Following George Tenet's resignation as Director of Central Intelligence at the CIA, the Bush administration immediately pointed to Rep. Porter Goss, as its handpicked nominee.
Porter Goss, a Florida Republican and former CIA operative, is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. He also chaired, together with Senator Bob Graham, the Joint Senate House Committee, on the September 11 attacks.
According to the White House, "the rush to name a replacement" was driven by "worries" of a possible terrorist attack on America in the wake of Tenet's untimely departure.
Yet if the real objective is to to make "America safer", why then did President Bush nominate an individual who is known and acknowledged to have dubious links to the Islamic terror network?
Amply documented, Porter Goss had an established personal relationship to the Head of Pakistan Military Intelligence (ISI), General Mahmoud Ahmad, who according to the Washington Post "ran a spy agency notoriously close to Osama bin Laden and the Taliban" (Washington Post, 18 May 2002).
(http://www.cfrterrorism.org/groups/harakat2.html , see also http://www.cfrterrorism.org/coalition/pakistan2.html ).
Yet this same individual, General Ahmad, was on an official visit to Washington from the 4th to the 13th of September 2001, meeting his counterpart George Tenet as well as key members of the administration and the US Congress including Rep Porter Goss.
In late August 2001, barely a couple of weeks before September 11, Representative Porter Goss together with Senator Bob Graham and Senator Jon Kyl were on a top level intelligence mission in Islamabad, which was barely mentioned by the US media.
Meetings were held with President Pervez Musharraf and with Pakistan's military and intelligence brass including the head of Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) General Mahmoud Ahmad.
The ISI headed by General Ahmad was allegedly also involved in ordering the assassination of the leader of the Northern Alliance, General Ahmed Shah Massood. (http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO309B.html ) The kamikaze assassination took place on the 9th of September (9/9 two days before 9/11) during General Mahmoud Ahmad's official "red carpet" visit to Washington. (4-13 September 2004). The official communiqué of the Northern Alliance pointed to the involvement of the ISI headed by General Mahmoud Ahmad.
The 9/11 breakfast meeting was described by one press report as a "follow-up meeting" to that held in Pakistan in late August 2001, barely two weeks before 9/11.
"Official denials notwithstanding, Pakistan has provided the Taliban with military advisers and logistical support during key battles, has bankrolled the Taliban, has facilitated transshipment of arms, ammunition, and fuel through its territory, and has openly encouraged the recruitment of Pakistanis to fight for the Taliban….
"Pakistan is distinguished both by the sweep of its objectives and the scale of its efforts, which include soliciting funding for the Taliban, bankrolling Taliban operations, providing diplomatic support as the Taliban's virtual emissaries abroad, arranging training for Taliban fighters, recruiting skilled and unskilled manpower to serve in Taliban armies, planning and directing offensives, providing and facilitating shipments of ammunition and fuel, and on several occasions apparently directly providing combat support….
In other words, up to and including September 11, 2001, extending to December 2001, the ISI had been supporting the terror network.
Rep Porter Goss could have pleaded ignorance on the morning of 9/11: "I did not know about the General." But the "Pakistani ISI connection" and the role played by its former head, General Mahmoud Ahmad have since 9/11 been amply documented.
So we were talking about what was happening in Afghanistan, what the capabilities and intentions of the Taliban and Al Qaeda were from the perspective of this Pakistani intelligence leader, when we got the notices that the World Trade Center towers had been attacked.
Q. So you had a more of an inkling than most people that something like this was possible due to your job, but still you couldn't have anticipated that it would happen.
A. Yeah, we had had no briefings either in the United States or in our just-concluded trip that indicated the immediacy or any of the specificity of what happened on September the 11th.
Q. But to you, probably less so than other people, it wasn't that surprising.
A. The fact that something like Sept. 11 occurred and that it occurred in the United States was not a stunning development. The fact that we were vulnerable to this had been anticipated. The actual details, the sophistication and the carnage, the loss of life that occurred, were stunning.
Q. The fact that you had no briefings or warnings, now looking back and you see what kind of evidence was around, was there an intelligence failure?
In other words, two weeks before 9/11, the White House nominee for the CIA Director of Intelligence was being "briefed on the growing threat of al Qaeda" (WP, 5/04/03) by a Pakistani General who "ran a spy agency notoriously close to Osama bin Laden and the Taliban." (WP, 5/18/02 for further details see below). Meanwhile we are led to believe that the revamping of the CIA is required to effectively wage the global war on terrorism (GWOT).
The role of the ISI had been excluded from the Goss-Graham Joint Inquiry's 858 page Report? (See: http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/library/congress/2003_rpt/joint-intell_9-11report_dec02-rel03.htm ).
While casually hinting to "Saudi support and involvement" in 9/11, the Joint Committee report has overlooked a vast body of analysis on ISI support to the terror network, in which the two Florida lawmen are personally implicated.
Needless to say, Saudi financing of Islamic organizations was part of an intelligence structure involving Pakistan's ISI and the CIA.
On September 13th 2001, General Mahmoud Ahmad, the alleged "moneyman" behind the 9/11 hijackers was meeting Colin Powell at the State Department to discuss the terms of Pakistan's cooperation in the war on terrorism.
Was it "an intelligence failure" to seek the cooperation of the Pakistani government in the "war on terrorism" in an agreement brokered by the head of a spy agency which is known to support the Islamic terror network?
Why was the Ahmad-Powell meeting never acknowledged in the Goss-Graham Report?
One of the recommendations of the Joint Senate House Report chaired by Goss and Graham, was a massive reorganization of the intelligence apparatus which would put the CIA in control of 70 percent of the agency's 40 billion budget (as opposed to 12% under the current arrangement).
Moreover, in anticipation of his nomination to the helm of the agency, Porter Goss, has carefully set the stage. He has introduced a bill in the House which follows through on the Joint Senate House Report. (See Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal 2005, http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/library/congress/2004_rpt/report108558.pdf ).
A large share of this expanded intelligence budget is to be allocated under the bill solely to the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT). This legislation, not only grants the Director of Central Intelligence expanded powers, it reinforces the CIA as a parallel administration responsible for US foreign policy, overshadowing the functions of the US State Department.
The legislation if adopted would "significantly expand the CIA director's executive and management authority over the whole intelligence community".
Below is the text of our earlier report on the the Mysterious 9/11 Breakfast meeting, first published by the CRG in June 2002 and published in the Winter 2003 issue of Global Outlook Quarterly.
"When the news [of the attacks on the World Trade Center] came, the two Florida lawmakers who lead the House and Senate intelligence committees were having breakfast with the head of the Pakistani intelligence service. Rep. Porter Goss, R-Sanibel, Sen. Bob Graham and other members of the House Intelligence Committee were talking about terrorism issues with the Pakistani official when a member of Goss' staff handed a note to Goss, who handed it to Graham. "We were talking about terrorism, specifically terrorism generated from Afghanistan," Graham said.
Mahmood Ahmed, director general of Pakistan's intelligence service, was "very empathetic, sympathetic to the people of the United States," Graham said.
Again the political significance of the personal relationship between General Mahmoud (the alleged "money man" behind 9/11) and Secretary of State Colin Powell is casually dismissed. According to The Miami Herald, the high level meeting between the two men was not planned in advance. It took place on the spur of the moment because of the shut down of air traffic, which prevented General Mahmoud from flying back home to Islamabad on a commercial flight, when in all probability the General and his delegation were traveling on a chartered government plane. With the exception of the Florida press (and Salon.com, 14 September), not a word was mentioned in the US media's September coverage of 9-11 concerning this mysterious breakfast reunion.
"Now the main question facing Goss, as he helps steer a joint House-Senate investigation into the Sept. 11 attacks, is why nobody in the far-flung intelligence bureaucracy — 13 agencies spending billions of dollars — paid attention to the enemy among us. Until it was too late.
Goss says he is looking for solutions, not scapegoats. "A lot of nonsense," he calls this week's uproar about a CIA briefing that alerted President Bush, five weeks before Sept. 11, that Osama bin Laden's associates might be planning airline hijackings.
When the "foreknowledge" issue hit the street on May 16th, "Chairman Porter Goss said an existing congressional inquiry has so far found 'no smoking gun' that would warrant another inquiry." 8 This statement points to an obvious "cover-up". The smoking gun was right there sitting in the plush surroundings of the Congressional breakfast venue on Capitol on the morning of September 11.
1 Agence France Presse (AFP), 28 August 2001.
3. The Hotline, 1 October 2002.
4 Stuart News Company Press Journal, Vero Beach, FL, 12 September 2001.
5 Miami Herald, 16 September 2001.
6. Washington Post, 18 May 2002.
7. Michel Chossudovsky, op. cit.
8. White House Bulletin, 17 May 2002.