FOIA Release

"Do NOT Cross That Line"
orders from:
John Ashcroft, Attorney General
George J. Tenet, Director of Central Intelligence
and
Donald H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense
to the
9/11 Commission

According to a document obtained by the ACLU under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) on Tuesday March 16, the 9/11 commission was warned on Jan. 6th, 2004 by high-level administration officials to “not cross the line” in the investigation of the events that occurred on Sept. 11, 2001.

The document is available at http://www.aclu.org/files/assets/CIA.pdf

Here’s a copy of the letter in question (page 26 of the PDF document)

From:

Department of Defense
Department of Justice
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)

To:

National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States

Thomas H. Kean, Chairman
Lee H. Hamilton, Vice Chairman

Gentlemen:

Your staff has advised us that the Commission seeks to participate in the questioning of certain enemy combatants detained in the war against terrorists of global reach. Such action by the Commission would substantially interfere with the ability of the United States to perform its law enforcement, defense and intelligence functions in the protection of the American people.

Your legislative commission has had extraordinary — indeed, unprecedented in the annals of American history — access to many of the Nation’s most sensitive secrets in the conduct of its work, including detainee information. In response to the Commission’s expansive requests for access to secrets, the executive branch has provided such access in full cooperation. There is, however, a line that the Commission should not cross — the line separating the Commission’s proper inquiry into the September 11, 2001 attacks from interference with the Government’s ability to safeguard the national security, including protection of Americans from future terrorist attacks. The Commission staffs proposed participation in questioning of detainees would cross that line.

As the officers of the United States responsible for the law enforcement, defense and intelligence functions of the Government, we urge your Commission to not further pursue the proposed request to participate in the questioning of detainees.

Respectfully,

John Ashcroft, Attorney General
Donald H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense
George J. Tenet, Director of Central Intelligence

Revealed: Ashcroft, Tenet, Rumsfeld warned 9/11 Commission about ‘line’ it ’should not cross’

Original pdf available here.

Senior Bush administration officials sternly cautioned the 9/11 Commission against probing too deeply into the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, according to a document recently obtained by the ACLU.

The notification came in a letter dated January 6, 2004, addressed by Attorney General John Ashcroft, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and CIA Director George J. Tenet. The ACLU described it as a fax sent by David Addington, then-counsel to former vice president Dick Cheney.

In the message, the officials denied the bipartisan commission's request to question terrorist detainees, informing its two senior-most members that doing so would "cross" a "line" and obstruct the administration's ability to protect the nation.

"In response to the Commission's expansive requests for access to secrets, the executive branch has provided such access in full cooperation," the letter read. "There is, however, a line that the Commission should not cross -- the line separating the Commission's proper inquiry into the September 11, 2001 attacks from interference with the Government's ability to safeguard the national security, including protection of Americans from future terrorist attacks."

The 9/11 Commission, officially called the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, was formed by President Bush in November of 2002 "to prepare a full and complete account of the circumstances surrounding the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks" and to offer recommendations for preventing future attacks.

"The Commission staff's proposed participation in questioning of detainees would cross that line," the letter continued. "As the officers of the United States responsible for the law enforcement, defense and intelligence functions of the Government, we urge your Commission not to further pursue the proposed request to participate in the questioning of detainees."

FireDogLake's Marcy Wheeler speculates that this was an attempt by the Bush administration to ensure that its torture of certain detainees, which has since been widely documented, remained secret.

"[W]hoever made these annotations appears to have been most worried that Commission staff members could make independent judgments about the detainees and the interrogations," Wheeler wrote on her blog. The official "didn't want anyone to independently evaluate the interrogations conducted in the torture program."

Eventually, the commission's co-chairs harshly criticized the administration for having purportedly "destroyed" tapes of its interrogations with terror suspects, as Raw Story reported last year.

9/11 Commission members Thomas Kean and Lee H. Hamilton wrote that although US President George W. Bush had ordered all executive branch agencies to cooperate with the probe, "recent revelations that the CIA destroyed videotaped interrogations of Qaeda operatives leads us to conclude that the agency failed to respond to our lawful requests for information about the 9/11 plot."

"Those who knew about those videotapes — and did not tell us about them — obstructed our investigation."

They continued: “There could have been absolutely no doubt in the mind of anyone at the CIA — or the White House — of the commission’s interest in any and all information related to Qaeda detainees involved in the 9/11 plot.

"Yet no one in the administration ever told the commission of the existence of videotapes of detainee interrogations," Kean and Hamilton wrote.

The letter can be found on page 26 of the ACLU's set of unveiled documents.

Evidence for Foreknowledge by US Officials

NOTE that his is excerpted from the source article: 9/11 and the American Empire: How Should Religious People Respond? by David Ray Griffin

"A central aspect of the official story about 9/11 is that the attacks were planned entirely by al Qaeda, with no one else knowing the plans. A year after the attacks, FBI Director Robert Mueller said: "To this day we have found no one in the United States except the actual hijackers who knew of the plot."[19] Since that time, federal officials have had to admit that they had received far more warnings prior to 9/11 than they had previously acknowledged. But these admissions, while raising the question of why further safety measures were not put in place, do not necessarily show that federal officials had specific foreknowledge of the attacks. One could still, as did the 9/11 Commission, accept the conclusion published at the end of 2002 by the Congressional Joint Inquiry, according to which “none of [the intelligence gathered by the US intelligence community] identified the time, place, and specific nature of the attacks that were planned for September 11, 2001.”[20]

Unfortunately for the official account, however, there are reports indicating that federal officials did have that very specific type of information. I will give two examples.

David Schippers and the FBI Agents: The first example involves attorney David Schippers, who had been the chief prosecutor for the impeachment of President Clinton. Two days after 9/11, Schippers declared that he had received warnings from FBI agents about the attacks six weeks earlier--warnings that included both the dates and the targets. These agents had come to him, Schippers said, because FBI headquarters had blocked their investigations and threatened them with prosecution if they went public with their information. They asked Schippers to use his influence to get the government to take action to prevent the attacks. Schippers was highly respected in Republican circles, especially because of his role in the impeachment of Clinton. And yet, he reported, Attorney General Ashcroft repeatedly failed to return his calls.[21]

Schippers’ allegations about the FBI agents were corroborated in a story by William Norman Grigg called “Did We Know What Was Coming?”, which was published in The New American, a very conservative magazine. According to Grigg, the three FBI agents he interviewed told him “that the information provided to Schippers was widely known within the Bureau before September 11th.”[22]

If Schippers, Grigg, and these agents are telling the truth, it would seem that when FBI Director Mueller claimed that the FBI had found no one in this country with advance knowledge of the plot, he was not telling the truth.

The Put Options: The government also would have had foreknowledge of the attacks because of an extraordinarily high volume of “put options” purchased in the three days before 9/11. To buy put options for a particular company is to bet that its stock price will go down. These purchases were for two, and only two, airlines--United and American--the two airlines used in the attacks, and for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, which occupied 22 stories of the World Trade Center. The price of these shares did, of course, plummet after 9/11. As the San Francisco Chronicle said, these unusual purchases, which resulted in profits of tens of millions of dollars, raise “suspicions that the investors . . . had advance knowledge of the strikes.”[23]

For our purposes, the most important implication of this story follows from the fact that US intelligence agencies monitor the market, looking for signs of imminent untoward events.[24] These extraordinary purchases, therefore, would have suggested to intelligence agencies that in the next few days, United and American airliners were going to be used in attacks on the World Trade Center. This is fairly specific information.

These two examples imply the falsity of the Joint Inquiry’s statement that “none of [the intelligence gathered by the US intelligence community] identified the time, place, and specific nature of the attacks.” Indeed, one of the FBI agents interviewed by William Grigg reportedly said: “Obviously, people had to know. . . . It’s terrible to think this, but this must have been allowed to happen as part of some other agenda.”[25]

He was right. This would be terrible. There is considerable evidence, however, that the full truth is even more terrible---that the reason some US officials had foreknowledge of the attacks is because they had planned them."

Endnotes:

19. I quoted this statement in The New Pearl Harbor (henceforth cited as NPH), 69.

20. This statement is contained in the summary of the final report of the Joint Inquiry conducted by the House and Senate intelligence committees, posted at http://intelligence.senate.gov/press.htm under December 11, 2002; it is quoted in NPH, 69.

21. See The Alex Jones Show, Oct. 10, 2001; “David Schippers Goes Public: The FBI Was Warned,” Indianapolis Star, Oct. 13, 2001; and “Active FBI Special Agent Files Complaint Concerning Obstructed FBI Anti-Terrorist Investigations,” Judicial Watch, Nov. 14, 2001.

22. William Norman Grigg, “Did We Know What Was Coming?” The New American 18/5 (March 11, 2002).

23. The San Francisco Chronicle, Sept. 29, 2001. The 9/11 Commission tried to scotch these suspicions. Its most important claim is that it found that 95 percent of the puts for United Airlines were purchased by “[a] single U.S.-based institutional investor with no conceivable ties to al Qaeda” (The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, Authorized Edition [New York: W. W. Norton, 2004], 499 note 130). But this argument is viciously circular. What is at issue is whether people other than al Qaeda knew about the attacks in advance, perhaps because they had helped plan them. But the Commission simply assumes that al Qaeda and only al Qaeda planned and knew about the attacks. Accordingly, runs the Commission’s logic, if the investors who purchased the put options in question had no ties with al Qaeda, they could not possibly have had insider knowledge. They were simply lucky.

24. UPI, Feb. 13, 2001; Michael Ruppert, “Suppressed Details of Criminal Insider Trading Lead Directly into the CIA’s Highest Ranks,” From the Wilderness Publications (www.fromthewilderness.com), Oct. 9, 2001.

25. William Norman Grigg, “Did We Know What Was Coming?” The New American (www.thenewamerican.com) 18/5: March 11, 2002.