Stencil graffiti of Osama bin Laden in Bucharest, Romania. (Photo: Bixentro / flickr)

Editor’s Note: A slightly different version of this report was originally published on Truthout on  June 13, 2011.

On the tenth anniversary of 9/11, just as he has done in years past, a top military intelligence analyst identified by the US government only as “Iron Man” will hunker down in front of his television and watch a particularly gruesome scene of the carnage left behind on that fateful day.

“Although I try to avoid it, I glimpse a film clip, a scene, of people throwing themselves from a burning tower, people who deserved better protection from their country, from me and the men I worked with, and I hear the sounds of the lobby in the [World Trade Center] on tape,” said the man, whose alter ego chosen by the government appears to be paying homage to the flawed Marvel Comics superhero. “To me, the sights and sounds, the smoke of that day are not yet history. They are a knot, a silence, a facial tick, a missing friend in Iraq. They are not history yet.”

For many Americans, the emotional reaction to President Barack Obama’s announcement that a Navy Seal team had killed Osama bin Laden during a raid at his compound in Pakistan was celebratory. But for others, like the mysterious Iron Man, who has spent his career lurking in the shadows, the death of the al-Qaeda leader is a painful reminder of how close he and his colleagues in the intelligence community came to capturing Bin Laden before 9/11.

The “intelligence failures” leading up to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon are an issue the media – and lawmakers – put to bed years ago, despite the fact that new information continues to trickle out, undercutting the integrity of the official investigations into who knew what and when.

It was an exclusive story Truthout published May 23 in the wake of Bin Laden’s death, focusing on a little-known intelligence unit ordered to stop tracking his movements prior to 9/11, that led Iron Man to contact Truthout to share previously undisclosed documents he recently obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which appear to cast further doubt on the official narrative and suggests high-level military and intelligence officials withheld key evidence from Congressional lawmakers probing the attacks.

The materials Iron Man provided to Truthout stand as the most revealing information to surface in years regarding Bin Laden and al-Qaeda’s plans to attack the United States.

This is the first page of “Iron Man’s” complaint to the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General related to intelligence work he did on Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. [Click here to download and read the documents.]

Formal Complaint

Five years ago, Iron Man, who requested Truthout conceal his true identity out of concern for his family’s privacy, lodged a formal complaint with the Department of Defense’s Office of Inspector General after he was accused of improperly handling classified material.

Iron Man filed a FOIA request in September 2006, seeking a declassified copy of the six-page complaint he filed with the inspector general’s office. He finally received a copy on April 8, just a few weeks prior to the raid on Bin Laden’s compound.

What he revealed in that letter, portions of which were redacted by the government because the information is classified, is the inner workings of an elite intelligence unit he headed at one point: the Asymmetric Threats Division, formed in 1999, and “charged with reporting on asymmetric threats, especially terrorism.”

The unit worked with Joint Task Force-Civil Support (JTF-CS), also set up in 1999. According to the Defense Department (DoD), JTF-CS was charged with supporting “terrorist response operations in the continental US” and providing “military assistance to civil authorities.”

The Asymmetric Threats Division is referred to as DO5, a branch of the Joint Forces Intelligence Command (JFIC), whose responsibilities included, among other things, vetting human intelligence sources on behalf of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). From 1998 to 2001, Iron Man was working as a counterterrorism/counterintelligence analyst for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), assigned to JFIC.

JFIC falls under the authority of the United States Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM) and “had a direct and assigned purview on international terrorism against the US, to include the operations of al-Qa’ida and the 9/11 attackers.”

In 2005, it was renamed the Joint Intelligence Command for Intelligence. Last month, JFCOM was shuttered, reportedly due to Pentagon budget cuts, and as a subcommand, JFIC was believed to have been disbanded along with it.

Much of JFIC’s work on al-Qaeda and Bin Laden remains shrouded in secrecy and has not been cited in media reports revolving around pre-9/11 intelligence, which has focused heavily over the past decade on CIA and FBI “intelligence failures.” Only a few details about the military intelligence unit have surfaced since then, notably in reports published by Truthout.

JFIC was responsible for, among other things, monitoring Bin Laden and other suspected terrorists who resided in Afghanistan between 1998 and 2000 and was charged with constructing likely scenarios that could be carried out by terrorists and possible government responses.

“JFIC’s role” and the DoD’s “role, in the pursuit of al-Qa’ida before 9/11 and timely analysis of the targets actually struck by the 9/11 attackers have remained unknown even to senior DoD officials,” Iron Man’s complaint letter says.

Iron Man noted that the “motivation for this complaint is multi-faceted.” He said the “purpose” of the letter  “is to formally complain” to the inspector general that “JFIC, when instructed in or before May 2002 to provide all original material it might have relevant to al-Qa’ida and the 9/11 attacks for a Congressional inquiry, intentionally misinformed the Department of Defense that it had no purview on such matters and no such material.”

Moreover, there has never been a public accounting of the work conducted by DO5. But Iron Man’s letter provides deep insight into the secret military intelligence group’s highly classified activities.

Tracking Terrorists

DO5 was “a fore-runner of current all-source fusion centers,” the letter Iron Man wrote says. Individuals assigned to the unit had “a wide mix of skills” in intelligence disciplines, including human and open-source intelligence, signals intelligence and imagery and signature intelligence.

DO5 drafted “numerous original reports … identifying probable and possible movements and locations of Usama bin Ladin and Mullah Omar,” including likely identification of the house where Khalid Sheikh Mohammed allegedly planned the 9/11 attacks.

From 1999 to 2001, the intelligence unit also “conducted imagery analysis of Jalalabad and Qandahar” and other parts of Afghanistan as they were “pulled into a community-wide initiative on al-Qa’ida.”

The letter further states, “DO5 was able to ‘scoop’ [the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency],” an agency which played a crucial role in identifying the compound in Pakistan where Bin Laden had been hiding.

According to US government officials, it was one of Bin Laden’s most trusted couriers, whom intelligence operatives identified about five years ago, that led the CIA to pinpoint Bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound.

But Iron Man’s 2006 letter states that DO5 worked closely with DIA and was instrumental in identifying “a likely financial courier” for al-Qaeda, one who may have led intelligence officials directly to Bin Laden before 9/11.

Early Intelligence Pointed to the World Trade Center, Pentagon

In 2002, following his departure to DIA, Iron Man returned to JFIC to teach two classes on asymmetric warfare, and he kept “numerous” slides related to DO5′s work on “pre-9/11 briefings.”

As Iron Man explained in his letter of complaint to DoD’s inspector general, “upon my arrival at DIA, I had these documents e-mailed from JFIC to my DIA account, so that I could use them as references for the asymmetric warfare course I was drafting for DIA, and as references for any future counter-terrorism work I might pursue at DIA.”

It appears that the allegation Iron Man mishandled classified material stems from a decision he made to email the briefing slides to his DIA account. Iron Man declined to elaborate about the circumstances of the allegations leveled against him. Still, what he reveals in his carefully worded letter in response to those charges is explosive.

“I kept the original classifications on the slides, as historical documents, although the fact that al-Qa’ida was likely to attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon was clearly no longer classified.” (Emphasis added.)

Iron Man further elaborated on this point by stating that high-level DoD officials held discussions about DO5′s intelligence activities between the summer of 2000 and June 2001 revolving around al-Qaeda’s interest in striking the Pentagon, the World Trade Center (WTC), and other targets.

In other words, the Bush administration was fully aware the terrorist organization had set its sights on those structures prior to 9/11 and, apparently, government officials failed to act on those warnings.

For example, Iron Man states in his letter that in the summer of 2000, DO5 briefed USJFCOM senior intelligence officials and staffers, including the deputy commander in chief, on the “WMD Threat to the U.S.”

Iron Man describes a “sensitive,” “oral briefing” that took place that summer “indicating that the World Trade Centers #1 and #2 were the most likely buildings to be attacked [by al-Qaeda], followed closely by the Pentagon. The briefer indicated that the worst case scenario would be one tower collapsed onto another.”

Furthermore, as he states in his letter, Iron Man was certain that such a scenario was part of a “red cell analysis” discussion that took place prior to the intelligence briefing and included a finding that the buildings “could be struck by a jetliner.” He wrote that there was a suggestion about alerting WTC security and engineering or architectural staff, “but the idea was not further explored because of a command climate discouraging contact with the civilian community.”

One official who attended the DO5 briefing was Vice Adm. Martin J. Meyer, the deputy commander in chief (DCINC), USJFCOM (Iron Man’s complaint does not identify Meyer by name, but notes the presence of the “DCINC” for USJFCOM). But despite the red flags raised during the briefing, Meyer reportedly told Maj. Gen. Larry Arnold, the commander of the Continental United States NORAD Region (CONR), and other high-level CONR staffers two weeks before the 9/11 attacks that “their concern about Osama bin Laden as a possible threat to America was unfounded and that, to repeat, ‘If everyone would just turn off CNN, there wouldn’t be a threat from Osama bin Laden.’”

Mayer retired from the Navy in 2003 and was hired by defense contractor Lockheed Martin.

Intelligence Withheld From Congress

Even worse, according to Iron Man’s letter, the information DO5 had collected about Bin Laden, al-Qaeda and the lead up to 9/11 was withheld from Congress after the House and Senate Intelligence Committees launched an investigation into the attacks.

“When the Justice Department requested all documents relating to 9/11 from DoD in May 2002, I notified [redacted] in the DIA Congressional Affairs office that I retained these documents,” Iron Man’s letter states. “I spoke to [redacted] JFIC DI1 [an individual who works in the command administrative staff], who informed me that JFIC had already submitted a response without any documents. I was surprised and disappointed when my successor at DO5 [redacted] notified me of the full JFIC non-response. I notified [redacted] in the Congressional Affairs office, and was told to submit the documents as DIA documents, with an explanatory e-mail. I did so on 29 May 2002, presuming (probably correctly) that the documents might be overlooked, since they originated at JFIC. I forwarded copies to [redacted] (who was departing JFIC that week), (his subordinate), and [redacted] (who was also departing JFIC that week).”

A DoD spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment. Spokespeople for the House and Senate Intelligence Committees also did not respond to calls for comment.

After raising his concerns, Iron Man, who from late 2000 to June 2001 was acting head of DO5, was told by his former boss that JFIC’s formal response to Congress’ inquiries was that “al-Qaida and the 9/11 attacks had been outside JFIC’s purview and that JFIC consequently held no material on those issues,” which was a lie.

Iron Man’s boss said, “He insisted [to officials who responded to the Congressional inquiries] that such was not the case, but was told this was JFIC’s response.”

Iron Man wrote that “many people” working at government agencies were knowledgeable about JFIC’s “role in preparing original analysis” on al-Qaeda, including officials at the CIA, NCIS, USJFCOM, DIA and NSA, whose names were redacted in the letter he sent to DoD’s inspector general.

However, after conducting at least 300 interviews and reviewing hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, the final report issued by the House and Senate Intelligence Committees in December 2002, into “Intelligence Community Activities Before And After The Terrorist Attacks Of September 11, 2001” did not cite any of DO5′s work on al-Qaeda or Bin Laden or the fact that the intelligence unit was able to identify the terrorist group’s top two targets in the US. The later 2004 9/11 Commission Report did not mention DO5 or JFIC.

Flawed DoD Investigation

Although the inspector general acted on Iron Man’s complaint and launched an investigation, the findings of the probe, outlined in a report, declassified last year, previously reported by Truthout, was highly flawed and failed to address Iron Man’s charges that intelligence was withheld from Congress.

Indeed, it appears the author of the inspector general’s report confused Congress’ investigation into the 9/11 attacks with the independent National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, otherwise known as the 9/11 Commission, created in late 2002 by legislation passed by Congress. The inspector general’s report insisted it did not find any “evidence that the Joint Forces Intelligence Command misled Congress by withholding operational information in response to the 9/11 Commission.”

But Iron Man’s complaint specifically addressed intelligence withheld from Congress’ inquiries into the 9/11 attacks, not the independent panel’s probe, thereby dismissing an allegation Iron Man had never made.

Iron Man told Truthout the inspector general’s final report “was, shall we say, very incorrect, and intentionally did not address the full scope of the [his] complaint. ”

The watchdog did not tackle another of Iron Man’s explosive claims about DO5 briefings that centered on “numerous examples and suggestions of how [Osama bin Laden] was being hunted by JFIC and could be hunted by the [intelligence community].”

One such briefing held for a “DIA senior intelligence officer on counterterrorism” was entitled “The Search (for Osama bin Laden) – A [commander in chief] Level View,” which included “a compendium of imagery of [a] suspected [Bin Laden] house dating from 23 August 1999 until 11 April 2000.”

At the briefing, intelligence officials were informed that “eleven special reports” by DO5 had been disseminated in the “Daily Intelligence Summary on [Bin Laden], Taliban leadership, Afghan military movements, UN locations, and the economic status of Afghanistan.”

Another briefing for the counterintelligence/counterterrorism chief at NCIS, and about 30 NCIS agents, “clearly stated the JFIC’s Asymmetric Threat Division monitored ‘worldwide [counterterrorism/counterintelligence] traffic’ and routinely prepared ‘analytic reports’ and ‘supplements national agencies with original intelligence on [Bin Laden] and Afghanistan.’”

Congress was kept in the dark about those discussions and was not shown the documents distributed to intelligence officials at the briefings. The inspector general never bothered to find out why. Remarkably, the watchdog stated in its report, “JFIC did not have the mission to track Usama Bin Ladin or predict imminent US targets.”

Iron Man told Truthout it was key intelligence withheld from Congress about al-Qaeda and Bin Laden’s pre-9/11 activities that also played a part in his decision to file a complaint with the inspector general.

“My concern was not only that the 9/11 commission had not been informed, but the larger Congress, in its larger oversight responsibilities, had also not been informed,” he said.

A Heavy Burden

What remains unclear is exactly what took place back in May 2006 that prompted Iron Man’s complaint to the inspector general, given that the issues he had raised centered on events that unfolded four years earlier.

The answer to that question can be found in these passages of Iron Man’s letter, particularly the last few sentences:

“I do believe that knowledge of the work done by DO5 would add to DoD’s understanding of its role in the events leading up to 9/11, and how to avoid future attacks,” Iron Man wrote. “I have been falsely accused of revealing classified information on DO5′s work, when I am certain that information is not and has not been classified since 9/11, and I do want to see myself cleared of that false accusation.

“In addition, I and the deputy of that team, [redacted], especially carried the burden of knowledge of how close DoD came to bin Ladin and perhaps being able to reduce the number of lives lost on 9/11 …”

The deputy whose name the government redacted from Iron Man’s letter, is believed to be Kirk von Ackermann, a former Air Force captain and intelligence analyst, who was working for the US Army as a contractor in Iraq and disappeared in October 2003 while traveling between Tikrit and Kirkuk. A computer, a briefcase containing $40,000, and other materials were found in von Ackerman’s vehicle after he went missing.

Because von Ackerman’s name was classified in the complaint Iron Man filed with the inspector general, he could not confirm whether von Ackerman is the individual he was referring to.

Just three months after Iron Man filed his complaint with DoD’s inspector general, in August 2006, the Army Criminal Investigative Service concluded that von Ackerman had been kidnapped and killed. His remains have never been found nor has anyone claimed responsibility for his death.

Von Ackerman’s tragic story has been previously reported by journalist-blogger Susie Dow on the web site e Pluribus Media, but has largely remained under the radar. In a May 6 article she published on her personal blog, Dow identified von Ackermann as a member of JFIC’s Asymmetric Threats Division. Iron Man’s complaint suggests he ultimately became deputy chief of DO5.

In October 2006, Dow wrote that von Ackermann was “assigned to a counterterrorism team.”

“You’ll find no mention of either Kirk von Ackermann or his team in the 9-11 Commission report…. Well before 9-11, Kirk von Ackermann predicted aircraft could be hijacked and used as weapons against the United States. He also predicted potential targets.”

Von Ackerman’s wife, Megan von Ackerman, has maintained a blog called “Missing in Iraq,” dedicated to her missing husband. In March 2006, she wrote that her husband had planned for such a catastrophic event, but his warnings were ignored:

“… When 9/11 happened everyone around us reacted as normal, civilians would – shock, horror, fear … but Kirk, isolated from the intelligence and military community of people who knew what he knew, felt what he felt, was essentially alone,” Megan von Ackerman wrote. “For a year he had spent his days imagining just this sort of scenario. He had come up with countless plans, evaluated targets, totaled up casualties and estimated political value. He had thought like a terrorist so he could stop them. Now he had to watch it made horribly real – the nightmare he had worked so hard to avoid … Kirk had tried to make the warning, he had worked endless hours to stop this very thing happening. He knew he had no guilt that he had been ignored. But he retained an enormous sense of responsibility – not only for what happened, but for dealing with the new world that 9/11 ushered in.”

Knowing exactly how close he, von Ackerman and DO5 came to capturing Bin Laden and possibly thwarting the attacks on 9/11 is a “burden” Iron Man said he “no longer wants to carry.”

“[Redacted] and I discussed this issue the last time we spoke,” Iron Man wrote in the final paragraph of his letter to the inspector general, likely referring to von Ackerman. “He remains the longest missing man in Iraq in this war, and I want, one day, to be able to explain to his children what their father foresaw.”

Also see the follow-up story by Kaye and Jason Leopold published Friday on Truthout.

This story was written by Jeffrey Kaye and Jason Leopold and originally published at Truthout.

Senior Pentagon officials scrubbed key details about a top-secret military intelligence unit’s efforts in tracking Osama bin Laden and suspected al-Qaeda terrorists from official reports they prepared for a Congressional committee probing the 9/11 terrorist attacks, new documents obtained by Truthout reveal.

Moreover, in what appears to be an attempt to cover up the military unit’s intelligence work, a September 2008 Defense Department (DoD) Inspector General’s (IG) report that probed complaints lodged by the former deputy chief of the military unit in question, the Asymmetrical Threats Division of Joint Forces Intelligence Command (JFIC), also known as DO5, about the crucial information withheld from Congress, claimed “the tracking of Usama Bin Ladin did not fall within JFIC’s mission.”

But the IG’s assertion is untrue, according to the documents obtained by Truthout, undercutting the official narrative about who knew what and when in the months leading up to 9/11.

Much of JFIC’s work on al-Qaeda and Bin Laden remains shrouded in secrecy and has not been cited in media reports revolving around pre-9/11 intelligence, which has focused heavily over the past decade on CIA and FBI “intelligence failures.” Only a few details about the military intelligence unit have surfaced since then, notably in two previous reports published recently by Truthout.

JFIC was the intelligence component of United States Joint Forces Command (JFCOM). In 2005, it was renamed the Joint Intelligence Command for Intelligence. Last month, JFCOM was shuttered, reportedly due to Pentagon budget cuts, and as a subcommand, JFIC was believed to have been disbanded along with it.

Click here to watch Jeffrey Kaye discuss this report on The Real News

Truthout had previously reported that the deputy chief of JFIC’s Asymmetrical Threats Division, who is identified in government documents by the code name “Iron Man,” had produced “numerous original reports, with original imagery, measurements & signatures intelligence, or electronic intelligence, identifying probably [sic] and possible movements and locations of Usama bin Ladin and [Taliban leader] Mullah Omar.” The intelligence included “bin Ladin’s likely residence in Qandahar … evidently the house in which Khalid Shaykh Muhammed planned the 9/11 attacks.”

However, Iron Man, whose unit also developed original intelligence on al-Qaeda targets, which included the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the documents show, claimed JFIC was told to stop tracking Bin Laden, suspected al-Qaeda terrorists, and members of the Taliban some months prior to 9/11.

Iron Man further alleged that the orders his unit received, as well as the work it conducted, was knowingly withheld from investigators working for the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, who were tasked with probing the circumstances behind the 9/11 attacks.

When the DoD’s watchdog prepared its report following an investigation into Iron Man’s complaints, the IG concluded Iron Man’s most explosive allegations related to the withholding of intelligence from Congress was  unfounded. But a close look at the report reveals it is rife with numerous factual errors.

The appendices in the IG’s report shows significant changes were made to JFIC’s original responses to Congressional investigators about its pre-9/11 intelligence work on al-Qaeda, the Taliban and Bin Laden. The information regarding the military unit’s work turned over to Congress described a substantially attenuated picture of JFIC’s operations.

The report determined “operational information in response to the 9/11 Commission” about Asymmetrical Threats Division had not been withheld. Yet, Iron Man had charged the information was withheld from Congressional investigators probing the 9/11 attacks, not the independent 9/11 commission. The IG’s report repeatedly confused the two investigative bodies.

Additionally, while the IG did confirm that Asymmetrical Threats Division analysts were told to stop tracking Bin Laden, suspected al-Qaeda terrorists and members of the Taliban, the watchdog determined that the Asymmetrical Threat Division had “not completed original intelligence reporting” and that “JFIC did not” specifically have a “mission to track Usama bin Ladin or predict imminent US targets.” (Emphasis added.)

In attempting to refute Iron Man’s claims about JFIC’s work, the IG’s report stated, “the 9/11 Commission questions were very specific and asked for information which involved the ‘imminent attack’ or ‘hijackers involved.’ Evidence indicated that the JFIC did not have knowledge regarding imminent domestic targets prior to 9/11 or specific 9/11 hijacker operations.”

But Truthout has learned that the definition of “hijackers,” as perceived by the military intelligence unit, was overly restrictive. The definition of “hijackers” only referred to the hijackers in the planes and not the alleged planners, such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, or Bin Laden, which the intelligence unit considered to be part of the team of hijackers.

Messages left for Gary Comerford, a spokesman for the Inspector General, were not returned. Officials who helped prepare the report referred questions to Comerford’s office.

Revealing New Documents

Iron Man, who requested anonymity in order to protect his family’s privacy, filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in 2006 seeking a copy of the complaint he filed with the IG, which was marked classified, and other secret documents pertaining to JFIC’s duties. He received a copy of his complaint in April, just a few weeks prior to the death of Bin Laden. That document, as well as the IG’s findings, formed the basis of Truthout’s two previous reports on JFIC’s activities.

Over the past month, Iron Man provided Truthout with other documents he received in response to his FOIA request, which shed additional light on JFIC’s work and calls into question the veracity of the IG’s investigation and conclusions into the charges Iron Man had leveled.

Iron Man provided Truthout with copies of a slide presentation that was used for a briefing held for the head of counterintelligence and counterterrorism at the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS). The date of the meeting could not be confirmed.

However, in summer 2000, the Asymmetrical Threats Division briefed “a DIA senior intelligence officer” on “The Search (for UBL Usama Bin Ladin]) – A CINC [Commander-in-chief] Level View.” According to Iron Man’s letter to the IG, “The briefing provided numerous examples and suggestions of how UBL was being hunted by JFIC and could be hunted by the IC [intelligence community].”

Iron Man would not provide the names of the individuals that the Asymmetrical Threats Division briefed because that information is classified. But the personnel included intelligence officials from CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, NCIS, NSA and high-level command officials at JFIC. The most senior official who was present at the briefing was Vice Adm. Martin J. Meyer, the deputy commander-in-chief of Joint Forces Command.

Vice Adm. Meyer is the military official who told Maj. Gen. Larry Arnold, the commander of the Continental United States North American Aerospace Defense Command Region (CONR), and other high-level CONR staffers two weeks before the 9/11 attacks that “their concern about Osama bin Laden as a possible threat to America was unfounded and that, to repeat, ‘If everyone would just turn off CNN, there wouldn’t be a threat from Osama bin Laden.’”

Since Meyer was one of the individuals JFIC briefed on al-Qaeda’s interest in attacking targets in the United States it is difficult to comprehend why he would dismiss the threats.

What is clear, however, is that the slides Truthout obtained from Iron Man show that the military intelligence unit he was a part of actively pursued Bin Laden, contradicting the IG report’s conclusions.

Indeed, one of the slides explicitly states, “JFIC routinely supplements national agencies with original intelligence on UBL [Usama Bin Ladin] and Afghanistan.” (Emphasis added.)

Another slide, “NCIS Support to Joint Forces Intelligence Command and NCIS Field Office, Norfolk,” contains a description of Iron Man’s responsibilities as deputy chief of JFIC’s Asymmetric Threat Division.

The slide presentation further notes that the Asymmetrical Threats Division has “primary division focus” on both counterterrorism and military “force protection.” Moreover, the briefing slides state JFIC’s “Primary CT/force protection concerns” was “UBL [Usama Bin Ladin] and associated terrorist groups,” adding that its goal was to determine when Bin Laden and other terrorists would strike, “How they will strike” and “Where they will strike.”

According to the documents, Asymmetrical Threats Division personnel monitored open-source intelligence, national imagery data and sensitive compartmented intelligence, as well as worldwide counterterrorism and counterintelligence communications, including communications and electronic intelligence databases from the National Security Agency (NSA).

The information from the briefing backs up what Iron Man previously told Truthout: that Asymmetrical Threats Division “worked closely” with the counterterrorism office at the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, which collects, analyzes and distributes geospatial intelligence related to national security, or that, “upon request,” it provided information on terrorist movements to the CIA.

The Asymmetrical Threats Division had what is known as “gamma” security clearance, one of the slides noted, indicating analysts had access to extremely sensitive classified information, according to a description of the classification level by Matthew Aid in an unrelated New York Times report.

Another document Iron Man turned over to Truthout is a January 2001 confidential “Point Paper” that describes the Asymmetrical Threats Division as having “prepared numerous assessments of those cities most likely to be targeted by international and domestic terrorists,” confirming Iron Man’s claims that part of his unit’s work did consist of producing intelligence on domestic targets by terrorists.

Significant Changes Made to JFIC’s Official Response

Perhaps the most salient issue with the IG’s report is that it completely conceals the information that was withheld from Congressional investigators.

According to the report, on March 11, 2002, the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Vice Adm. Thomas R. Wilson tasked JFCOM to provide it with information concerning its activities “in support of the 9/11 Commission.” As the IG’s report points out, the public law creating the 9/11 Commission was not effective until November 2002, so Vice Admiral Wilson can only be responding to a request from the Congressional joint inquiry and not the 9/11 Commission.

The IG’s report indicates JFCOM sent a “tasker” to JFIC two days later, indicating it was an urgent matter and the 13 items “derived from the original DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency] tasker” were due by March 22.

A “JFIC senior naval officer,” the report states, gathered the information from the different departments within the military unit. The responses were then returned to JFCOM, where the Intelligence Director “reviewed the JFIC’s input prior to release” to the DIA Congressional Affairs Office on March 25, 2002.

The original JFIC response was scanned and printed as Appendix B of the IG report. According to the IG, the “original questions and answers to 13 questions that USJFCOM [United States Joint Forces Command] forwarded” to the Defense Intelligence Agency were also scanned and are printed as the report’s Appendix C. The scanned questions and answers that ultimately were sent to the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Congressional Affairs Office and presumably on to Congressional investigators, are preceded by ten pages of superfluous material relating to JFIC actions taken after 9/11.

But the original questions and answers JFIC officials produced prior to March 22 (Appendix B) are not the same as the edited version that was sent to the Defense Intelligence Agency and Congress (Appendix C). Four questions and answers from Appendix C were deleted and one subsection and some of the other responses were scrubbed.

The IG report failed to highlight the difference and, indeed, the report still maintains the JFCOM version has “13 questions,” though four questions were omitted after another “review.”

There is no indication the scanned documents were redacted, which would have helped explain the omission, since the original material that was deleted and/or rewritten shows up unredacted in Appendix B.

According to the executive summary of the IG’s report, JFIC’s replies “were accurate and substantiated by our extensive review of available documentation and our 14 personnel interviews at all levels of Joint Forces Intelligence Command. We concluded that the Joint Forces Intelligence Command provided a timely and accurate reply in response to the 9/11 Commission. The United States Joint Forces Command forwarded the response to the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Congressional Affairs Office.”

JFlC’s original responses “were forwarded to the USJFCOM [United States Joint Forces Command]. The USJFCOM Intelligence Director reviewed the JFIC’s input prior to release to the DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency].”

The report, however, fails to note that the JFCOM review removed substantial portions of JFIC’s replies to Congress.

What Was Missing

The missing portions largely relate to aspects of JFIC’s mission that had to do with the breadth and depth of its anti-terrorism work. For instance, in item one, JFCOM deleted the original JFIC reply that it conducted “in depth discussions about potential terrorist attacks since Dec. 00.”

The second item in the inquiry asked whether JFIC had information prior to 9/11 about “international terrorist cells operating in the United States.” While JFIC answered this question in the negative, in their original response JFIC indicated they maintained “global situational awareness for areas such as CONUS [Continental United States] outside of the USJFCOM [United States Joint Forces Command] AOR [area of responsibility.]” They briefed pertinent information” at morning briefings, “but we did not track it.” JFIC indicated the information “generally consisted of CIA and NSA reports.”

In the altered version of the response sent to Congress, the words “such as CONUS” are deleted, as is the reference to CIA and NSA reports. The edited version completely eliminates the fact that JFIC was keeping track of NSA and CIA reports of terrorist activity as it related to the United States. Indeed, later in the report, the fact that JFIC also maintained a “24-hour watch floor,” whose responsibility included monitoring of “worldwide events and terrorist issues,” was also deleted.

According to the original JFIC response, after 9/11, it officially did take on responsibility for tracking “potential threats to CONUS.” “As far as we know,” the JFIC original responses state, “JFIC is one of the few DoD entities attempting to track potential terrorist activities within CONUS.”

One of the missing items in the version of the JFIC answers sent to Congress concerned the names and positions of JFIC counterterror personnel. This was not redacted for classification purposes, as they appear in the IG report, Appendix B. Instead, back in 2002, the lack of any such names meant there was no one identifiable from JFIC to call as a witness.

At other points in the edited version of the JFIC responses, descriptions of the unit’s analytic work, in particular aspects that seem pertinent to Asymmetrical Threats Division’s work, are left out. It is noteworthy that even in the original JFIC response to the questionnaire, the mission JFIC was given was distorted.

According to the original inquiry response (and left out of the final version), “Prior to Sept. 11, JFIC did not have a robust counter-terrorism mission. We did do some analysis, but since it did not directly support Joint Forces Command’s AOR [area of responsibility], the analysts were directed to stop. As a result of this and normal military rotation, we did not have a large counter-terrorism analysis base to build on” after 9/11. (Emphasis added.)

Yet, in another portion of the original JFIC response and also deleted in the final version of the response, JFIC discusses its “process.” According to JFIC, while they do “not conduct unilateral collection” of intelligence in the United States, nor liaison with “foreign counterparts,” they do receive reports from “other agencies.” “JFIC’s process is to fuse all of the information that we have visibility on into one all-source threat picture,” the questionnaire stated, noting JFIC reviewed 2,275 messages daily from intelligence and military sources.

Subsequently, JFIC personnel decide what to do with this information, noting that sometimes they may “try to do further analysis (connect the dots, possibly produces a special analytic product), or … follow-up with the reporting agency.”

In a section erased from the JFIC response to Question 12 from Congressional investigators, JFIC describes their process as one of fusing “all of the information that we have visibility on into one all-source threat picture.” This is similar to Iron Man’s description of the Asymmetrical Threats Division in his complaint to the IG, when he described his former unit as “a forerunner of current all-source fusion centers…. able to develop and use all-source, original analysis in a manner probably then unprecedented within the intelligence community.”

If the report’s narrative sequence can be trusted, the JFCOM director either directly, or under his or her supervision, significantly altered the reply to Congressional Joint Inquiry investigators. Furthermore, due to the fact that items 7, 9, 11 and 13 are missing from the final document sent to the Defense Intelligence Agency it would have had to be apparent to the individual(s) reading that a chunk of information was missing.

While Congressional investigators were not provided with this intelligence on JFIC’s work, there were still other opportunities to pass the information along. In Spring 2002, a colleague informed Iron Man that none of the documents that could verify Asymmetrical Threats Division’s work was being sent to Congress.

The former deputy chief and later “Acting Chief” of Asymmetrical Threats Division contacted the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Congressional Affairs Office himself and offered to personally send the documentation, including the slides and “point paper.”

Those materials were subsequently sent to the Defense Intelligence Agency. Whether they made their way to Congress is unknown. The December 2002 unclassified Congressional Joint Inquiry report never mentions JFIC or Asymmetrical Threats Division or their work, nor does the 9/11 Commission Report published several years later.

Current and former lawmakers who worked on the Congressional committees probing the 9/11 attacks, including former Senator Bob Graham (D-Florida), did not respond to phone calls and emails seeking comment about whether they received any briefings about the military intelligence unit’s counterterrorism work pertaining to al-Qaeda, Bin Laden, and the Taliban.

Iron Man told Truthout, however, that he and his colleagues would “damn sure comment” on JFIC’s work if given the opportunity to speak with lawmakers.

But, Iron Man said, “the only manner in which any former DO5 [another name for JFIC] personnel could probably comment would be if requested by Congress/Congressional staff and permitted by DoD.”

Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism czar, speaks to filmmakers John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski about crucial intelligence involving two 9/11 hijackers he believes ex-CIA Director George Tenet and others concealed.

This report was written by Jason Leopold and originally published at Truthout.

With the tenth anniversary of 9/11 just a month away, the intelligence failures leading up to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have started to attract fresh scrutiny from former counterterrorism officials, who have called into question the veracity of the various government probes that concluded who knew what and when.

Indeed, an exclusive report recently published by Truthout based on documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and an interview with a former high-ranking counterterrorism official showed how a little-known military intelligence unit, unbeknownst to the various investigative bodies probing the terrorist attacks, was ordered by senior government officials to stop tracking Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda’s movements prior to 9/11.

And now, in a stunning new interview scheduled to air on a local PBS affiliate in Colorado tonight, former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, for the first time, levels explosive allegations against three former top CIA officials – George Tenet, Cofer Black and Richard Blee – accusing them of knowingly withholding intelligence from the Bush and Clinton White House, the FBI, Immigration and the State and Defense Departments about two of the 9/11 hijackers who had entered the United States more than a year before the attacks.

Clarke also accused the former CIA officials of engaging in a cover-up failing to disclose to Congress and the 9/11 Commission key details about the two hijackers.

Tenet, Black and Blee have “been able to get through a joint House investigation committee and get through the 9/11 Commission and this has never come out,” Clarke said in the interview, an advance copy of which was provided to Truthout. “They got away with it.”

Clarke, who now runs the security firm Good Harbor Consulting, was the chief counterterrorism adviser for the Clinton and Bush administrations. He famously testified before the 9/11 Commission probing the terrorist attacks that “your government failed you.”

In October 2009, Clarke spoke to John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski, who have been working on a documentary about Blee and the secrecy surrounding his role in the intelligence failures leading up to 9/11, which is set to air on the tenth anniversary of the attacks.

Duffy and  Nowosielski, whose previous film, “Press For Truth,” followed four 9/11 widows as they lobbied the Bush White House to convene an independent commission to probe the attacks, have also launched a new transparency web site, SecrecyKills.com, set to go live this evening with a campaign aimed at further unmasking Blee.

Clarke acknowledges that he does not have any evidence to back up his claims about the former CIA officials. He did not respond to questions about whether he still stood behind the comments he made about Tenet, Black, and Blee nearly two years ago. But Nowosielski told Truthout he spoke to Clarke last week to inform him that Tenet, Black and Blee had issued a joint statement that was harshly critical of his charges, and Clarke told  Nowosielski he has not changed his position.

Clarke asserts in the 13-minute interview that Tenet, the former CIA director; Black, who headed the agency’s Counterterrorist Center; and Blee, a top aide to Tenet who led the CIA’s Bin Laden Issues Station, also known as Alec Station, whose true identity was revealed for the first time two years ago, are responsible for the government’s failure to capture Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, who hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 with three other terrorists and flew the jetliner directly into the Pentagon killing 189 people.

“George Tenet followed all of the information about al-Qaeda in microscopic detail,” Clarke told Duffy and  Nowosielski. “He read raw intelligence reports before analysts in the counterterrorism center did and he would pick up the phone and call me at 7:30 in the morning and talk about them.”

But Tenet, who was awarded the Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush in 2004, did not share what Clarke says he knew about the al-Hazmi and the al-Mihdhar case.

In early January 2000, CIA analysts were informed by the National Security Agency that al-Hamzi and al-Mihdhar were heading to a meeting of other al-Qaeda associates in Malaysia, their travel arranged by Osama bin Laden’s Yemen operations center. The CIA surveilled the meeting and obtained photographs of the men from Malaysian intelligence.

From Malaysia, al-Hazmi, al-Mihdhar and Khallad bin Attash, the alleged mastermind behind the USS Cole bombing, traveled to Thailand, which the CIA reported in a cable sent to Alec Station. The CIA had claimed, according to the 9/11 Commission report, that they lost track of all three men after they arrived at an airport in Thailand.

Al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar then boarded a flight bound for Los Angeles, arriving in the city on January 15, 2000, and later met up with retired English professor Abdussattar Shaikh, who was secretly working as an FBI informant.

Still, despite being aware that al-Mihdhar held a multiple-entry US visa, the CIA failed to notify the FBI and State Department for inclusion on the latter’s terrorist watch list. Remarkably, Mihdhar left Southern California for Yemen in late 2000 and, using a new passport, returned to the US undetected on July 4, 2001.

Clarke suggests that if the CIA had shared intelligence about al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar with him, the FBI, and others, then perhaps the attack on the Pentagon could have been thwarted.

As he noted in his book, “Your Government Failed You: Breaking the Cycle of National Security Disasters,” the 9/11 Commission never fleshed out the rationale behind the CIA’s failure to share crucial intelligence information about al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar with other officials and government agencies.

“As jaded and cynical as I am about government failures, I still find this one mind-boggling and inexplicable,” Clarke wrote. “The 9/11 Commission report does not tell us very much about how or why it happened and their explanations, while they could be correct, strain credulity and leave many questions unanswered.”

But the FBI also bears some responsibility for the intelligence breakdown. An agent assigned to Alec Station discovered in January 2000 al-Mihdhar had a US visa and drafted a memo intended to alert the FBI’s Bin Laden Unit. But a CIA officer prohibited the agent from sending it. Moreover, Shaikh’s FBI case agent was aware that two Saudi Arabian men had moved into his San Diego apartment in 2000, but never bothered to inquire about the identities of the individuals. Had the case agent done so, he would have discovered that his informant’s houseguests were al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar.

“Failure to Communicate”

One of the CIA officials who had been monitoring the Malaysia meeting was a young al-Qaeda analyst named Jennifer Matthews, who had been working with the Bin Laden Issues Station since its inception in 1996. Another analyst, who worked closely with Matthews, was a red-headed woman who, in recent years, has been at the center of a scandal involving the torture and wrongful rendition of at least one detainee. She has since been promoted and continues to work for the CIA on al-Qaeda-related issues. An agency spokesman requested that Truthout not print her name because her identity is classified.

In his recently published book, “Triple Agent,” Washington Post reporter Joby Warrick wrote that former CIA Inspector General John Helgerson probed “CIA missteps that had allowed” al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar “to enter the United States undetected.”

“Helgerson concluded that the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center had failed to respond to a series of cabled warnings in 2000 about” al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar “who later became part of the September 11 plot …,” Warrick wrote. “The cables were seen by as many as sixty CIA employees, yet the two operatives’ names were never passed along to the FBI, which might have assigned agents to track them down or shared with the State Department, which could have flagged their named on its watch list. In theory, the arrest of the either man could have led investigators to the other hijackers and the eventual unraveling of the 9/11 plot.

“Helgerson’s report named individual managers who it said bore the greatest responsibility for failing to ensure that vital information was passed to the FBI. The report, never released in full, also recommended that some of the managers be reviewed for possible disciplinary action … Jennifer Matthews was on that list.”

Matthews, who Warrick also says led the agency’s search for the first high-value detainee, Abu Zubaydah, and who was also present at the CIA black site prison in Thailand when Zubaydah was waterboarded after he was captured in March 2002, was among seven CIA officers killed in Khost, Afghanistan, in a December 2009 suicide bombing  at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Afghanistan, which Matthews was chief of.

“A High-Level Decision”

Although Helgerson’s report recommended Matthews be disciplined, Clarke does not believe she or the dozens of other CIA analysts bear the ultimate responsibility for failing to inform the US government for 18 months that al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar were in the US.

“It’s not as I originally thought, which was that one lonely CIA analyst got this information and didn’t somehow recognize the significance of it,” Clarke said during the interview. “No, fifty, 5-0, CIA personnel knew about this. Among the fifty people in CIA who knew these guys were in the country was the CIA director.”

Still, Clarke said his position as National Coordinator for Security and Information meant he should have received a briefing from CIA about al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar, explaining “unless somebody intervened to stop the normal automatic distribution I would automatically get it.”

“For me to this day, it is inexplicable why when I had every other detail about everything related to terrorism that the director didn’t tell me, that the director of the counterterrorism center didn’t tell me, that the other 48 people inside CIA that knew about it never mentioned it to me or anyone in my staff in a period of over 12 months … We therefore conclude that there was a high-level decision inside CIA ordering people not to share that information,” Clarke said.

How high level?

“I would think it would have to be made by the director,” Clarke said. “You gotta understand my relationship with [Tenet], we were close friends, he called me several times a day, we shared the most trivial of information with each other, there was not a lack of information sharing, [CIA] told us everything except this.”

CIA Tried to “Flip” Hijackers?

So, what happened? Why did the CIA fail to share its intelligence about al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar with Clarke and other government officials? Clarke believes the CIA may have attempted to “flip” al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar, but ultimately failed.

That’s an allegation that surfaced in Lawrence Wright’s groundbreaking book, “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and The Road to 9/11.” Wright, who interviewed Clarke for his book, said a team of FBI investigators and federal prosecutors known as Squad I-49 came to believe that the CIA “was shielding Mihdhar and Hazmi because it hoped to recruit them”

“The CIA was desperate for a source inside al-Qaeda; it had completely failed to penetrate the inner circle or even to place a willing partner in the training camps, which were largely open to anyone who showed up,” Wright wrote. “Mihdhar and Hazmi must have seemed like attractive opportunities however, once they entered the United States they were the province of the FBI. The CIA had no legal authority to operate inside the country … It is also possible, as some FBI investigators suspect, the CIA was running a joint venture with Saudi intelligence in order to get around that restriction … These are only theories about the CIA’s failures to communicate vital information to the bureau … Perhaps the agency decided that Saudi intelligence would have a better chance of recruiting these men than the Americans. That would leave no CIA fingerprints on the operation as well.”

“This is the view of some very bitter FBI investigators, who wonder why they were never informed of the existence of al-Qaeda operatives inside America. Mihdhar and Hazmi arrived nineteen months before 9/11. The FBI had all the authority it needed to investigate these men and learn what they were up to, but because the CIA had failed to divulge the presence of two active members of al-Qaeda, the hijackers were free to develop their plot until it was too late to stop them.”

The 9/11 Commission was unable to substantiate claims that the CIA tried to recruit al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar and Clarke never disclosed this theory to the panel during his testimony as it was a conclusion he said he reached years later.

“Reckless and Profoundly Wrong”

In response to Clarke’s charges, Tenet, Black and Blee issued a joint statement to Duffy and Nowosielski last week upon learning that Clarke’s interview was scheduled for broadcast. The former CIA officials admonished their former colleague, stating his comments were “reckless and profoundly wrong.” Blee’s inclusion in the joint statement marks the first time he has spoken publicly about the events leading up to 9/11.

“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,” the former CIA officials said. “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.”

“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 … 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. We testified under oath about what we did, what we knew and what we didn’t know. We stand by that testimony.”

“We Would Have Found Those Assholes”

But Clarke says even as early as July 2001 – two months before the terrorist attacks – when Tenet and Blee called an urgent meeting with President Bush at the White House, they had an opportunity to disclose the fact that al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar were somewhere in the US, but failed to disclose what they knew.

The CIA waited until late August to inform lower-level FBI agents that al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar were in the US and were likely planning an attack inside the US. Yet, the CIA continued to conceal the intelligence from senior FBI and Bush administration officials a week prior to the attacks.

Clarke said there’s a “very obvious answer” as to why the CIA continued, as early as September 4, 2001, in a meeting attended by Clarke and other senior Bush administration officials, to withhold intelligence about the two hijackers: to protect the agency from scrutiny.

“I know how all this stuff works I’ve been working it for 30 years,” Clarke said. “You can’t snowball me on this stuff. If they announce on September 4 in the Principals meeting that these guys are in the United States and they told the FBI a few weeks ago I’m going to say ‘wait, time out. How long have you known this? Why haven’t you reported it at the daily threat meetings? Why isn’t it in the daily threat matrix?’ We would have begun an investigation that day into CIA malfeasance and misfeasance that’s why we’re not informed.”

Clarke added that even if the CIA had disclosed what it knew about al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar as late as September 4, 2001, he believes the FBI could have captured the men and dismantled their plans to attack the Pentagon.

“We would have conducted a massive sweep,” Clarke said. “We would have conducted publicly. We would have found those assholes. There’s no doubt in my mind. Even with only a week left.”

Truthout contributor Jeffrey Kaye contributed to this report.

Stencil graffiti of Osama bin Laden in Bucharest, Romania. (Photo: Bixentro / flickr)

This story was originally published at Truthout. It was reported by Jeffrey Kaye and Jason Leopold

On the tenth anniversary of 9/11, just as he has done in years past, a top military intelligence analyst identified by the US government only as “Iron Man” will hunker down in front of his television and watch a particularly gruesome scene of the carnage left behind on that fateful day.

“Although I try to avoid it, I glimpse a film clip, a scene, of people throwing themselves from a burning tower, people who deserved better protection from their country, from me and the men I worked with, and I hear the sounds of the lobby in the [World Trade Center] on tape,” said the man, whose alter ego chosen by the government appears to be paying homage to the flawed Marvel Comics superhero. “To me, the sights and sounds, the smoke of that day are not yet history. They are a knot, a silence, a facial tick, a missing friend in Iraq. They are not history yet.”

For many Americans, the emotional reaction to President Barack Obama’s announcement last month that a Navy Seal team had killed Osama bin Laden during a raid at his compound in Pakistan was celebratory. But for others, like the mysterious Iron Man, who has spent his career lurking in the shadows, the death of the late al-Qaeda leader is a painful reminder of what could have been avoided had the government heeded numerous early warnings of an impending attack against the very targets terrorists struck on 9/11.

The intelligence failures leading up to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon are an issue the media – and lawmakers – put to bed years ago, despite the fact that new information continues to trickle out, undercutting the integrity of the official investigations into who knew what and when.

It was an exclusive story Truthout published May 23 in the wake of Bin Laden’s death, focusing on a little-known intelligence unit that was ordered to stop tracking his movements prior to 9/11, and led Iron Man to contact Truthout to share previously undisclosed documents he recently obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which appear to cast further doubt on the official narrative and suggests high-level military and intelligence officials withheld key evidence from Congressional lawmakers probing the attacks.

The materials Iron Man provided to Truthout stand as the most revealing information to surface in years regarding Bin Laden and al-Qaeda’s plans to attack the United States.

This is the first page of “Iron Man’s” complaint to the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General related to intelligence work he did on Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

Formal Complaint

Five years ago, Iron Man, who requested Truthout conceal his true identity out of concern for his family’s privacy, lodged a formal complaint with the Department of Defense’s Office of Inspector General after he was accused of improperly handling classified material.

Iron Man filed a FOIA request in September 2006, seeking a declassified copy of the six-page complaint he filed with the inspector general’s office. He finally received a copy on April 8, just a few weeks prior to the raid on Bin Laden’s compound.

What he revealed in that letter, portions of which were redacted by the government because the information is classified, is the inner workings of an elite intelligence unit he headed at one point: the Asymmetric Threats Division, formed in 1999, and “charged with reporting on asymmetric threats, especially terrorism.”

The unit worked with Joint Task Force-Civil Support (JTF-CS), also set up in 1999. According to the Defense Department (DoD), JTF-CS was charged with supporting “terrorist response operations in the continental US” and providing “military assistance to civil authorities.”

The Asymmetric Threats Division is referred to as DO5, a branch of the Joint Forces Intelligence Command (JFIC), whose responsibilities included, among other things, vetting human intelligence sources on behalf of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). From 1998 to 2001, Iron Man was working as a counterterrorism/counterintelligence analyst for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), assigned to JFIC.

The JFIC is an elite intelligence unit that falls under the authority of the United States Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM) and “had a direct and assigned purview on international terrorism against the US, to include the operations of al-Qa’ida and the 9/11 attackers.”

The JFIC was also responsible for monitoring Bin Laden and other suspected terrorists who resided in Afghanistan between 1998 and 2000 and was charged with constructing likely scenarios that could be carried out by terrorists and possible government responses.

Iron Man noted that the “motivation for this complaint is multi-faceted.” He said the “purpose” of the letter he wrote “is to formally complain” to the inspector general that “JFIC, when instructed in or before May 2002 to provide all original material it might have relevant to al-Qa’ida and the 9/11 attacks for a Congressional inquiry, intentionally misinformed the Department of Defense that it had no purview on such matters and no such material.”

“JFIC’s role” and the DoD’s “role, in the pursuit of al-Qa’ida before 9/11 and timely analysis of the targets actually struck by the 9/11 attackers have remained unknown even to senior DoD officials,” the letter says.

Moreover, there has never been a public accounting of the work conducted by DO5. But Iron Man’s letter provides deep insight into the secret military intelligence group’s highly classified activities.

Tracking Terrorists

DO5 was “a fore-runner of current all-source fusion centers,” the letter Iron Man wrote says. Individuals assigned to the unit had “a wide mix of skills” in intelligence disciplines, including human and open-source intelligence, signals intelligence and imagery and signature intelligence.

DO5 drafted “numerous original reports … identifying probable and possible movements and locations of Usama bin Ladin and Mullah Omar,” including likely identification of the house where Khalid Sheikh Mohammed allegedly planned the 9/11 attacks.

From 1999 to 2001, the intelligence unit also “conducted imagery analysis of Jalalabad and Qandahar” and other parts of Afghanistan as they were “pulled into a community-wide initiative on al-Qa’ida.”

The letter further states, “DO5 was able to ‘scoop’ [the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency],” an agency which played a crucial role in identifying the compound in Pakistan where Bin Laden had been hiding.

According to US government officials, it was one of Bin Laden’s most trusted couriers, whom intelligence operatives identified about five years ago, that led the CIA to pinpoint Bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound.

But Iron Man’s 2006 letter states that DO5 worked closely with DIA and was instrumental in identifying “a likely financial courier” for al-Qaeda, and one who may have led intelligence officials directly to Bin Laden well before 9/11.

Early Intelligence Pointed to the World Trade Center, Pentagon

In 2002, following his departure to DIA, Iron Man returned to JFIC to teach two classes on asymmetric warfare, and he kept “numerous” slides related to DO5′s work on “pre-9/11 briefings.”

As Iron Man explained in his letter of complaint to DoD’s inspector general, “upon my arrival at DIA, I had these documents e-mailed from JFIC to my DIA account, so that I could use them as references for the asymmetric warfare course I was drafting for DIA, and as references for any future counter-terrorism work I might pursue at DIA.”

It appears that the allegation Iron Man mishandled classified material stems from a decision he made to email the briefing slides to his DIA account. Iron Man declined to elaborate about the circumstances of the allegations leveled against him. Still, what he reveals in his carefully worded letter in response to those charges is explosive.

“I kept the original classifications on the slides, as historical documents, although the fact that al-Qa’ida was likely to attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon was clearly no longer classified.” (Emphasis added.)

Iron Man further elaborated on this point by stating that high-level DoD officials held discussions about DO5′s intelligence activities between the summer of 2000 and June 2001 revolving around al-Qaeda’s interest in striking the Pentagon, the World Trade Center (WTC), and other targets.

In other words, the Bush administration was fully aware the terrorist organization had set its sights on those structures prior to 9/11 and, apparently, government officials failed to act on those warnings.

For example, Iron Man states in his letter that in the summer of 2000, DO5 briefed USJFCOM senior intelligence officials and staffers, including the deputy commander in chief, on the “WMD Threat to the U.S.”

Iron Man describes a “sensitive,” “oral briefing” that took place that summer “indicating that the World Trade Centers #1 and #2 were the most likely buildings to be attacked [by al-Qaeda], followed closely by the Pentagon. The briefer indicated that the worst case scenario would be one tower collapsed onto another.”

Furthermore, as he states in his letter, Iron Man was certain that such a scenario was part of a “red cell analysis” discussion that took place prior to the intelligence briefing and included a finding that the buildings “could be struck by a jetliner.” He wrote that there was a suggestion about alerting WTC security and engineering or architectural staff, “but the idea was not further explored because of a command climate discouraging contact with the civilian community.”

One official who attended the DO5 briefing was Vice Adm. Martin J. Meyer, the deputy commander in chief (DCINC), USJFCOM (Iron Man’s complaint does not identify Meyer by name, but notes the presence of the “DCINC” for USJFCOM). But despite the red flags raised during the briefing, Meyer reportedly told Maj. Gen. Larry Arnold, the commander of the Continental United States NORAD Region (CONR), and other high-level CONR staffers two weeks before the 9/11 attacks that “their concern about Osama bin Laden as a possible threat to America was unfounded and that, to repeat, ‘If everyone would just turn off CNN, there wouldn’t be a threat from Osama bin Laden.’”

Mayer retired from the Navy in 2003 and was hired by defense contractor Lockheed Martin.

Intelligence Withheld From Congress

Even worse, according to Iron Man’s letter, the information DO5 had collected about Bin Laden, al-Qaeda and the lead up to 9/11 was withheld from Congress after the House and Senate Intelligence Committees launched an investigation into the attacks.

“When the Justice Department requested all documents relating to 9/11 from DoD in May 2002, I notified [redacted] in the DIA Congressional Affairs office that I retained these documents,” Iron Man’s letter states. “I spoke to [redacted] JFIC DI1 [an individual who works in the command administrative staff], who informed me that JFIC had already submitted a response without any documents. I was surprised and disappointed when my successor at DO5 [redacted] notified me of the full JFIC non-response. I notified [redacted] in the Congressional Affairs office, and was told to submit the documents as DIA documents, with an explanatory e-mail. I did so on 29 May 2002, presuming (probably correctly) that the documents might be overlooked, since they originated at JFIC. I forwarded copies to [redacted] (who was departing JFIC that week), (his subordinate), and [redacted] (who was also departing JFIC that week).”

A DoD spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment. Spokespeople for the House and Senate Intelligence Committees also did not respond to calls for comment.

After raising his concerns, Iron Man, who from late 2000 to June 2001 was acting head of DO5, was told by his former boss that JFIC’s formal response to Congress’ inquiries was that “al-Qaida and the 9/11 attacks had been outside JFIC’s purview and that JFIC consequently held no material on those issues,” which was a lie.

Iron Man’s boss said, “He insisted [to officials who responded to the Congressional inquiries] that such was not the case, but was told this was JFIC’s response.”

Iron Man wrote that “many people” working at government agencies were knowledgeable about JFIC’s “role in preparing original analysis” on al-Qaeda, including officials at the CIA, NCIS, USJFCOM, DIA and NSA, whose names were redacted in the letter he sent to DoD’s inspector general.

However, after conducting at least 300 interviews and reviewing hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, the final report issued by the House and Senate Intelligence Committees in December 2002, into “Intelligence Community Activities Before And After The Terrorist Attacks Of September 11, 2001” did not cite any of DO5′s work on al-Qaeda or Bin Laden or the fact that the intelligence unit was able to identify the terrorist group’s top two targets in the US. The later 2004 9/11 Commission Report did not mention DO5 or JFIC.

Flawed DoD Investigation

Although the inspector general acted on Iron Man’s complaint and launched an investigation, the findings of the probe, outlined in a report, declassified last year, previously reported by Truthout, was highly flawed and failed to address Iron Man’s charges that intelligence was withheld from Congress.

Indeed, it appears the author of the inspector general’s report confused Congress’ investigation into the 9/11 attacks with the independent National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, otherwise known as the 9/11 Commission, created in late 2002 by legislation passed by Congress. The inspector general’s report insisted it did not find any “evidence that the Joint Forces Intelligence Command misled Congress by withholding operational information in response to the 9/11 Commission.”

But Iron Man’s complaint specifically addressed intelligence withheld from Congress’ inquiries into the 9/11 attacks, not the independent panel’s probe, thereby dismissing an allegation Iron Man had never made.

Iron Man told Truthout the inspector general’s final report “was, shall we say, very incorrect, and intentionally did not address the full scope of the [his] complaint. ”

The watchdog did not tackle another of Iron Man’s explosive claims about DO5 briefings that centered on “numerous examples and suggestions of how [Osama bin Laden] was being hunted by JFIC and could be hunted by the [intelligence community].”

One such briefing held for a “DIA senior intelligence officer on counterterrorism” was entitled “The Search (for Osama bin Laden) – A [commander in chief] Level View,” which included “a compendium of imagery of [a] suspected [Bin Laden] house dating from 23 August 1999 until 11 April 2000.”

At the briefing, intelligence officials were informed that “eleven special reports” by DO5 had been disseminated in the “Daily Intelligence Summary on [Bin Laden], Taliban leadership, Afghan military movements, UN locations, and the economic status of Afghanistan.”

Another briefing for the counterintelligence/counterterrorism chief at NCIS, and about 30 NCIS agents, “clearly stated the JFIC’s Asymmetric Threat Division monitored ‘worldwide [counterterrorism/counterintelligence] traffic’ and routinely prepared ‘analytic reports’ and ‘supplements national agencies with original intelligence on [Bin Laden] and Afghanistan.’”

Congress was kept in the dark about those discussions and was not shown the documents distributed to intelligence officials at the briefings. The inspector general never bothered to find out why. Remarkably, the watchdog stated in its report, “JFIC did not have the mission to track Usama Bin Ladin or predict imminent US targets.”

Iron Man told Truthout it was key intelligence withheld from Congress about al-Qaeda and Bin Laden’s pre-9/11 activities that also played a part in his decision to file a complaint with the inspector general.

“My concern was not only that the 9/11 commission had not been informed, but the larger Congress, in its larger oversight responsibilities, had also not been informed,” he said.

A Heavy Burden

What remains unclear is exactly what took place back in May 2006 that prompted Iron Man’s complaint to the inspector general, given that the issues he had raised centered on events that unfolded four years earlier.

The answer to that question can be found in these passages of Iron Man’s letter, particularly the last few sentences:

“I do believe that knowledge of the work done by DO5 would add to DoD’s understanding of its role in the events leading up to 9/11, and how to avoid future attacks,” Iron Man wrote. “I have been falsely accused of revealing classified information on DO5′s work, when I am certain that information is not and has not been classified since 9/11, and I do want to see myself cleared of that false accusation.

“In addition, I and the deputy of that team, [redacted], especially carried the burden of knowledge of how close DoD came to bin Ladin and perhaps being able to reduce the number of lives lost on 9/11 …”

The deputy whose name the government redacted from Iron Man’s letter, is believed to be Kirk von Ackermann, a former Air Force captain and intelligence analyst, who was working for the US Army as a contractor in Iraq and disappeared in October 2003 while traveling between Tikrit and Kirkuk. A computer, a briefcase containing $40,000, and other materials were found in von Ackerman’s vehicle after he went missing.

Because von Ackerman’s name was classified in the complaint Iron Man filed with the inspector general, he could not confirm whether von Ackerman is the individual he was referring to.

Just three months after Iron Man filed his complaint with DoD’s inspector general, in August 2006, the Army Criminal Investigative Service concluded that von Ackerman had been kidnapped and killed. His remains have never been found nor has anyone claimed responsibility for his death.

Von Ackerman’s tragic story has been previously reported by journalist-blogger Susie Dow on the web site e Pluribus Media, but has largely remained under the radar. In a May 6 article she published on her personal blog, Dow identified von Ackermann as a member of JFIC’s Asymmetric Threats Division. Iron Man’s complaint suggests he ultimately became deputy chief of DO5.

In October 2006, Dow wrote that von Ackermann was “assigned to a counterterrorism team.”

“You’ll find no mention of either Kirk von Ackermann or his team in the 9-11 Commission report…. Well before 9-11, Kirk von Ackermann predicted aircraft could be hijacked and used as weapons against the United States. He also predicted potential targets.”

Von Ackerman’s wife, Megan von Ackerman, has maintained a blog called “Missing in Iraq,” dedicated to her missing husband. In March 2006, she wrote that her husband had planned for such a catastrophic event, but his warnings were ignored:

“… When 9/11 happened everyone around us reacted as normal, civilians would – shock, horror, fear … but Kirk, isolated from the intelligence and military community of people who knew what he knew, felt what he felt, was essentially alone,” Megan von Ackerman wrote. “For a year he had spent his days imagining just this sort of scenario. He had come up with countless plans, evaluated targets, totaled up casualties and estimated political value. He had thought like a terrorist so he could stop them. Now he had to watch it made horribly real – the nightmare he had worked so hard to avoid … Kirk had tried to make the warning, he had worked endless hours to stop this very thing happening. He knew he had no guilt that he had been ignored. But he retained an enormous sense of responsibility – not only for what happened, but for dealing with the new world that 9/11 ushered in.”

Knowing exactly how close he, von Ackerman and DO5 came to capturing Bin Laden and possibly thwarting the attacks on 9/11 is a “burden” Iron Man said he “no longer wants to carry.”

“[Redacted] and I discussed this issue the last time we spoke,” Iron Man wrote in the final paragraph of his letter to the inspector general, likely referring to von Ackerman. “He remains the longest missing man in Iraq in this war, and I want, one day, to be able to explain to his children what their father foresaw.”

Taliban religious police beating a woman in Kabul on August 26, 2001. Photo/Wikimedia

How ironic, of all people in the world, Vladimir Lenin, the Russian revolutionary defined the goal of terrorism succinctly. Lenin said: “the purpose of terrorism is to terrorize.” A century has unfolded since Lenin’s practical conclusion. In modern era, America witnessed the act of domestic terrorism by Timothy McVeigh, a United States Army veteran also known as the Oklahoma City Bomber, who sympathized with militia movement and grew tired of his federal government. McVeigh killed 168 innocent civilians, including women and children, and injured 450; his action was the deadliest act of terrorism within the United States prior to the September 11, 2001 attacks.

When September 11 occurred, Osama Bin Laden became the overnight poster child of terrorism. With Bin Laden now serving as organic fish food at the bottom of the Indian Ocean, his co-conspirators, the Taliban continuously terrorize freedom. The Taliban are the perfect face of the modern terrorism in all of its glorious pathology. Why anyone takes them seriously is utterly beyond me. And yet for some, including Afghanistan’s leader, their bogus moral preening continues to resonate.

While Afghanistan’s president and his family are openly advocating for the Taliban to be recognized as a legitimate political movement, the Taliban’s actions clearly classify them as a terrorist organization which desperately preys on vulnerable minds. Boys as young as 12-years-old are recruited to become suicide bombers under the false pretense of promises which will never be delivered. And in turn, the Taliban boast about using these children as human bombs to slaughter civilians in universities and hospitals across Afghanistan.

When the Pakistan-backed Taliban regime collapsed in 2001, Afghanistan’s doors were open to all Afghans, regardless of their ethnicity or political affiliation. Even those who served during the dark days of the Afghan Communist era seized this opportunity and reintegrated themselves to help in rebuilding Afghanistan. The Taliban, however, resorted to terrorism to appease their Pakistani ISI masters to incessantly inflict terror on Afghans.

Although there is no broadly accepted definition for terrorism, a terrorist group such as the Taliban commonly is defined as a set of individuals belonging to a non-state entity that uses terrorism to achieve their goal. In the Taliban’s case, their objective is for the United States to leave Afghanistan, so Pakistan ISI can conveniently move back in, as in the late-nineties. While most terrorist groups are political by nature, their aim is to target civilians as the Taliban demonstrate this on daily basis.

Unfortunately, Afghan president’s 10 infelicitous years at the helm has failed to help him to grasp the basic notion that even terrorist groups that have ended, did so by pursuing their goals through politics. There is no need to rebrand them and fabricate an identity that genuinely doesn’t fit and is seriously incongruous with Taliban’s character. Today, Taliban’s ideological motivation, to kill Americans because they are Christian, no longer resonates with Afghans, unless Mr. Karzai stokes Afghans sentiment against the United States and appeal to their emotional intelligence.

Unlike Afghanistan’s president, the Taliban do understand that their goal of knocking America out of Afghanistan and the region is extremely unattainable and the only way they could envisage a political settlement and by some miracles find a voice in Afghan society after fifteen years of continuous atrocities, is to redefine their objective narrowly.

For a hypothetical moment, suppose, tomorrow the Taliban open up a political office in Afghanistan. One would highly doubt that Afghans will voluntarily join their political party as Taliban’s past track record is a clear indication of a savage cult that misunderstands Islam and has no respect for Afghan cultural values. No Afghan would want to be the subject of public flogging like livestock in exchange for a political discourse.

But the senseless Afghan war must end. If Mr. Karzai is truly genuine about bringing a well-deserved peace to Afghanistan, he must be genuine about the peace process. First, Mr. Karzai must discern between Afghanistan’s foes and friends. He must use the tools of democracy afforded to him at the sacrifice of the international community and the Afghan people, to delegitimize terrorist actions. For example: the Afghan Parliament must be encouraged to pass a law that forbids any Afghans to take arms against the Constitution of Afghanistan, punishable by death, with a final amnesty to all Taliban terrorist before the law is ratified. This will demonstrate to the Afghan people that Karzai’s government is a serious institution and true custodian of the Afghan Constitution.

Second, the Afghan government must work hard to reform mosques that have historically been used as a tipping point for major political upheavals. Whether it has been the Iranian regime or Pakistan ISI – they have easily manipulated these venues to propagate against reform and the progressive nature of a democratic society.

Third, the Afghan opposition leaders also have a stake in shaping the course of Afghanistan’s future. They must demonstrate to Afghans that individuals with Afghan blood on their hands will no longer be part of a new chapter. Allowing these nefarious characters to participate in political dialogue will afford the Taliban an opening to delegitimize their genuine cause. The opposition must also bring into their ranks many tribal elders and youth organizations that counter Taliban terrorist ideology. The new generation of Afghans, especially students who are introduced to the benefits of education are fundamentally opposing the Taliban mindset and their Pakistani-innovated Islamic values.

Wahid Monawar is former Permanent Representative of Afghanistan to the United Nations in Vienna, Austria. He is currently an associate of Zurich Partners. You can follow him on Twitter @Afghanpolicy.

These are meant to be show trials, part of an overarching plan of “exploitation” of prisoners, which includes, besides a misguided attempt by some to gain intelligence data, the inducement of false confessions and the recruitment of informants via torture. The aim behind all this is political: to mobilize the U.S. population for imperialist war adventures abroad, and political repression and economic austerity at home.

Holder claims he wanted civilian trials that would “prove the defendants’ guilt while adhering to the bedrock traditions and values of our laws.” The Attorney General blamed Congress for passing restrictions on bringing Guantanamo prisoners to the United States for making civilian trials inside the United States impossible. Marcy Wheeler has noted that the Congressional restrictions related to the Department of Defense, not the Department of Justice, and there is plenty of reason to believe the Obama administration could have pressed politicians on this issue, but chose not to. (Others see it differently.)

Human rights organizations have responded with dismay, if not outrage. Center for Constitutional Rights, whose attorneys have been active in the legal defense of a number of Guantanamo prisoners, stated, “The announcement underscores the fact that decisions about whether to try detainees in federal court or by military commission are purely political. The decision is clearly driven not by the nature of the alleged offense, or where and when it was committed, but by the unpopularity of the detainee and the political culture in Washington.” CCR also compared the precedent-setting behavior to “Egypt’s apparent plans to use military trials for protesters at Tahir Square.”

Human Rights First spokesperson Daphne Eviatar said, “Decisions on where to prosecute suspected terrorists should be made based on careful legal analysis, not on politics. This purely political decision risks making a second-class justice system a permanent feature U.S. national security policy – a mistake that flies in the face of core American values and would undermine U.S. standing around the world.”

Most organizations stressed the fact that this was an about-face for the Obama administration. Indeed, one of the oldest human rights organizations in the United States, Human Rights Watch, called the decision a “blow to justice.” HRW Executive Director Kenneth Roth said, “The military commissions system is flawed beyond repair. By resurrecting this failed Bush administration idea, President Obama is backtracking dangerously on his reform agenda.”

The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers statement concentrated on the faults of the military commissions themselves, headlining their press release, “At Guantanamo, “Detainees Are Presumed Guilty”:

“Despite some cosmetic changes since the Bush-era commissions, the commission rules still permit the government to introduce secret evidence, hearsay and statements obtained through coercion,” said the association’s Executive Director, Norman Reimer. “NACDL maintains that the rules and procedures for these commission trials raise serious questions about the government’s commitment to constitutional principles upon which our country was founded. “

Anthony Romero, Executive Director of the ACLU, echoed this today when he called the military commissions “rife with constitutional and procedural problems,” noting the outstanding cases “are sure to be subject to continuous legal challenges and delays, and their outcomes will not be seen as legitimate.”

The Origins of the Military Commissions

CCR, HRF, HRW, and NACDL are all correct, so far as they go. It is evident to many observers that only peculiar military exigency, backed by facts, could allow for military tribunals, as the Supreme Court’s 2006 Hamden decision made clear. It is a matter of historical record that the Bush-era military commissions policy, adopted by President Barack Obama, was initially pushed by former CIA employees William Barr and David Addington, with the encouragement of former Vice President Dick Cheney, along with other “War Council” participants John Yoo, Defense Department counsel under Donald Rumsfeld, William Haynes, and Bush lawyers Alberto Gonzales and Timothy Flanigan.

At the same time the military commissions proposal was initiated, via a military order by Bush, the Bush administration was stripping detainees of Geneva Conventions protections, as well as implementing a program of torture, with Haynes soliciting the Pentagon’s Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA) as early as December 2001 for techniques used in the “exploitation” of prisoners.

In a recent article by Jason Leopold and Jeffrey Kaye, it was shown that the JPRA program that was “reverse-engineered” was Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) course SV-91, “Special Survival for Special Mission Units,” whose mission was to train U.S. military and intelligence personnel to withstand torture meant to “exploit” them for enemy purposes. Those purposes went far beyond the gathering of intelligence. As then-SERE psychologist Bruce Jessen, who was later to work as a contract psychologist and interrogator for the CIA beginning in 2002, noted in notes for SV-91 written in 1989:

“From the moment you are detained (if some kind of exploitation is your Detainer’s goal) everything your Detainer does will be contrived to bring about these factors: CONTROL, DEPENDENCY, COMPLIANCE AND COOPERATION,” Jessen wrote. “Your detainer will work to take away your sense of control. This will be done mostly by removing external control (i.e., sleep, food, communication, personal routines etc. )…Your detainer wants you to feel ‘EVERYTHING’ is dependent on him, from the smallest detail, (food, sleep, human interaction), to your release or your very life … Your detainer wants you to comply with everything he wishes. He will attempt to make everything from personal comfort to your release unavoidably connected to compliance in your mind.”

Jessen wrote that cooperation is the “end goal” of the detainer, who wants the detainee “to see that [the detainer] has ‘total’ control of you because you are completely dependent on him, and thus you must comply with his wishes. Therefore, it is absolutely inevitable that you must cooperate with him in some way (propaganda, special favors, confession, etc.).”

A former colleague of Dr. Jessen, and along with him a founder of the SV-91 SERE class, former Captain Michael Kearns told Leopold and Kaye:

“What I think is important to note, as an ex-SERE Resistance to Interrogation instructor, is the focus of Jessen’s instruction. It is exploitation, not specifically interrogation. And this is not a picayune issue, because if one were to ‘reverse-engineer’ a course on resistance to exploitation then what one would get is a plan to exploit prisoners, not interrogate them. The CIA/DoD torture program appears to have the same goals as the terrorist organizations or enemy governments for which SV-91 and other SERE courses were created to defend against: the full exploitation of the prisoner in his intelligence, propaganda, or other needs held by the detaining power, such as the recruitment of informers and double agents. Those aspects of the US detainee program have not generally been discussed as part of the torture story in the American press.”

The Stalinist governments of the USSR and East Europe used to make a great practice of show trials, one of the most famous being the trial of Hungarian Cardinal Mindszenty. Arthur Koestler’s famous book Darkness at Noon is about the show trial and confession of an “old Bolshevik” under Stalin’s regime. Such show trials still occur in many parts of the world, from China and Vietnam, to Indonesia, Burma, Iran, Pakistan, Zimbabwe, and the list could go on and on.

That list now includes the United States, where most recently, former child prisoner Omar Khadr was tried in a military commission, pleading guilty with a coerced confession, after years of torture and imprisonment in solitary confinement, his penalty phase of the military tribunal amounting to a show trial, complete with psychiatric “expert” testimony about Khadr’s supposed propensity for “terrorism.” The result? A 40-year sentence for the young man who never spent a free day as an adult, part of a staged deal with the U.S. military prosecutors, who presumably will release Khadr to Canadian authorities in a year or so, where he will continue to be imprisoned, pending any appeals there. But the penalty “trial” got a lot of press, and the U.S. was able to garner a propaganda “victory.”

Without Accountability, Whither America?

The United States is only a small step away from some kind of dictatorship. This may sound like hyperbole to some, but the lack of a clear and strong opposition to military and intelligence community institutional pressures has driven the Obama administration to the right even of the Bush administration on matters of secrecy and executive power. Proposals for “terrorist” or “national security” courts continue to be seriously considered, while the public uproar over the use of torture on prisoners has died down ever since Barack Obama told his Democratic Party followers not to “look back,” and made clear that accountability for war crimes would not happen on his watch. Meanwhile, tremendous inroads are made on privacy rights, while surveillance of private citizens, strip searches at airports, seizures of personal computers, and gathering of personal data from emails and phone calls are now everyday occurrences.

As a result, Obama has been the active creature of militarist forces within the government, and on point after point, has given way to lobbying by the military and intelligence establishments, themselves beholden to a power elite that holds the economic reins of the country, from oil to finance, in their hands. Obama’s role is most evident in his recent military actions against Libya.

The courts, too, have stepped back from their gesture towards judicial independence under Bush, with the Supreme Court ruling today that it would not hear three Guantánamo detainee cases, appeals on rejected habeas reviews regarding Fawzi Khalid Abdullah Fahad Al Odah, Ghaleb Nassar Al-Bihani and Adham Mohammed Ali Awad. While the cases concerned issues surrounding use of hearsay, other evidentiary standards, the role of international law, and the right to a meaningful challenge to detention, the Court gave no explanation for denial of cert. Courthouse News noted, by the way, that new Justice Elena Kagan “does not appear to have recused herself from consideration of two of the cases because of her prior work as U.S. Solicitor General.”

Meanwhile, some anti-torture activists are trying to pursue accountability the best they can, going after the licensure status of mental health professionals who participated in the Bush torture regime. Complaints against former Guantanamo Chief Psychologist Larry James and CIA contract interrogator James Mitchell have not gotten very far, with their cases dismissed.

Another case against former Major John Leso, a psychologist working for the DoD Behavioral Science Consultation Team at Guantanamo, who in 2002 helped write an interrogation protocol that relied in part on SERE “reverse-engineered” torture techniques, was also dismissed, but according to Raw Story, this Tuesday the Center for Justice and Accountability (CJA) and the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) will ask the New York Supreme Court to reconsider the decision of the New York State Office of Professional Discipline (OPD) not to investigate the misconduct complaint against Leso.

The issue of the military commissions must be considered in the context of its embedded existence as part of a full-scale exploitation plan upon prisoners, implemented as part of a war policy with strong imperialist ambitions, initiated by the United States in the aftermath of 9/11. The agitation for such a war preceded 9/11. The terrorist attack set lose this militarist policy, whose appurtenances — military tribunals, exploitation of prisoners, psychological warfare, secret prisons, false confessions, experimental torture programs, and unchecked executive power — threaten to end the semblance of democracy in the United States once and for all.

Originally published on Firedoglake.

Jeffrey Kaye is a psychologist living in Northern California who writes regularly on torture and other subjects for The Public Record, Truthout and Firedoglake. He also maintains a personal blog, Invictus. His email address is sfpsych at gmail dot com.

The second printing has lots of words blacked out. WikiLeaks claims to have a first edition, but hasn’t shared it. However, reading the bleeped-through version reveals plenty. [The New York Times, which obtained an advance copy of the book noted that the "secrets" contained in Operation Dark Heart have been previously reported.]

Shaffer and others in the military-spying complex knew about al-Qaeda cells and leaders in the United States before the 9-11 attacks and were prevented from pursuing the matter. Shaffer believes that effective action could have prevented 9-11. He so informed the 9-11 Commission, which ignored him.

The Defense Intelligence Agency retaliated against Shaffer for having spoken up. We already knew this, but the book adds context and details, and names names.

The bulk of the book is an account of Shaffer’s time in Afghanistan in 2003, and the title comes from the name of another aborted mission that Shaffer believes could have and should have captured or killed al-Qaeda leaders at that time in Pakistan.

Shaffer blames the CIA for screwing up any number of missions; for working with Pakistan which worked with the Taliban and al-Qaeda; for counter-productive drone attacks, and for torturing prisoners.

He also describes the insanity of Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s scheme of sending armed soldiers door-to-door to win hearts and minds and flush out “bad guys.”

Shaffer doesn’t say whether people he helped capture were tortured, but proudly recounts helping murder people and interrogating people without using torture. He does, however, detail the interrogation he did of a man whom he repeatedly threatened with shipment to Guantanamo.

Bleeped out throughout the interrogation are repeated references to what is almost certainly the man’s identity as an American.

Shaffer’s book describes a web of incompetent rival bureaucracies within the military as well as the overlapping “intelligence community.”

What’s remarkable about this gang of gung-ho heroes and obedient cogs is not that they do so much damage but that any of them remain proud of having been a part of it.

Shaffer sure as hell does. He wants the drones to stop and the war scaled back, but he wants the kind of operations he favors to be pursued under an all-powerful commander in both Afghanistan and Pakistan — legal niceties be damned — until military “victory” can compel the negotiation of “peace.”

The 12 pages of advice on “How to Win in Afghanistan” that Shaffer tacked onto the end of the book, and on the basis which the book has been marketed, is a hodgepodge of contradictory recognition of hopelessness and insistence on prevailing.

This book has it all.  And to think that all this nearly perished in the flames [Below, blacked-out passages are represented as BLEEEEEEP]:

Models of heroism instilling confidence in our leaders:

“On Friday afternoons, three of my friends and I would hop in a car and drive the 100 miles to Tucson, drinking a fifth — or two — of vodka along the way.  Soon, I was working counterterrorism missions in the United States and Europe while still in the army reserves and having the time of my life. . . .

“I started having blackouts: I would start drinking in one place, wake up in another place, and not know how I got there. . . .  [S]ome of my bosses drank as much as I did.”

Deep insights into human motivation:

“We’d come halfway around the world to deal with an enemy that cared about nothing but their narrow interpretation of God.  They wanted to kill us simply because we did not think like they did.”

Dramatic tension and vegetable references:

“My team was gonna take to it like an eight-year-old to asparagus. We’d BLEEEEEEEP recruited a scout to help smooth our way with the villagers, but the CIA had maneuvered him out of the picture. Now we were going to be on our own without a native guide. Freakin’ CIA.”

Exemplary and tragic stands taken on principle:

“The CIA, it turned out, was running its own game, a game they didn’t bother to coordinate with anyone on the Defense side of the house.

“At one point, I was to learn later, we had an ugly experience with a warlord who was on their payroll. It was not that they played against both sides. It was the fact that they did it so obviously and poorly that pissed us off.”

The worst cliff-hanging ending to a chapter ever:

“Shortly after that meeting with Dave, our informants told us of a chilling development.  Bearded men, riding on Honda motorcycles, carrying Kalashnikov rifles and satellite telephones, were driving along the trails of the deep, treeless valleys in Zabul province about 100 miles southwest of Bagram. They were on their way.”

The worst beginning to the next chapter that could have been conceived of, with or without depicting people as insects or rodents:

“The Taliban were reinfesting southeast Afghanistan.”

Measured use of violence:

“‘What is your consideration of collateral damage?’ he asked.  ‘None,’ I replied.  ‘According to our information, there appears to be only true believers present with the target.’”

A keen eye for detail:

“For a moment, it was interesting to contemplate the Taliban as a bunch of Fred Flintstones. Nah. I couldn’t recall ever seeing a fat Taliban.”

Subtle foreshadowing:

“The same circumstances would reoccur: coalition and Afghan forces fighting to take ground in hundreds of villages like Deh Chopan throughout the region, holding it long enough to push out the Taliban, and then leaving, only to see the Taliban reemerge in the district unopposed.”

Passionate romance:

“I had been told by several friends about finding troops ‘doing it’ in cramped spaces like the small bomb shelters around our tent living area and Porta-Johns. Yeah, Porta-Johns.”

Clever imperialist banter:

“‘Wow,’ I said. ’But that’s Indian territory.’ I gave them the street location. ’It’s the heart of where the bad guys are hanging out these days.’”

Realistic unflinching looks at the front lines of the battlefield:

“We had to get back to Bagram before dark. Besides, the mess hall served Alaskan king crab on Friday nights, and you had to get there early before it got too rubbery.”

Even subtler foreshadowing:

“The graveyard sat on a high plain that overlooked Kabul against a backdrop of brown and gray rock mountains. Faded green Soviet vehicles — T-64 and T-72 tanks, BMP armored personnel carriers, BRDM armored cars, and more — were stretched out on a tan flat plain as far as the eye could see. Row after row of them.”

Inverted literary allusions based on movies:

“I thought about Willard’s journey up the river and into the ‘heart of darkness.’ Maybe we were going to have to do something to get at these guys where they lived; the remote area where Kurtz called his home was as remote as Wana to us.”

Insights into local customs:

“Dave and I put on our ‘Hajji hats’ — flat-topped Afghan hats worn by the local men.”

Massage cream sources that threaten national security:

I’d never given a massage in a combat zone before, but I dug out some hand cream with lotus flowers that I’d picked up at the BLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP and figured it would do in place of massage oil.

Hints of a sequel:

We have to become involved in helping to shape and improve the message of the true Muslim faith.

David Swanson is the author of the new book Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union by Seven Stories Press.  You can order it and find out when tour will be in your town: http://davidswanson.org/book.

In September 2006, he resurfaced in Guantánamo, when President Bush announced that he was one of 14 “high-value detainees,” previously held in secret CIA prisons, whose existence had been resolutely denied by the administration until that point.

In a speech on September 6, 2006, Bush finally conceded that “a small number of suspected terrorist leaders and operatives captured during the war [on terror] have been held and questioned outside the United States, in a separate program operated by the Central Intelligence Agency,” and claimed that when Abu Zubaydah, who he described as “a senior terrorist leader and a trusted associate of Osama bin Laden,” became “defiant and evasive” after his capture, “the CIA used an alternative set of procedures. These procedures were designed to be safe, to comply with our laws, our Constitution, and our treaty obligations. The Department of Justice reviewed the authorized methods extensively and determined them to be lawful.”

This was a reference to the CIA’s torture program for “high-value detainees,” which was first publicly revealed when a memo that purported to redefine torture so that it could be used by the CIA, written by Justice Department lawyer John Yoo and issued in August 2002, was leaked in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal in 2004.

However, another narrative had already appeared to challenge the one put forward by the President. In June 2006, Ron Suskind’s book The One Percent Doctrine was published, which explained, as I described it in an article a year ago, that:

Zubaydah “turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be,” in the words of Barton Gellman, who reviewed Suskind’s book for the Washington Post in 2006. He “appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations,” and was, instead, the “go-to guy for minor logistics — travel for wives and children and the like” …

Suskind described how, through a close scrutiny of his diaries, in which FBI analysts found entries in the voices of three people — a boy, a young man and a middle-aged alter ego — which recorded in numbing detail, over the course of ten years, “what people ate, or wore, or trifling things they said,” Dan Coleman, the FBI’s senior expert on al-Qaeda, told his superiors, “This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality.”

Since then, more and more compelling evidence has emerged to demonstrate that Abu Zubaydah was indeed nothing more than a “safehouse keeper” with mental health problems, who “claimed to know more about al-Qaeda and its inner workings than he really did,” and a “kind of travel agent” for would-be jihadists, who “was not even an official member of al-Qaeda.” This included Abu Zubaydah’s own testimony at his Combatant Status Review Tribunal at Guantánamo in 2007, when he stated that he was tortured by the CIA to admit that he worked with Osama bin Laden, but insisted, “I’m not his partner and I’m not a member of al-Qaeda.”

Moreover, following on from Ron Suskind’s explanation of how “The United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered,” further confirmation was also provided that his torture yielded no significant information and led only to vast amounts of the intelligence agencies’ time being wasted on false leads. A year ago, summing up the results of Zubaydah’s torture, a former intelligence official stated, bluntly, “We spent millions of dollars chasing false alarms.”

In addition, the details of the torture program that was specifically developed for use on Abu Zubaydah have also been revealed — primarily through a leaked International Committee of the Red Cross report (PDF), based on interviews with the “high-value detainees,” including Abu Zubaydah, and also through other Justice Department “torture memos” released by the Obama administration last April. The grim list of techniques includes waterboarding (a form of controlled drowning), confinement in tiny, coffin-like boxes, prolonged sleep deprivation, prolonged isolation, and the use of violence and stress positions, sustained nudity, loud music and noise.

Given all these facts — that the Bush administration implemented torture for use on a man whose importance was hideously overstated, which led to no useful intelligence and a hideous waste of the agencies’ time — Abu Zubaydah’s story is one of the most distressing examples of hubris in the whole of the Bush administration’s brutally inept “War on Terror,” but his story has not come to an end, of course, and his continued detention, and the Obama administration’s attempts to justify it, continue to throw up new revelations, as was made clear just last week when a court submission filed by the government in September 2009 was unclassified.

In response to 213 requests by Abu Zubaydah’s lawyers for discovery in his habeas corpus petition, the government itself provided the most comprehensive rebuttal to date of the kind of claims put forward by the Bush administration in defense of its torture program, and, specifically, its claims regarding Abu Zubaydah, on the basis that requests for discovery are only relevant when they refer to claims made by the government.

In seeking to turn down the lawyers’ requests, the government revealed that it “has not contended … that Petitioner was a member of al-Qaeda or otherwise formally identified with al-Qaeda” and “has not contended that Petitioner had any personal involvement in planning or executing either the 1998 embassy bombings in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, or the attacks of September 11, 2001.”

Instead, the government now claims that the ongoing detention of Abu Zubaydah “is based on conduct and actions that establish Petitioner was ‘part of’ hostile forces and ‘substantially supported’ those forces,” and that he “facilitat[ed] the retreat and escape of enemy forces” after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001.

In response, as Jason Leopold reported for Truthout:

Zubaydah’s attorneys claim that “the persons whom [Zubaydah] assisted in escaping Afghanistan in 2001 included ‘women, children, and/or other non-combatants’” and that the government has evidence to support those assertions. The lawyers also questioned the government’s history of falsehoods about their client.

“The Government’s accounts frequently have been at variance with the actual facts, and the government has generally been loath to provide the facts until forced to do so,” said Zubaydah’s attorney, Brent Mickum, in an interview. “When the Government was forced to present the facts in the form of discovery in Zubaydah’s case, it realized that the game was over and there was no way it could support the Bush administration’s baseless allegations. So it changed the charges.”

Mickum continued, “I’m not surprised at all that the Government has dropped the old charges against our client and is alleging new charges against him. That is their tried-and-true modus operandi … [W]hen their case falls apart, they re-jigger the evidence, and come up with new charges and [say] ‘we will defend the new charges with the same zeal we defended the earlier bogus charges.’”

Since taking up Abu Zubaydah’s case and filing a habeas corpus petition in February 2008, his lawyers have always maintained not only that their client was not a member of al-Qaeda, but also that Khaldan, the training camp for which he was the “safehouse keeper,” was closed down by the Taliban in 2000 after the camp’s leader refused to allow it to come under the control of Osama bin Laden. Even the government now accepts that Khaldan was “organizationally and operationally independent of al-Qaeda,” and as Brent Mickum told Jason Leopold, reviewing all of the above, “We have never deviated from that position, and now the government admits that we were correct all along.”

These extensive concessions on the part of the government seem only to reveal that the Justice Department is painting itself into a corner with Abu Zubaydah, engaged in a slow-moving legal process, which senior officials must be hoping can be strung out indefinitely. Otherwise, profoundly difficult truths will emerge — about the extent of Abu Zubaydah’s torture, its particular futility, and, it should be noted, his relationship to Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the emir of Khaldan who turned down Osama bin Laden.

Rendered to Egypt after his capture at the end of 2001, al-Libi was tortured until he confessed that Saddam Hussein was helping al-Qaeda obtain chemical weapons, a wildly improbable scenario, which, nevertheless, was used to justify the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. What makes the revival of al-Libi’s story particularly unappealing for the US government is that, after years of detention in secret prisons, he was returned to Libya, where, last May, he conveniently died in prison — reportedly by committing suicide — just three days before the US embassy reopened in Tripoli after being closed for 40 years.

When it comes to dealing with Khaldan, the stories of Abu Zubaydah and Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi not only demonstrate the Bush administration’s legacy at its most toxic and self-defeating, but also at its most cruel and pointless, from which, it seems clear, there is no easy way out.

This report was originally published on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation.

Andy Worthington, a regular contributor to The Public Record, is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and the definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009. He maintains a blog at andyworthington.co.uk.