With my new, “lucid and erudite” book on social media about to be published, I’m just beginning the inexorable process of trying to cut through all the clutter and let people know of its existence. Since it’s all about the impact of the digital information revolution and its new social tools and technologies, I thought it might be cool to try some of them as a way of promoting the book — and I encourage you all to join in with me!

Toward that end, I have just created a Facebook event to handle invitations to a virtual book tour being set up by a new tech firm called Shindig. As company exec Eric Yohay explains, “Shindig is a virtual chat technology company that allows authors to not only project themselves onto 1000′s of their fans at once, but lets their fans all interact at the same time.” But the platform isn’t limited to creative types like authors and musicians; each “Shindig” is its own customized video chat space, also useful for events, presentations, parties, and other social functions. So if you like what you see, you can easily host your own.

Anyway, please join me for a magical virtual mystery tour on Wednesday, April 11th at 7pm EST, for “Rory O’Connor’s Virtual Book Tour” when, truly, the medium will be the message! I’ll be discussing my forthcoming book “Friends, Followers and the Future: How Social Media are Changing Politics, Threatening Big Brands and Killing Traditional Media.” I’ll also try to explain current trends in social media and explore what tech visionaries, media makers, political advisers and businesspeople are saying about the meteoric rise of the various social networks.

The New Yorker’s Ken Auletta kindly said, “This is a timely book about a vital subject: How do we get information and is it reliable? If you want to understand the future of news, its opportunities and its pitfalls, read this book.” And Kirkus Reviews said, “”An obvious proponent of the online-media revolution, O’Connor pulls no punches and effectively tracks the gains and losses of the movement in clear, energetic language. An erudite, constructive analysis.”

Please join me in cyberspace –and invite YOUR friends and followers to do so as well — to chat, interact, ask questions and listen to as I read, react and opine…

Listening Post on Al Jazeera is one of my favorite media programs in the world. This week LP and its energetic host Richard Gizbert look at “the Republican media machine” and how the Limbaugh controversy could impact the coming presidential election. I’m pleased to be included as a commentator once again, so please check it out.

Here’s a program summary:

“He has made a living from speaking his mind. But this time round, Rush Limbaugh, the US radio talk show host, may have taken his conservative rants one step too far. Last week, the right-wing shock jock led an on-air, all-out verbal assault on Sandra Fluke, who had argued before Congress that contraception should be covered by health insurance.

This week, advertisers pulled out of his show en masse, despite a rare apology from Limbaugh for the words he had unleashed. And while Barack Obama, the US president, chose to speak up, Republican candidates decided to keep their heads down, weary of upsetting one of the most powerful right-wing media voices in the US – as the countdown to the presidential elections creeps up.

This week’s News Divide takes a look at a controversy within the Republican media machine and the impact it may have on the US presidential election. Has Limbaugh unintentionally harmed the party he backs?

In our Internet Video of the Week, we feature one of the smartest and most prolific online animators around, Mark Fiore. With the US primaries rumbling on, it was only right that he would weigh in with his take on it. In the latest video, “Leader’s”, he summarises what the candidates are talking about – personal lives and timeshares – as opposed to the big issues like economy and war, that they should be talking about.

Listening Post can be seen each week at the following times GMT: Saturday: 0830, 1930; Sunday: 1430; Monday: 0430.http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/listeningpost/2012/03/201239101841433193.html

As she covered Iowa’s recent Republican caucus race, Andrea Mitchell of NBC News recently offered the following analysis of the state and its voters: “The rap on Iowa – it doesn’t represent the rest of the country. Too white, too evangelical, too rural.”

Mitchell’s remark swiftly led to criticism from conservative bloggers and cable television commentators alike. Bernard Goldberg of Fox News, for example, told that network’s leading talk show host, Bill O’Reilly, that mainstream media reporters such as Mitchell would never say that “South Carolina is too black”. Blogger Noel Sheppard of Newsbusters, which specialises in “documenting, exposing and neutralising liberal media bias”, attacked NBC as an “Obama-loving” network, and added, “Nice way of the NBC Nightly News informing viewers that much as the media did in 2008, the race card will be played whenever possible to assist Barack Obama in getting re-elected”. And the political website RealClearPolitics.com charged Mitchell with “opining” rather than reporting.

In rejecting the criticism and accusations of editorialising, NBC News spokesperson Erika Masonhall quickly “clarified” Mitchell’s statement, saying the reporter had merely been “referencing critics who argue that the state shouldn’t carry so much weight because it doesn’t proportionally represent the rest of the country”. Masonhall noted that Mitchell had also interviewed “analysts and Iowa voters who explain why the state is so important in the election cycle”.

But why were Mitchell’s remarks even controversial? After all, both she and the unnamed critics she was “referencing” were right: neither Iowa with its bizarre caucuses nor its first-in-the-nation primary cousin New Hampshire accurately reflect the overall electorate of the United States. The real controversy should be about why the recent “overhyped, unrepresentative Iowa caucuses” (as Brian Montopoli of CBS News described them), along with the equally overhyped and unrepresentative New Hampshire primary, continue to be “so important in the election cycle”. After all, taken together, residents of the two states make up less than two per cent of the population of the US. What’s worse, only about 120,000 of them even participate in the Iowa Republican caucuses, (“That’s about 20 per cent of Iowa’s registered Republicans, four per cent of the population of Iowa, and .04 per cent of the total US population,” as Montopoli points out) and only about twice as many will vote in the upcoming New Hampshire Republican primary.

Taken together, the relatively few caucus and primary voters in these two small states are about as far from a representative sample of the US population as possible. Iowa caucus-goers, for example, are overwhelmingly white, well educated, highly conservative and very religious. (On the Republican side, 60 per cent identified as “born-again” or “evangelical” Christians in 2008.) Iowa is also much more rural than most of the US, and its unemployment rate is well below that of the national norm. Add in the facts that, thanks to the caucuses, Iowa farmers help to determine much of the US’ food, farm and energy policies, and that its caucuses tend to favour the involvement of committed party activists, and you end up with a process that skews entire elections in a more racial, rural, religious and conservative direction than the rest of the voters in the US want to head.

Much the same holds true of New Hampshire, where the nation’s first actual primary election follows closely on the heels of the Iowa caucuses. The Granite State’s minuscule population of 1.3 million is even whiter (94 per cent) than that of Iowa; its largest city, Manchester, has little more than 100,000 residents; and its unemployment rate is even lower than that of Iowa, for example.
Inside Story US 2012: Does Romney’s
Iowa win really matter?

In addition, the fact that past winners in both Iowa and New Hampshire have had mixed success in getting their party’s nomination raises further questions about the relevance of the results there. Both Democrats and Republicans, from Edmund Muskie in 1972 to Mike Huckabee in 2008, have won in Iowa, but lost their party’s nomination. George HW Bush even managed to win Iowa, but failed to become the party standard-bearer in 1980 – and then to lose Iowa while winning not only the Republican nomination, but also the presidency in 1988.

In New Hampshire, John McCain won the Republican primary in 2000, but lost the party’s nomination to George W Bush. More recently, Hillary Clinton won the Democratic primary in 2008, but the party eventually chose Barack Obama. Conversely, Democrat Walter Mondale in 1984 and Republicans Bob Dole in 1996 and George W Bush in 2000 all lost New Hampshire, but eventually won their party nomination. In fact, since 1984, only two candidates have won both the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primaries. If current frontrunner Mitt Romney follows his eight-vote victory in Iowa with a win in New Hampshire, he will be the first non-incumbent Republican to win both states since the 1970s.

Every four years, two tiny and distinct groups of people get to set the policy agenda for the most powerful country on Earth. They wield their extraordinary and disproportionate influence, thanks in large measure to the very same media outlets (including NBC News, of course) that focus so intently on their first-in-the-nation position. Defenders of the two states’ special status like to hail the “retail” or “personal” style of politics supposedly found uniquely in Iowa and New Hampshire, which reputedly enables voters to assess candidates in a way the rest of the populace can’t. But that argument is harder than ever to make in an age when television reigns supreme, with multiple cable debates and millions of dollars in unregulated advertising now setting the agenda.

New Hampshire and Iowa fiercely protect their first place status in the voting process; in fact, they ensure it with laws mandating that their contests take place before those of any other state. The Iowa caucus, however, is really nothing more than a non-binding popularity contest, which does little to determine which candidates actually win the state’s delegates to the Republican nominating convention. Still, the intense focus the media place on covering Iowa’s and New Hampshire’s “horse races” diverts attention from issues and forces candidates to spend months and millions winning just a few thousand votes in places like Iowa – home, as one critic phrased it, “to more pigs than people”. Moreover, the people who do live there simply don’t reflect the general population of the US. Iowans are 91.5 per cent white, for example, compared with about 67 per cent of all Americans. Hispanics are now 14.4 per cent of the national population, but only 3.7 per cent in Iowa, and the state is only 2.3 per cent African-American, compared with 12.8 per cent nationwide.

Iowa and New Hampshire have long been first on the national electoral calendar. New Hampshire’s primary was the first test for presidential hopefuls before the date of Iowa caucuses was moved up in 1972. It became known for political upsets when Dwight Eisenhower defeated his Republican rival Senator Robert Taft in 1952 before winning the presidency. Historically, Iowa held its caucus in mid-February, followed a week later by a primary in New Hampshire; the campaign season then ran through early June, when primaries were held in such large population states as New Jersey and California. Winning in either state – or at least doing better than expected – could put a campaign on the map, and doing poorly often led candidates to pull out. Some spent years organising support in these states. In 1976, the relatively unknown governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter, followed such a strategy all the way to the Democratic nomination and later the presidency.

Fearing that Iowa and New Hampshire were exerting too much influence in the nomination process, however, other states soon began scheduling their primaries earlier. In 1988, for example, 16 mostly Southern states moved to early March. Such “front-loading” escalated during the 1990s, and Iowa and New Hampshire then scheduled their contests even earlier. By 2008, 40 states set primaries or caucuses for January or February; several even attempted to blunt the influence of the two early states by moving to early January. This required all the candidates to raise more money sooner, while simultaneously making it more difficult for lesser-known candidates to gain momentum by doing well in the early going.

Why should you care that the influence of these two small and unrepresentative states grows with each election? The Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primaries not only help select who runs for president in the general election, but they also have a huge impact on what the two major parties come to stand for, and thus how they govern. Their rising importance is owed to two separate, but related phenomena we can already see in action: momentum and elimination.

Here’s how it works: candidates who beat expectations in these early voting states are seen as having momentum, and thus gain more attention amid raising expectations and are taken more seriously by financial contributors, media – and eventually by voters themselves. For those with little momentum, the opposite is true; they lose attention, expectations decline, funding dries up and the media turns away. A case in point: Michele Bachmann, who, according to media reports “affirmed her status as a top-tier candidate in the Republican race to challenge President Obama in 2012″ in August 2011 when she won a pre-caucus “straw poll” in Iowa by receiving 4,823 votes of the nearly 17,000 votes cast. A few months later, Bachmann came in last in the caucuses and was forced to withdraw from the presidential race.

The fact that Iowa and New Hampshire still have so much power and influence makes a mockery of the entire US presidential primary process. Many reformers now call for either a series of regional primaries or just one wide open national primary that would give every state equal status. But all agree that the current primary system is obsolete and puts too much power in the hands of too few.

It seems obvious that every US voter – and not just those few voting in Iowa and New Hampshire – should have a chance to help decide which politicians and policies will govern us. But will things change? Probably not, for two reasons. The first is nature of the US political system itself – but the second problem is with its media system. Whatever happens in the truncated and frenetic 2012 campaign – and no matter how many complaints are aired about the process – the odds remain high that Andrea Mitchell and the rest of her mainstream buddies will find themselves back in Iowa and New Hampshire four years from now for yet another round of horse race coverage focused once again on a narrow, unrepresentative slice of citizens.

Former FBI agents say the agency’s bin Laden unit misled them about two hijackers By Rory O’Connor and Ray Nowosielski

A growing number of former government insiders — all responsible officials who served in a number of federal posts — are now on record as doubting ex-CIA director George Tenet’s account of events leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. Among them are several special agents of the FBI, the former counterterrorism head in the Clinton and Bush administrations, and the chairman of the 9/11 Commission, who told us the CIA chief had been “obviously not forthcoming” in his testimony and had misled the commissioners.

These doubts about the CIA first emerged among a group of 9/11 victims’ families whose struggle to force the government to investigate the causes of the attacks, we chronicled in our 2006 documentary film “Press for Truth.” At that time, we thought we were done with the subject. But tantalizing information unearthed by the 9/11 Commission’s final report and spotted by the families (Chapter 6, footnote 44) raised a question too important to be put aside:

Did Tenet fail to share intelligence with the White House and the FBI in 2000 and 2001 that could have prevented the attacks? Specifically, did a group in the CIA’s al-Qaida office engage in a domestic covert action operation involving two of the 9/11 hijackers, that — however legitimate the agency’s goals may have been — hindered the type of intelligence-sharing that could have prevented the attacks? And if not, then what would explain seemingly inexplicable actions by CIA employees?

As we sought to clarify how the CIA had handled information about the hijackers before 9/11, we found a half dozen former government insiders who came away from the Sept. 11 tragedy feeling burned by the CIA, particularly by a small group of employees within the agency’s bin Laden unit in 2000 and 2001, then known as Alec Station.

Among them was Gov. Thomas Kean, co-chairman of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, which was responsible for investigating 9/11. He agreed to an on-camera interview for our documentary in 2008. He surprised us by voicing many doubts and questions about the CIA’s actions preceding Sept. 11 — and especially about former CIA director George Tenet.

Four years after Tenet testified to the commission, Kean said the CIA director had been “obviously not forthcoming” in some of his testimony. Tenet said under oath that he had not met with President Bush in the month of August 2001, Kean recalled. It was later learned he had done so twice.

Did Tenet misspeak? we asked the New Jersey Republican.

“No, I don’t think he misspoke,” Kean responded. “I think he misled.”

A tale of two hijackers

The story buried in footnote 44 of Chapter 6 of the 9/11 Commission report was this:

The commission became aware in early 2004 of a warning written by Doug Miller, an FBI agent working inside the CIA’s Alec Station. In January 2000, Miller tried to inform his bosses about a man named Khalid Al Mihdhar, who had previously been identified as a member of an al-Qaida operational cadre. By the spring of 2000, the CIA had learned that Mihdhar and another suspected al-Qaida operative, Nawaf Al Hazmi, had likely arrived in Southern California. But the CIA did not pass along the information to the FBI.

The draft cable — blocked by Miller’s CIA superiors — was not turned over to the commissioners or to the earlier congressional investigation. It was discovered in CIA records by an investigator working for a concurrent inquiry conducted by the Justice Department’s inspector general. Apparently it had been missed by Tenet’s DCI Review Group, convened immediately after the attacks to examine CIA records in order to prepare the director for the coming government investigations.

Kean was disturbed by the revelation.

“The idea that that information was left out of something that was so essential for the FBI, whose job it is to work within the United States and track these people … you know, it’s one of the most troubling aspects of our entire report, that particular thing,” Kean said.

We pushed Kean. Could it be this was a simple mistake, a failure to recognize the significance of Mihdhar and Hazmi, as the CIA had initially characterized it?

“Oh, it wasn’t careless oversight,” Kean replied. “It was purposeful. No question about that in my mind … In the DNA of these organizations was secrecy.”

Mihdhar and Hazmi boarded American Flight 77 at Washington Dulles airport on the morning of Sept. 11. After the plane took off, they joined three other men in commandeering the aircraft and flying it into the Pentagon, killing a total of 184 people.

So how then had George Tenet and those responsible at the CIA managed to get away with misrepresenting the incident as a mistake for so long?

“Tenet was a likable guy,” Kean concluded. “He got away with some stuff because people liked him.”

“Malfeasance and misfeasance”

In 2009, former White House counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke took the scenario further. In an on-camera interview he suggested that Tenet, once a close friend and colleague, had ordered the withholding of the information about the two al-Qaida operatives from the FBI and from the White House.

Clarke explained why he had come to that remarkable conclusion. Tenet, he said, followed all information about al-Qaida “in microscopic detail” and would call Clarke at the White House several times a day to share “the most trivial of information.” In addition, there were terrorism threat meetings held in person every other day.

We must have had dozens, scores of threat committee meetings over the time when they knew these guys had entered the country … They told us everything except this … So now the question is, why?

The only explanation Clarke could offer was admittedly speculative: that the CIA may have been running an operation to recruit the two al-Qaida operatives while they were living under their own names in Southern California. This might appear to have been a reasonable thing for the CIA to do. After all, Bill Clinton’s White House had long complained to the agency about the lack of penetration agents in al-Qaida.

But if the CIA was following or recruiting or monitoring Mihdhar and Hazmi in the United States, that might well have qualified as operating on U.S. soil, a violation of the agency’s charter. Once the two men were identified as hijackers on Flight 77, CIA officials may have begun a coverup of their earlier “malfeasance and misfeasance,” as Clarke charges.

His language is blunt, especially for a national security policymaker.

“I am outraged and have been ever since I first learned that the CIA knew these guys were in the country,” explained Clarke. “But I believed for the longest time that this was probably one or two low-level CIA people who made the decision not to disseminate the information. Now that I know that 50 CIA officers knew this, and they included all kinds of people who were regularly talking to me, saying I’m pissed doesn’t begin to describe it.”

Clarke said he assumed that “there was a high-level decision in the CIA ordering people not to share that information.” When asked who might have issued such an order, he replied, “I would think it would have been made by the director,” referring to Tenet — although he added that Tenet and others would never admit to the truth today “even if you waterboarded them.”

The view from the FBI

We found the same suspicion was also prevalent among FBI counterterrorism agents from the time, particularly those who had worked under a legendary FBI agent named John O’Neill in New York. O’Neill, movingly portrayed in Lawrence Wright’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Looming Tower,” was one of the special agents in charge of counterterrorism in the FBI’s New York office. He retired to serve as chief of security at the World Trade Center and was killed in the Sept. 11 attacks, only three weeks after leaving the bureau.

O’Neill’s deputy for counterterrorism was Pasquale D’Amuro, who was appointed inspector in charge of the FBI’s investigation into the attacks.

“I am cautious about saying it, because you have to deal with the facts,” D’Amuro told us. He said that he was told that Richard Blee, the chief of Alec Station, and his deputy, Tom Wilshere, had blocked the sharing of intelligence on Mihdhar and Hazmi with the FBI.

“I had heard that Blee stopped it from coming over, that Blee and Wilshere had had the conversation and stopped it,” D’Amuro said. “There’s no doubt in my mind that that went up further in the agency than just those two guys. And why they didn’t send it over — to this day, I don’t know why.”

Jack Cloonan, former manager at the FBI’s al-Qaida-busting I-49 Squad, is another insider pained by the CIA’s actions.

“If you start to look into everything that’s Khalid Al Mihdhar and Nawaf Al Hazmi, you can’t help but conclude to most people’s minds that this is it,” Cloonan, said during an emotional interview in his New Jersey living room. “9/11 occurred not because the systems failed. The systems actually worked. Somebody made a critical decision not to share this information … If you look at this, it’s really just a handful of people. I don’t know how they sleep at night, I really don’t.”

The CIA’s failure to inform the FBI meant that a last chance to stop the hijackers was missed, says Clarke.

“And if they had….” Clarke told us, his voice trailing off. “Even as late as Sept. 4,” he went on, “we would have conducted a massive sweep. We would have conducted it publicly. We would have found those assholes. There’s no doubt in my mind — even with only a week left — we would have found them…”

Clarke is not an infallible or even a disinterested witness. As a top counterterrorism adviser at the time of the attack, he cannot help but take the tragedy personally. That said, the fact that at least three FBI agents share his views certainly enhances his credibility.

A spokesman for the CIA rejects the notion, telling Salon, “any suggestion that the CIA purposely refused to share critical lead information on the 9/11 plots with the FBI is simply wrong.” The spokesman cited the 9/11 Commission report and a report of the CIA’s independent inspector general. (The latter study, completed in 2004, has never been made public.)

The story of the alleged CIA intelligence failure attracted little other media interest until this August. That’s when Tenet, Richard Blee and another CIA official criticized by Clarke, Counterterrorism Center director J. Cofer Black, replied to our request for an interview. We had asked them to respond to Clarke’s speculation.

Although they declined to be interviewed, Tenet, Black and Blee sent us a joint written statement that charged Clarke was “reckless and profoundly wrong” and that he had “suddenly invented baseless allegations which are belied by the record and unworthy of serious consideration.”

The statement, which we shared with the Daily Beast, was newsworthy because the three men had never before felt the need to explain their actions directly to the American public.

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

The relevance of their testimony to Clarke’s theory is hard to assess. Tenet and Black were never asked about the surveillance of Mihdhar and Hazmi, at least in their public testimony. Blee’s testimony has never been made public.

“You’re not going to say anything”

The CIA’s explanation is not convincing to Mark Rossini, an FBI agent who was assigned to Alec Station in 2000 and 2001. The assignment of tracking Khalid Al Mihdhar, he told us, had been given to a young staff operations officer who shared responsibility for watching events in Yemen along with Alec Station deputy chief Tom Wilshere.

Rossini, who resigned from the FBI in the wake of legal troubles, recalled in a phone interview that the staff officer’s direct supervisor was a redheaded analyst working directly for Wilshere. He says that this supervisor, not referred to by even so much as an alias in any of the government reports on 9/11, is the same woman who told congressional investigators that she had hand-delivered Mihdhar’s visa information to FBI headquarters. This was later proven false when the investigators checked the log books at the FBI headquarters, discovering that she had never set foot in the building. Eleanor Hill, staff director of the congressional inquiry, also told us that her investigators found no evidence that the FBI had ever received the information.

Rossini remembered that the staff operations officer working under that redhead had ordered him and his fellow FBI agent Doug Miller not to tell their colleagues at the bureau, including John O’Neill’s New York office, that Mihdhar was likely on his way to the United States in early 2000.

“She got a little heated,” Rossini recalled. “She just put her hand on her hip and just said to me, ‘Listen, it’s not an FBI case. It’s not an FBI matter. When we want the FBI to know, we’ll let them know. And you’re not going to say anything.’”

Only two days before, this same officer had sent a message internally throughout the CIA misleading her fellow agents into believing that the information had been passed on to the FBI. Her later conversation with Rossini makes it appear that this was a deliberate misstatement. According to the Justice Department inspector general, she sent the misleading message only hours after posting an electronic note on Doug Miller’s draft warning to the FBI: “pls hold off … for now per [the CIA deputy chief of bin Laden unit],” a reference to Tom Wilshere.

We now know the staff officer is a woman named Michael Anne Casey. Her red-haired supervisor was a woman named Alfreda Frances Bikowsky.

Google penetrates the CIA

How we learned the names of those two CIA personnel can be summarized in one word: Google. In the case of the redhead, an Associated Press article from February 2011 seemed to refer to her. She had also been referenced in Jane Mayer’s book “The Dark Side,” by her middle name, Frances. The AP article stated that she had an unusual first name. After searching State Department nominations from the past decade — often cover positions for CIA personnel but still entered into the Congressional Record -– a contemporary historian named Kevin Fenton with whom we work closely found a name that seemed to fit.

For the staff officer, we knew three important facts. She had a “man’s name” — most likely Michael, the name used in the Commission Report. She was in her late 20s at the time of the incident, and was a “CIA brat,” meaning she had at least one parent or another family member inside the agency. We wondered if she might be related to a prominent CIA figure, as her boss Richard Blee had turned out to be. One of the first names that came to mind, given her probable birth year, was William J. Casey, Ronald Reagan’s CIA director.

Pairing the first name “Michael” with the last name “Casey,” we found a number of people with that name working in State Department or military positions. Again looking in the Congressional Record, we found the name Michael Anne Casey — a woman with a man’s name — and another website listing Casey as 27 years old in 1999 and living in the D.C. area, which seemed to make her very likely the person in question. (Incidentally, we were later informed that she is no relation to William J. Casey.)

A CIA threat

When we informed the agency’s Public Affairs office that we planned to release an investigative podcast on iTunes on Sunday, Sept. 11, that named Bikowsky and Casey, the agency replied immediately.

“We strongly believe it is irresponsible and a potential violation of criminal law [emphasis added] to print the names of two reported undercover CIA officers who you claim have been involved in the hunt against al-Qaida,” said spokesman Preston Golson.

Erring on the side of caution, we took the names out of our podcast. On the day we released the revised podcast on our website, we heard from Sibel Edmonds. A former FBI analyst and prominent whistleblower, Edmonds posted a story on her blog Sept. 21 stating that she had three credible sources and a document confirming that the redhead in our revised story was Bikowsky. She also stated that the staff officer involved was Michael Anne Casey and cited our website, Secrecy Kills. It was only then that we discovered our webmaster had briefly and inadvertently placed our entire email to the CIA on our site. Edmonds saw the information and published it.

Within minutes the information had spread widely through social media on the Internet. Before long Gawker breathlessly announced the latest of the CIA’s problems: that Bikowsky, who had risen to become the head of the CIA’s global jihad unit, had been outed. The rather more significant story — that a CIA intelligence failure had contributed to the 9/11 attacks — got short shrift from the popular gossip site.

In an effort to clarify the story, we asked the CIA two factual questions. We asked if Bikowsky’s statement to the congressional 9/11 inquiry — that she had delivered Mihdhar’s visa information to the FBI prior to the attacks — was accurate.

We also asked if former FBI agent Mark Rossini’s recollection that Michael Anne Casey had told him not to report information about Mihdhar and Hazmi was accurate.

The agency did not address the specifics of either question.

“We do not, as a rule, publicly confirm or deny the identities of currently serving agency officers,” a spokesman replied. “That includes those dedicated to the disruption of terrorist plots. The officers involved in those critical efforts have, thanks to their skill and focus, saved countless American lives.”

The story of Mihdhar and Hazmi could easily be clarified, says Robert Baer, a retired CIA officer in the Middle East who worked directly with some of the people involved.

“A lot of these people who withheld this information were not covert operatives,” he explained. “There was no reason to hide their names. They are out there in the public. You can find them in data and credit checks and the rest of it … They certainly could have been brought before the House or the Senate in closed session and an explanation and a report put out there.”

Langley on the defensive

The CIA prefers not to disclose but to protect the handful of people at the heart of this story.

Tenet remained George W. Bush’s CIA director for another two and a half years, where he was famously involved in passing along faulty intelligence about weapons of mass destruction that justified the disastrous invasion of Iraq. On Dec. 14, 2004, George Tenet was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Bush.

Richard Blee, chief of Alec Station in 2001, reportedly took over the CIA operation during the invasion of Afghanistan to capture or kill Osama bin Laden when bin Laden was surrounded in the mountains of Tora Bora three months after 9/11. According to 23-year career CIA officer Gary Berntsen, as reported in his book, “Jawbreaker,” Blee was in charge at the time bin Laden managed to slip away to Pakistan to live comfortably for nearly a decade. Harper’s Ken Silverstein reported that Blee was active in the controversial renditions and detainee-abuse programs. He is now retired and living in Los Angeles.

We do not know exactly what became of Tom Wilshere, a mysterious figure who has managed to maintain an even lower profile than the rest. Dale Watson, former head of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, told us that us that Wilshere became a White House briefer during the Bush era.

Casey and Bikowsky have risen in the CIA’s ranks, despite the fact that Bikowsky has been associated with at least one major blunder. The AP reported that Bikowsky was at the center of “the el-Masri incident,” in which an innocent German citizen was renditioned (a euphemism for kidnapped) by the CIA in 2003 and held under terrible conditions (a euphemism for tortured) in a secret Afghan prison. The AP characterized it as “one of the biggest diplomatic embarrassments of the U.S. war on terrorism.” It was no doubt something more to Khaled el-Masri. Despite that episode Bikowsky was promoted.

As chief of the counterterrorism center, Cofer Black was the boss of Casey, Bikowsky and Blee. He too was associated with the abuses of the extraordinary rendition program. He resigned shortly after George Bush was elected to a second term. Black then served as vice chairman of Blackwater USA, the controversial U.S.-based private security firm, from 2005 to 2008. Earlier this month Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney announced that Black would join his campaign as a foreign policy adviser.

Stand With Me, Jose Antonio Vargas, for a New Conversation about Immigration

OVERVIEW

“On June 22, 2011, I published a shocking exposé in the New York Times. It was my life story. I am an undocumented immigrant, an outlaw in my own country.

Since publishing “My Life As an Undocumented Immigrant,” I have been drowning in media requests, tearful letters, and powerful Facebook messages. I want to thank all of the individuals who have both challenged and supported me, as well as ask those who have not yet done so to join me.

I decided to quit my job as a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and come out about my immigration status in order to launch the project “Define American.” I knew it would be a risk, but I also knew it was long past time to strike up a more civil, inclusive debate about immigration in America. After all, I had a unique story to tell, and I was tired of staying silent.

We may not all agree on how to fix it, but one thing we can all agree on is that our immigration debate is out of control and our immigration system is badly broken. I believe that not only can we do better, but that we must.

Will you sign the pledge to stand with me — Jose Antonio Vargas — in saying that it’s time for a new national conversation on immigration? Define American. Pledge to ask questions, debate, listen, and learn.” More here.

I first met Jose Antonio Vargas in the fall of 2008, in the midst of the historic Obama campaign for the presidency. At the time, I was a fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where I was researching the impact of the then-emerging social media on older legacy forms of journalism, such as newspapers.

A woman named Maralee Schwartz was also at the Kennedy School when I was there. Beginning in 1979, Maralee had spent her entire professional career at The Washington Post, largely as a political reporter and political editor. As national political editor, she led the Post’s award-winning teams of reporters in coverage including three presidential elections, the last term of the Clinton White House, and the first term of the Bush White House.

As a “lifer” at the Post, and like many of her peers at the time in the so-called “mainstream, media,” Maralee was, shall we say, extremely wary of the new media. When she heard upon our first meeting that I was researching how social networks were affecting journalism, for example, she promptly fired back, “Social networks? You mean those places online people go to get dates?”

Despite her pronounced skepticism, Maralee was still open enough to at least consider the possibility that there might be something to my seemingly wild contention that social media would have a major impact on the way journalism would be practiced in the near future. A few weeks after we met, she knocked loudly on my office door, and when I opened it, literally shoved a young man in. “This is Jose Antonio Vargas,” she announced. “He gets what you’re doing!” And then she marched off, leaving Vargas in her considerable wake.

We spent the next hour talking, and I quickly ascertained that Maralee was right – this guy really did get it! Quick, articulate, savvy and full of energy, the twenty-seven-year old immigrant from the Philippines had already been part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning team at the Post — and he certainly seemed poised to attain even greater honor and success in the near future, pursing a career that had already taken him at a still tender age (to me at least!) near the pinnacle of establishment journalism…

Vargas then surprised me by proceeding to castigate his employer as completely behind the curve and mired in a rapidly fading past glory. “These guys don’t understand,” Vargas complained. “They should fire most of the editors and hire a bunch of graphic designers and online journalists,” he announced with the impatience and brashness of youth.

I realized immediately that Vargas, whose Pulitzer participation came about when he cleverly used social media like Facebook to break news about the Virginia Tech campus massacre, was exactly the sort of young, hip and connected reporter places like the Post desperately needed in order to make the transition to a new digital form of journalism. I also realized that Vargas probably was not long for that world.

In short order he did walk away — from what, in an earlier era, would have been seen as the opportunity of a lifetime — in order to join the online upstart Huffington Post. He was among the first, in what soon became a wave, and then a tsunami of journalists, who were abandoning major media platforms like the Post, the New York Times and national television networks to work in a new form of journalism online.

In the years that followed, Jose enjoyed great success at HuffPo, and also began freelancing for major national magazines, including writing a landmark piece for the New Yorker about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. A series of articles he had written about H.I.V./AIDS became a documentary film called “The Other City,” which opened at the Tribeca Film Festival last year and was broadcast on Showtime – and along the way, Jose also came out as gay and wrote movingly about how he could and would no longer keep secrets about who he was and how he felt.

But despite his many amazing successes, Vargas still felt incomplete. Now we know why.

Over the past few years, the annual Personal Democracy Forum has emerged as one of the few truly essential gatherings of its type — and the recently concluded eighth PDF gathering was no exception.

Each year, I go into the conference excited about one or more items on its crowded agenda, only to be surprised at what later emerges as the most important takeaway. This year the key word was one you don’t hear much any more in an American context: revolution.

At PDF, a fascinating procession of speakers, all intimately involved in what has euphemistically become known as the “Arab Spring,” laid out the measures that led first Tunisia, then Egypt and now a number of other Middle Eastern lands to rise up and revolt against their unresponsive and corrupt governments. From Riadh Guerfali to Dr. Rasha Abdulla to Mona Eltahawy to Alaa Abd el Fattah, they explained the process of how they and millions of supporters are  “weaving a network for change” in their countries, and what role the emerging media plays in making that happen.

As speaker after speaker explained, the Arab Spring actions were emphatically not “Twitter” or “Facebook” revolutions that coalesced online — they were instead the outcome of literally decades of resistance offline. At the same time, they were clearly facilitated, and to some extent accelerated, by the decentralized organizing power of the new social media. The result of this offline/online action mashup was surprisingly successful revolutions against long-entrenched political forces.

“The Internet has helped revolution; but the Internet is not revolution,” as Nigeria’s Omoyele Sowore told the assembled. “Maybe the United States is also overdue for a revolution — this country can do a lot better than it is doing now.”

It’s not surprising, I suppose, that it takes an outsider to point out the obvious to us. After all, the corrupt nexus of media and politics has spent decades — and billions — to convince us the Empire is wearing clothes, when any fool without blinders on can see its naked nature. Sowore’s remarks instantly transported me back in time, to a hot and sweaty basketball gymnasium in 1968. I was sixteen-years-old and had just left home to attend Boston College, still a conservative bastion where jocks literally threw rocks at longhairs in a fading and futile attempt to hold back the sweeping changes already beginning to swirl through society.

Somehow, the Student Activities Committee had managed to book a new group called Jefferson Airplane to play at BC. Tiny Roberts Center was packed way beyond capacity on a steamy autumn night when lead singer Grace Slick began to sing the anthem, “Volunteers of America:”

Look what’s happening out in the streets
Got a revolution Got to revolution
Hey I’m dancing down the streets
Got a revolution Got to revolution!

I don’t know if I had ever heard such an idea expressed other than in history books — and it resonated deeply among the thousands of young people crammed into the gym:

One generation got old
One generation got sold
This generation got no destination to hold
Pick up the cry
Hey now it’s time for you and me
Got a revolution Got to revolution !

As the brilliant Alaa Abd el Fattah pointed out in his remarks at PDF, the roots of the current revolution in Egypt go back nearly as far — to 1972 and efforts by his parents’ generation. Ultimately, however, they were stymied by a clever power structure that painstakingly divided and thus conquered the protesters, marginalizing some, buying others off with favor and access”

Sound familiar?

But as Fattah also pointed out, the emerging media now make it possible “to make noises louder online, to build local movements with one narrative and then build them online to a mass movement.”

Come on now we’re marching to the sea
Got a revolution Got to revolution
Who will take it from you
We will and who are we
We are volunteers of America

There’s rightfully been an outpouring of praise in this country for the brave revolutionaries of the Arab Spring. So here’s a question to my fellow Americans: what are you waiting for? This country could be doing so much better than it is.   It’s time to volunteer again for America — and if that takes a revolution, so be it.  After all, as another Boomer anthem of that long ago era aptly put it, once again there’s “something in the air.”

Call out the instigators
Because there’s something in the air
We’ve got to get together sooner or later
Because the revolution’s here, and you know it’s right
And you know that it’s right.

German theologian Martin Niemoller was a staunch anti-Communist who supported Hitler’s rise to power — at first. He later became disillusioned, however, and led a group of German clergymen opposed to Hitler. In 1937 Niemoller was arrested for the crime of “not being enthusiastic enough about the Nazi movement” and later sent to concentration camps. Rescued in 1945 by the Allies, he became a leading post-war voice of reconciliation for the German people.

Niemoller is most famous for his well-known and frequently quoted statement detailing the dangers of political apathy in the face of repression. Although it described the inactivity of Germans following the Hitler’s rise to power and his violent purging of group after group of German citizens, his statement lives on as a universal description of the dangers of not standing up against tyranny.

The text of the Niemoller’s statement is usually presented as follows:

First they came for the communists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew.

Then they came for me,
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

I was reminded of Niemoller recently when federal prosecutors issued a subpoena intended to force New York Times reporter James Risen, the author of a book on the Central Intelligence Agency, to testify at the criminal trial of Jeffrey Sterling, a former C.I.A. officer. Sterling was charged as part of a wide-ranging Obama administration crackdown on officials accused of disclosing restricted information to journalists. Now the Obama Justice Department is threatening to jail a journalist as well unless down Risen tells them if Sterling or someone else leaked information about the CIA’s efforts to sabotage the Iranian nuclear program.

The subpoena, as Charlie Savage reported recently in the Times, “tells Mr. Risen that ‘you are commanded’ to appear at federal district court in Alexandria, Va., on Sept. 12 to testify in the case. A federal district judge, Leonie M. Brinkema, quashed a similar subpoena to Mr. Risen last year, when prosecutors were trying to persuade a grand jury to indict Mr. Sterling.”

Risen rightly says he will ask the judge to quash the new subpoena as well, stating forthrightly, “I will always protect my sources,” and rightly that, “this is a fight about the First Amendment and the freedom of the press.”

It’s bad enough that ever since President Obama took office, he has repeatedly gone after whistleblowers like Sterling with a cold vengeance, charging more people in cases involving leaking information than “all previous presidents combined,” as Savage noted.

But Obama administration officials are no longer content just with targeting whistleblowers like Sterling, former National Security Agency official Thomas Drake, (who goes on trial soon on charges of providing classified information to The Baltimore Sun) and of course Bradley Manning, the Army intelligence analyst accused – and already pronounced guilty by the president — of passing a classified video of an American military helicopter shooting Baghdad civilians to Wikileaks.org. Now they are coming for the journalists as well – just as Bush Administration officials did before them.

And if Risen’s subpoena is not quashed and he still refuses to testify, he risks being held in contempt and imprisoned, just as Times reporter Judy Miller was for 85 days for her refusal to testify in connection with the Valerie Plame Wilson leak in 2005.

Obama’s prosecutors argue that the First Amendment doesn’t give Risen any right to avoid testifying about his confidential sources in a criminal proceeding, and that the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist should be compelled to provide information to a jury “like any other citizen.”

Citizens as well as journalists need to stand up for Risen and against the sleazy, Bush-like tactics of the Obamacrats and the burgeoning national security state. Otherwise, if you don’t speak out when they come, first for the whistleblowers, and then for the journalists, when they come for you, there will be no one left to speak out…

National Conference for Media Reform – Dave Saldana & Rory O’Connor & Patrice O’Neill

 

George Orwell argued that controlling language offered the ultimate tool for getting people to accept the unacceptable – such as the catastrophic risks of operating nuclear power plants. In Orwell’s “1984,” each new edition of the Newspeak dictionary had fewer words than the previous one, making it harder and harder even to think a thought that might challenge Big Brother.

So Orwell would not have been surprised to learn, as the New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert helpfully pointed out this week, that there is literally no word for “meltdown” in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s glossary of atomic-related words and phrases.

A Google search for the past month showed more than 1.93 billion hits for “meltdown. Yet the regulators at the NRC remain wary of listing the word that everyone else in the world uses to summarize the full horror of what will ensue if uranium fuel at the core of a commercial nuclear power plant is left uncooled long enough for it to melt. It’s no surprise, since the nuclear industry’s proponents speak a different language than the rest of us, a special language where euphemism and obfuscation reign, as we first pointed out thirty years ago in our book Nukespeak: Nuclear Language, Myths, and Mindset. Nukespeak is the language of the nuclear mindset — the worldview or system of beliefs of nuclear developers and enthusiasts, to whom there are never any accidents — only “events” or “incidents”, “abnormal evolutions and normal aberrations”, or “plant transients.” [Read more...]