FBI agents accuse CIA of 9/11 coverup

See the second link above (added after your comment, sorry.)

9/11 changed a lot about how Americans perceive risk factors. The CIA, FBI, and DHS are still separate orgs, but there are now mechanisms by which they share information and the walls between domestic and foreign spying are a lot thinner.

If you take the organizations at face value by stated mission, it makes sense that the CIA would have a tremendous amount of information on US citizens that would be proscribed for the FBI. Allowing shared access is just asking for parallel construction and secret courts and shit.

I mean, just this year a high ranking FBI counterintelligence agent was arrested for spying for Russia.

To be fair, we don't know what that data sharing prevented, so that leak might just be the price to pay for preventing another 9/11.

Any sufficiently large organization develops its own factions, with their own internal goals and culture, which will inevitably conflict with the other factions. The larger the organization, the more distant the factions can be from each other, and it doesn't take all that long before they don't even see each other as on the same side "under the hood" anymore, but simply as rivals.

The US government is way, way beyond the "sufficiently large" size, which is more down around the size of any organization that exceeds the Dunbar number. In the real world, even assuming the FBI and the CIA are themselves unitary organizations is only useful as a very rough approximation. I don't have the info to know what the factions are or who they want, I just know from general principles that they are individually far beyond the size where they are most assuredly factions within them, and probably large enough that the factions have their own quite distinct factions within themselves.

See for example the following, from Wikipedia's Alfreda Bikowsky entry[1]:

> Bikowsky was a senior staff member at the Bin Laden Issue Station in January 2000.[16] She was the direct supervisor of Michael Anne Casey, a CIA staff operations officer who was assigned to track future 9/11 hijacker Khalid al-Mihdhar at an al-Qaeda operatives' meeting in Malaysia in early January 2000.[9] Casey blocked a draft cable written by Doug Miller, an FBI agent detailed to the Bin Laden Issue Station, to the FBI warning that al-Mihdhar had a multiple-entry visa for travel to the U.S.[17][18]: 240 Mark Rossini, another FBI agent first assigned to the Bin Laden Issue Station in 1999,[18]: 233 testified that Casey also verbally ordered him to not share information with FBI headquarters about al-Mihdhar or Nawaf al-Hazmi, who was traveling with al-Mihdhar.[2][19] Rossini further stated that Bikowsky told congressional investigators in 2002 that she hand-delivered al-Mihdhar's visa information to FBI headquarters. This was later proven false by FBI log books.[2] The CIA shared some details about al-Mihdhar with the FBI at that time, but not that he had a valid visa to enter the U.S.[18]: 244–7

This kind of story is inconsistent with the notion of a ban on information sharing between the two TLAs.

Of course, Bikowsky's story, and Ray Nowosielski and John Duffy's documentary Who Is Rich Blee, in which her identity was revealed, may be relevant to the linked article in their own right.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfreda_Frances_Bikowsky

Government entities have budgets, and people will always fight over resources. Even to the point that the mission is like 2nd or 5th priority.

The other is an intelligence agency that focuses on foreign collection, analysis and action. Its activities are definitionally illegal in the places where it operates, with the ultimate goal being to inform and enforce American foreign policy using means other than the US justice system.

The CIA sharing information with the FBI generally means that the 4th amendment has been violated, because the CIA operates with an "ends justify the means" framework that the FBI isn't supposed to use.

Edit: I worked with defense/intel forensics as Iraq was transitioning from wartime (intelligence based) to peacetime (justice based) frameworks for dealing with terrorists. There is a massive difference between intelligence briefings needed in a wartime environment to prevent IEDs through "kinetic action" and the evidence packet needed to prosecute terrorists in court as civil society reasserts itself.

In general in the dark world of secret services, there is a "need to know" principle, about protecting sources.

Meaning, what someone does not know, he cannot leak. Because when the enemy knows, that file X leaked and he knows that only 5 persons had access to that file, they can find the source easily.

That has been happened a lot of times accidently, but likely has even been used to activly sabotage each others operations, as the bosses of each others service did not liked each other to put mildly.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedge:_The_Secret_War_Betwee...

“We believe that it is prudent to establish a set of instructions that will more clearly separate the counterintelligence investigation from the more limited, but continued, criminal investigations. These procedures, which go beyond what is legally required, will prevent any risk of creating an unwarranted appearance that FISA is being used to avoid procedural safeguards which would apply in a criminal investigation.”

https://www.globalsecurity.org/security/library/report/2004/...

Which should make all of HN’s sing, but easier to repeat the “wall” meme.

The CIA wanted to recruit, the agencies don’t play together, and when they get caught with their pants down it’s blame someone else. It’s really amazing how HN is 99% doubting of FBI/CIA/NSA/DOJ but be completely uncritical of something when convenient.

The other side of the story: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2004/04/18/t...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act

This principle has been softened and defanged quite a bit since 9/11.

A domestic spy agency would spend all of its time trying to control government, strategic industries, and self-dealing. There are no checks on an organization like the CIA other than the old limitation that it couldn't target US citizens. There's no way to oversee an agency that isn't obligated to explain itself to Congress, is supplied by secret budgets, and information on whose outputs is protected by the Espionage Act (or ultimately, indefinite imprisonment and torture, threats made to family members, etc.)

We're sacrificing democracy for a secret hierarchy of secret police. You've cut government completely out of the equation if you have a government department with the latitude and ability to control domestic politics. It's basically a military coup.

The state must be kept limited in all its powers even in its power to protect from harm. Accepting the consequences of these intentional limitations is a price a society must pay for liberty or face the consequences.

In my opinion the USA has repeatedly fallen short in this regard. Coming back to your question here is an example of harm caused by (one-sided) information sharing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction .

The FBI, military, and state department had an effective veto over new powers for the CIA, so the CIA agreed to lots of rules to make them happy: no overlapping function, no recruiting current employees, etc.

The argument was: “combining domestic and foreign intelligence is something the Nazis and Communists do, so it’s bad.”

There have evolved good reasons for the distinctions. The CIA never engages in criminal prosecution, so doesn’t need to worry about revealing evidence as part of a prosecution. FBI agents, by contrast, are paranoid about what information they are exposed to, for fear it could come out in court.

That’s much more recent, and would have been a surprise to Hoover. In fact, Hoover used the FBI to filter information gleaned from the Vernona Project. The president would receive summaries of analysts reports that were simply “vouched for” by Hoover.

By contrast the DEA was formed during an era when federal law enforcement and intelligence were at a low point in influence, so they stole people, mission, and influence. That’s why the DEA has its own foreign intelligence, domestic intelligence, diplomatic corps, and even judicial system.

Their "job," insofar as it requires lying to people, explicitly does not include lying or manipulating the American people.

MKUltra was a real conspiracy, meaning members of the CIA worked together on something we consider wrongful.

Something else to point out:

> The known fallout from this program includes the Unabomber.

I know that it's been said that Kaczynski was victimized by mkultra but that does not mean mkultra was responsible for his later actions. Plenty of others impacted didn't go on to be serial killers. Edit: and googling, it seems like there's some who say that the specific Harvard experiment he was a subject in was not CIA.

  Privately, President Eisenhower seemed concerned about how to reach the Muslim world. He wrote to his confidant, the Presbyterian church leader Edward Elson, that Islam and the Middle East were always on his mind. “I assure you that I never fail in any communication with Arab leaders, oral or written, to stress the importance of the spiritual factor in our relationships. I have argued that belief in God should create between them and us the common purpose of opposing atheistic communism.” In White House meetings he was more blunt. Speaking with the CIA covert operations czar Frank Wisner and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Eisenhower said that Arabs should dip into their own religion for inspiration in fighting communism. “The President said he thought we should do everything possible to stress the ‘holy war’ aspect,’ according to a memo outlining the conversation. “Mr. Dulles commented that if the Arabs have a ‘holy war they would want it to be against Israel. The President recalled, however, that [King Ibn] Saud, after his visit here, had called on all Arabs to oppose Communism.” The Operations Coordinating Board — the body set up to imple- ment covert plans by the CIA and other agencies — took up Islam. It had already produced a detailed study of Buddhism and how that religion could be used to further U.S. interests. In 1957, the board established an Ad Hoc Working Group on Islam that included offi- cials from the U.S. Information Agency, the State Department, and the CIA. According to a memo on the groups first meeting, its goal was to take stock of what public and private U.S. organizations were doing in the field of Islam and come up with an “Outline Plan of Operations.’ The plan had two main components, both of which were echoed in CIA actions in Munich. First, the United States would shun traditional Muslims in favor of “reform” groups, like the Muslim Brotherhood. Then, as today, the Brotherhood’s radi- cal political agenda of a return to a mythic state of pure Islam was obfuscated by its members’ use of modern symbols, such as West- ern clothing and rhetoric. “Both the Chairman and the CIA mem- ber felt that with the Islamic world being divided as it is between reactionary and reformist groups, it might be found profitable to place emphasis on programs which would strengthen the reformist groups.” In May, the coordination board passed the inventory and plan of action. Its statements were clear and simple: Islam is a natural ally, communists are exploiting Islam, and Islam affects the balance of power. The paper listed a dozen recommendations for strengthen- ing ties with Islamic organizations, especially those with a strong anticommunist bent. As always, the operations were to be covert. “Programs which are indirect and unattributable are more likely to be effective and will avoid the charge that we are trying to use reli- gion for political purposes,’ the report concluded. “Overt use of Is- lamic organizations for the inculcation of hard-line propaganda is to be avoided”

That... didn’t happen.