Jul 07 2006
FBI Bomb Plot News Conference: Live Blogging
The investigation has been going on for more than a year.
The plan has mostly been thwarted (sounds bad)
Number of actions around the world
Someone exposed this action too early to the media! Sounds like they may have this person identified. Another Benedict Arnold.
The Lebonese suspect was a key Al Qaeda operative with ties that cannot be dismissed as tenuous. We avoided another 9-11.
The second speaker (Port Authority) is listing all the processes and methods they use to protect these travel and commuter lines.
<3rd speaker (NYC Police): plot in the planning stage and nowhere near being operational (which means it had plenty of intel to provide for some time).
This was an example of good intelligence (yet possibly crippled by the NY Times). It was also a warning that NY remains a top target.
Bloomberg is thanking everyone for their efforts and notes anniversary of the London bombings
Investigation on-going
Questions now coming. I will post any answers of interest
Investigation which began with intelligence and then expanded overseas (thanks NSA) and led to the arrest in Lebanon
The individuals involved only mentioned the PATH tunnel, but other discussions over the year included a range of targets.
6 other countries (3 continents) are involved and from the question one may be Canada.
They believe they have the primary leaders, but the hesitation doesn’t sound good to me.
This was not the planned date for taking action! Someone must have leaked to the media and the media had contacted government sources for comment causing this premature action. This is definitely a new damaging leak to the media.
The planning had matured to the point where they were ready to attempt to surveil targets, establish attack plans and acquire materials.
Still subjects out there with some known and some partially known – still a danger there.
2 more ‘in custody’ in foreign countries where the term is not the same as here.
Media wants to know how big a device is required to do what size damage! No risk in printing that so the terrorists can read it!
Principle players (8 individuals) not in this country (yet, since they had to survey targets) which means we needed the NSA surveillance and SWIFT financial tracking systems to track their paths here.
Investigation is just about 12 months old – which means the NY Times and other media outlets were definitely hurting this investigation by disclosing our ongoing methods.
Plot was a suicide attack plan with explosives in tunnels between NJ and NY
end of conference
I can only say I am saddened beyond belief that leaks have caused the authorities to move early and possibly lose some key players in this (5 our still free). And I am angry that the NY Times and others naively exposed programs used legally by this country to foil these plots and save lives. Keller and Co. need to be on the hot seat right now!
Almost all of the transit tunnels are below sea level. If the train tunnel were breeched, a good bit of the system and entire stations such as the station under the World Trade complex would flood. Much would depend on the severity of the breech. A major break in a tunnel at rush hour could potentially drown thousands of commuters before they could get up to a higher level.
The train tunnels are pretty much interconnected so the PATH stations flooding could then in turn flood the subway tunnels.
This is actually a concern for hurricanes in NYC too. Should a major hurricane hit Manhattan, the storm surge could swamp transit station entrances and flood the system.
I’ve been assuming, as I think many of us are/were, that the constant leaks have been motivated strictly by anti-Bush, anti-war leftists hoping to put their own breed back in control of the legislative and executive branches: ie, “misguided” (OK, loonies) people who believe themselves to be better informed than most of us and ‘true patriots’ who bend technical rules but are “not really traitors.”
I’m no longer glued to that view. It’s beginning to look as though elements within our government, especially intelligence circles, are actually working for or on behalf of enemy elements (moles) — not necessarily for al Queda or Islamic interests, but something with more traditional espionage capacity, and capable of utilizing our internal political clashes as a smokescreen while we’re weakened or destroyed, without showing their own dirty hands.
Well, MJ1, if you want to go down that road, yeah there is a faction that actually wants to eliminate the entire concept of secret intelligence. Their agenda is to completely rid our government of any secrets at any level. It is a very naive concept. If you follow the agenda of some of the offshoots of Fenton Communications clients such as the Institute for Policy Studies and the Center for International Policy, you will note a stated agenda to eliminate secret intelligence.
Now when you consider that the husband of Dana Priest, the Washington Post reporter who wrote about alleged secret prisons is the executive director of one of these groups and is actually responsible for finding Joe Wilson his speaking engagements … you begin to get an idea of the scope of what is going on, but only begin to get the idea.
Now consider that organizations and individuals such as Veterans for Peace, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), Code Pink, Cindy Sheehan, Larry Johnson and others are also clients of Fenton Communications in addition to the organizations I noted above.
Fenton’s stated strategy is to get in front of the journalists and spoon-feed them information. They have described the process as “educating the journalists so they may educate the public” and it isn’t much of a stretch to imagine that Fenton might very well be the go-between connecting leaker to journalist. They are a PR agency. They also have a clearly stated political agenda. They limit their clientel to a select group of “progressive” groups and individuals. The initial groups I mentioned are also extremely anti-US. They are pro-Cuba, pro-Sandanista, pro-Chaves. They have a vested interest in damaging the US and our intelligence capability. As Fenton has good connections with members of the media, it would be natural that they be the conduit to use the press in order to damage our intelligence and law enforcement operations.
Why was the New York Post the one to leak this story? Maybe Fenton figures the Times has taken enough of a hit? Maybe they decided to spread the goodies around a little? Who knows. My gut instinct, and that is all it is, tells me that Fenton Communications is the pipeline that is matching up leaker to news outlet.
Oh, and this isn’t the first time in history this has been done. Have some fun on google when you don’t have anything else to do and search on different groupings of “Martha Honey” “John Kerry” Nicaragua “Heinz Foundation” “Institute for Policy Studies”
It could make for a few days of interesting reading on days gone by. I don’t want to give exact links because people tend to place more stock in what they uncover themselves and someone might uncover something new that I missed that is even better than anything I might come up with.
New Details Emerging on Busted NY Terror Plot…
What I continue to see is that there are partisan hacks in sensitive positions that are leaking classified information that affects national security and they’re endangering US national security by their actions. Whether it’s the NSA intercepts progr…
“The American Spectator: ”
‘We thought that once the reporters and editors understood that one, these were not warrantless searches, and two, that this was a successful program that had netted real bad guys, and three, that it was a program that was helping us with current, ongoing cases, they would agree to hold off or just not do a story,’ says the U.S. Treasury official. ‘But it became clear that nothing we said was going sway them. Whomever they were talking to, whoever was leaking the stuff, had them sold on this story.’
To that end, the Justice Department has quietly and unofficially begun looking into possible sources for the leak. ‘We don’t think it’s someone currently employed by the government or involved in law enforcement or the intelligence community,’ says another Justice source. ‘That stuff about ‘current and former’ sources just doesn’t wash. No one currently working on terrorism investigations that use SWIFT data would want to leak this or see it leaked by others. We think we’re looking at fairly high-ranking, former officials who want to make life difficult for us and what we do for whatever reasons.'”*********
http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=10043
Thanks, Crosspatch, I’ll dig into the stuff I’m not familiar with — good stuff, all of it. But my point was based on the assumption that the leaks have to originate with someone who has access to current information, which by definition is someone inside government.
All the determination in the world to eliminate secrets and intelligence agencies via dissemination of the secret information would be futile, without a means of accessing the information to disseminate.
Fenton and their client roster would be laughable and harmless, if they didn’t have several someones inside feeding them. Even the confederacy of disgruntled former intelligence types should be in the dark about current intel, and/or current applications of old intel.
My own primary assumption since shortly after the Joe Wilson – Valarie Plame charade began, has been that (1) the invasion of Iraq cut someone’s financial water off, and that (2) the re-election of President Bush put many of those someone(s) in jeopardy of exposure on both, their activities prior to the Iraq invasion and their subsequent activities to undermine the WOT, defeat Bush, and return power to elements which would not pursue any investigations of who they are and why they’ve been working against US interests.
Granted, some of their activities have either bordered on treason, or even crossed the border. But I saw that, not as the intended end result but as a means to the end, protecting their backsides and trying to regain whatever financial edge they’d had prior to Iraq, no matter the cost.
It’s now looking more and more as though damage to and risk of destruction of the US is not just a costly “means to an end,” but is the desired end. That requires an entirely different motive than simple greed and CYA, and suggests loyalty to and action on behalf of some government other than our own. In that event, Fenton et. al., would simply be the useful idiots.
There are two things going on. First of all you have the partisans in government with an agenda to damage Bush or the Republicans who are not beyond leaking, and then you have a PR agency with a wider agenda to actually harm the US who can facilitate those leaks and coordinate them. We are talking about a professional PR agency here. These are people who know their trade well. They can pick when to leak, what to leak, and who to leak to for the most impact.
But getting back to your comment, yeah, you have to have the leakers to begin with and I believe their motivation is partisan. And they are being used by another group who has a wider agenda of damaging America.
I posted an entry on the subject in my blog, here.
Good column, Crosspatch. I just bookmarked you.
Thanks! Townhall is still having some technical issues with their blogging. For example, there is no easy way to go from a specific article to the main blog page. My main blog page is here. The blogrolls don’t work correctly yet and there is apparently no way for me to adjust the “skin” I selected originally to correct for some font/background color selection issues with the defaults. I like the notion of what they have done over there but the blog area is still a little rough yet.