators".

 

[pourts]

Valerie Plame Wilson was officially an undercover agent. It is an official designation and she had previously served as an agent in non-official cover in Europe. She was an undervcover agent before she met her husband and while she was driving a desk back in DC her association with the CIA was still classified.

I love this thread, it covers everything.

"When the Tribune searched for Plame on an Internet service that sells public information about private individuals to its subscribers, it got a report of more than 7,600 words. Included was the fact that in the early 1990s her address was "AMERICAN EMBASSY ATHENS ST, APO NEW YORK NY 09255."
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/...plame-story,1,2504459.story?coll=chi-news-hed
Listing your address as the US embassy is not something a Non-Official Cover agent would do.

Cate said: "You indicated that no one actually believed that said scene was real. I asked you for evidence supporting your contention that no one actually believed said scene was real."

Maybe we should conduct an Airwarriors poll to be scientific, but I for one think that particular scene was dramatized, and so did the people I watched it with. Happy? I don't have reading comprehension issues, I just get distracted by your hilarious pink kitten and viking helm.

 

[Brett327]

You may want to double-check your basic terminology first. The term "agent" is a one Hollywood and the liberal media uses for CIA case officers. It has no basis in reality. There's nothing "official" about her being an "agent" any more than you or me are officially Navy "navigators".

Good point. Without getting into the minutiae, there are many levels of cover, official or otherwise, in the IC. Sometimes, CIA personnel are placed in various corporations with international connections. This represents the bulk of the "unofficial cover" billets for CIA and is likely the role Plame played. It seems pretty clear that Plame wasn't a DO case officer. She wasn't James Bond, so give it a rest, people.

Brett

 

[thenuge]

She wasn't James Bond, so give it a rest, people.
Brett

Jane Bond, perhaps...

 

[The Chief]

This is the best open source stuff I can find, good enough for you?

If you are looking for "Open Source" information, most all of it is biased one way other the other. From first hand knowledge I have, this is more accurate than most:

From “Human Events” September, 6, 2006


......The media's conspiracy theory is:

Wilson said Bush's famed "16 words" in his 2003 State of the Union address -- "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa" -- were a lie.


Wilson's wife was then revealed to be an "undercover" spy at the CIA, exposing Wilson and his family to danger.


Therefore, she was "outed" by the White House as retaliation against Wilson for calling Bush a liar.


Point No. 1 of liberals' conspiracy theory has been proved false since Britain's Butler Commission reviewed its government's pre-war intelligence on Iraq and concluded that "the British government had intelligence from several different sources indicating that this visit was for the purpose of acquiring uranium."

It was again proved false when our own Senate Intelligence Committee also concluded, in July 2004, that Saddam Hussein had sought uranium from Niger.

So there went the White House's motive for muddying up Wilson: Government fact-finding commissions, here and in the United Kingdom, were muddying up Wilson on their own simply by finding facts.

Point No. 2, that Wilson's wife was an undercover agent, has been proved false even to the willfully blind since Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald announced the conclusion to his pointless investigation last year, saying that Plame's employment with the CIA was not undercover, but merely "classified."

Everything is "classified" at the CIA. They have no idea when 19 terrorists are about to hijack commercial aircraft and slaughter 3,000 Americans, but the CIA is very good at play-acting James Bond spy games.

How covert was Valerie Plame at the CIA? Her top-secret code name was "Valerie Plame."

All this should have been enough to end conspiracy theories of White House skullduggery. But the nation's newsrooms simply continued asserting that someone in the Bush White House had "outed" Valerie Plame, despite the fact that revealing her employment with the CIA was not illegal.

Thus, as recently as January of this year, a New York Times editorial said the issue of the "leak" about Wilson's wife, whom the Times called "a covert CIA operative whose identity was leaked" (two strikes already), concerned "whether the White House was using this information in an attempt to silence Mrs. Wilson's husband, a critic of the Iraq invasion."

Wilson was more precise about the White House "leaker," variously naming Karl Rove, Lewis Libby and Dick Cheney as the source. He even described "a meeting in the suite of offices that the vice president occupies, chaired by either the vice president or Mr. Libby," where, Wilson said, the decision was made to destroy him.

(If the secret plan hatched in the vice president's office was to send evil spirits to enter Wilson's body and make him act like a fool, the plan worked brilliantly.)

Now it turns out, even point No. 3 of liberals' conspiracy theory was false: The original "leaker" of Plame's name to columnist Bob Novak -- not a crime -- was not in the White House at all. It was Richard Armitage, a State Department official and opponent of the Iraq war.

The information that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA had nothing to do with harming Wilson. It did not come from the White House. It did not even come from someone who supported the war in Iraq.

The rest of the world found out Armitage was Novak's source last week, something Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald knew from the first week of his investigation. So what was Fitzgerald investigating?

.....


What was Fitzgerald investigating? Not only was there no underlying crime, there was not even -- as the Times put it -- "an attempt to silence Mrs. Wilson's husband" (or an attempt "to respond to people calling you a liar in the New York Times," as normal people put it).

Fitzgerald's entire investigation was nothing but a perjury trap from beginning to end for anyone who misremembered anything about who told whom what about a low-level nobody at the CIA who happened to be married to a Walter Mitty fantasist.:icon_smil :icon_smil

 

[TurnandBurn55]

For example, it was not actually Ahmed Shah Massoud, it was an actor.

And honestly, the inclusion of Massoud was what drew me to watching the miniseries. Our relationship (or lack thereof) with him under Clinton was a point that has been grossly, grossly underreported in the liberal media. How many Americans do you think even knew who he was before this show? I remember on 9/11, I was in college and we saw rocket attacks on Kabul that night... everyone was wondering if we'd started airstrikes... "Uhh... you guys know that Afghanistan is in a civil war??"

The point got across very well that we had an ally in Afghanistan. He'd been relatively pro-Western since the 80s. He'd been an enemy of the Taliban, he was a charismatic leader admired by many ethnic groups, and was well-known and supported in several western countries. He was an effective, even brilliant military leader. He volunteered his services to help us in the mid-late 90s.

And there were heated debates as to how much support we should give the dude. The CIA sent guys to help him (only to observe, though). Maybe if we wanted to get reallllly accurate, Cate, we could have included Congressman Rohrabacher's meeting with Massoud. We could have included how he pushed hard for assistance to the Northern Alliance, how he pointed out that Clinton's aid ended up squarely in the hands of the Taliban, and how his Democrat rivals branded him a traitor.

We could have also pointed out out how Clinton's official contact with Massoud was sending Bill Richardson to Afghanistan... and his "official" policy was to try to convince the Northern Alliance to disarm.

No? At the end of the day, the point was made. We had an ally in Afghanistan-- a guy who was a hell of lot better of a dancing partner than Hamid Karzai-- and Clinton was simply too stupid to engage him.

Oh no, but that's not the problem. The REAL problem is that an ABC miniseries showed a conversation that didn't actually happen, huh?

Hooked on phonics? Try "hooked on logic"

 

[The Chief]

... Hooked on phonics? Try "hooked on logic"

I think one of the big picture points of the series was that 9/11 was not the fault of any one administration. For example, 9/11 the Bush administration was not yet totally in place. Another example, during the first Clinton administration, I did not have a boss for over 2 years (Undersecretary was not nominated). So for those 2 years, little changed, we were still marching to Bush #1 directives. Also easy to forget, Clinton was being successfully impeached. only the second time in our history, and hounded by the press in a manner similar to current Bush. They had a rope around his neck.

Our system is the worst system possible, wait, except for all the others.

 

[Flash]

You may want to double-check your basic terminology first. The term "agent" is a one Hollywood and the liberal media uses for CIA case officers. It has no basis in reality. There's nothing "official" about her being an "agent" any more than you or me are officially Navy "navigators".

Sorry about the terminology screw up, she was an Intelligence Officer (that is the official term).

As for exposing her, there are people who association with the CIA is classified and she was one of them. My association with the agency I work for is not classified (though I am not going to advertise who I work for) but I know several people who work at the same place and their association is classified. I can tell you from first hand experience that this is not wasted on Ambassadors wives or socialites. It is not to be taken lightly, period.

Whether or not Valerie Plame was Jane Bond or Johnny English her association with the CIA was classified. Now you can make all the excuses in the world about how she really wasn't an undercover case officer, she just drove a desk, she was just some admin pogue, whatever the heck you want to say. But, it is not anyone's business to make her association public but the officials at the CIA or thier bosses (DNI and the President), PERIOD.

I don't care if you think it is in the best interest of the nation, if you hate her, if she is just some admin pogue, it is not any else's choice to declassify her association with the CIA. That is the same tired and pathetic excuse Johnathan Pollard uses to excuse his spying for Israel. "They are our ally.....they deserved the info.....I was just helping a friend". I don't care, it is not your place to to declassify anything. Why don't you all read this quote again:

"Valerie Wilson was a CIA officer. In July 2003, the fact that Valerie Wilson was a CIA officer was classified. Not only was it classified, but it was not widely known outside the intelligence community."

Any deliberate attempt to expose her knowing that her association with the CIA was classified was against the law. Apparently, the fact that her association with the CIA was classified was not well known and therefore the letter of the law was probably not broken. However, to try and excuse exposing her because she was not Jane Bond or some super-secret case officer is a pathetically half-hearted attempt to excuse something that should not have happened in the first place. While many of my co-workers don't agree with Wilson or his inflated sense of self-importance most do not like the fact that his wife's classified association with the CIA was exposed.

I am sorry, but you can't excuse stupidity or breaking the rules for some stupid reason like this (if not the law in this case). Just because you think that something that is classified should be made public because you think it should be does not make is the right thing to do. It is awfully arrogant to think that, and shame on those who do. I don't care what you f#@cking agenda is, you break a rule like this it is almost always inexcusable, whether you are Sandy Berger, Johnathan Pollard, Daniel Ellsberg, Scooter Libby or Richard Armitage, you break the rules you deserve to pay. Period. Anyone suggesting otherwise has no business being in the intelligence field, maybe not even the military. :icon_rage

 

[TurnandBurn55]

I think the point that is lost here is the relative amount of media attention granted to this incident. Nobody is excusing the leak of classified information-- indeed, the blase attitude so many have had toward that continues to damage US national security.

But I think it's worth asking why the whole Valerie Plame business has gotten so much more media attention than the already-mentioned Deutsch and Berger gaffs. Why has it gotten so much more attention than the profoundly stupid decision to leak to the Washington Post, on 24 August 1998, that we had electronically intercepted bin Laden's phone conversations? As a result, you know, we kinda lost an intelligence edge which, I dunno, might have been important in future events...

Why has it gotten THIS much attention? The cynic in me says it's a symptom of the whole "free pass" the media wants to give Clinton, while dragging the Bush Administration through the mud at any opporunity.

The reality is that it's because everyone believes that Valerie Plame was some sort of deep-cover agent, and the leak of her identity compromised her overseas operatives and endangered her life. I echo Brett... get over it, folks.