• Donate your research and writing, and/or your financial support, to the History Commons.
• Spread the word on Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, and other social outreach venues.
• Let your friends and colleagues know about the resource of information available at HC.
• Post your comments on the History Commons Groups blog.

You can go to the newly redesigned History Commons New Topics Listing for information on what we’d like to begin (or continue) covering in 2012. You can comment on these topics, or propose your own, at the HC Groups Blog, on the Facebook page, in a tweet, or by emailing us. We cannot cover all of this on our own. If it’s to be done, it will only get done with your help. Some of the topics we’re interested in covering include:

• 2012 elections and earlier
• the Abramoff lobbying scandal
• Blackwater and the rise of private mercenary forces
• the Citizens United decision
• Guantanamo violations and depredations
• History of the CIA
• the Murdoch/News of the World hacking scandal
• Operation Gladio and NATO’s secret armies in Western Europe
• Political assassinations in the US
• Social movements
• SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act)
• the US Attorney scandal and resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales
• Violence against women in the military
• Wikileaks and Bradley Manning

Naturally, some of our best and most penetrating coverage comes from our community, in the form of suggestions and contributions. Many of our projects began with user suggestions.

And none of our currently active projects are “complete” by any stretch. Every project needs more information for a broader and more in-depth examination of the issues those projects cover. If you’re not interested in a new project, an older project could often use some attention. Here are some of the current projects we’d dearly love to see get some new attention:

• War in Afghanistan
• Prisoner Abuse in Iraq, Afghanistan and Elsewhere
• Global Financial and Economic Crisis 2007-Present
• US Electoral Politics
• US Health Care System
• Global Warming
• US Environmental Issues
• US International Relations

We appreciate your interest and your support. Let’s make this a banner year.

New timeline entries describe how NORAD–the military organization responsible for defending US airspace–regularly launched fighter jets in response to suspicious aircraft in the years before 9/11, with fighters able to take off within minutes of a scramble order.

Other new entries describe a large Russian military exercise that began the day before 9/11 and was monitored by NORAD fighters that were deployed to Alaska and Northern Canada. The Russians promptly called off their exercise in response to the attacks in the US on September 11. As well as monitoring this Russian exercise, on September 11, personnel at the NORAD operations center in Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, were participating in the annual training exercise Vigilant Guardian, which has been described as a “full-blown nuclear war” exercise.

New timeline entries also examine in detail the actions on September 11 of two key NORAD officials: Robert Marr, the battle commander at NORAD’s Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS), and Larry Arnold, the commander of the Continental United States NORAD Region (CONR). After these two men spoke over the phone about the day’s exercise, Arnold joined a teleconference with other NORAD officials. This, however, meant he was unavailable when Marr tried calling him to get authorization to launch fighters in response to the hijacked Flight 11. After leaving the teleconference, Arnold learned of Marr’s call but wondered if the report of a hijacking was part of the exercise. Arnold soon called Marr back and told him to go ahead and launch fighters in response to the hijacking.

Arnold then called the NORAD operations center about the hijacking and the request for fighters. However, when operations center personnel saw television reports about the first crash at the World Trade Center, minutes later, they did not realize it involved the hijacked plane they’d just been alerted to. The operations center was in fact in an “information void” during the course of the attacks, according to officers there that day. It was also receiving many reports of hijackings from the FAA that turned out to be incorrect.

Other timeline entries describe how the US military was placed on an increased state of alert on September 11. Following the terrorist attacks, installations around the world were placed on the highest state of alert, known as Force Protection Condition Delta (FPCON Delta). Soon after that, the defense readiness condition was raised to Defcon 3, the highest level since 1973. News of the increased defense readiness condition was soon communicated within NORAD, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld notified President Bush of the raised threat level. The military stayed at Defcon 3 until September 14, when the defense readiness condition was lowered one notch, to Defcon 4.

There’s a new page for History Commons contributors, users, and friends. Check it out and see if any of the proposed new topics interests you. If you have an idea for something not on this list, post it here!

If you are thinking that so much has been written on 9/11 and putative conspiracies surrounding the event, that it’s almost superfluous to add yet another, think again.

Kevin Fenton has honed in on one of the weakest, most vulnerable aspects of the mainstream narrative about 9/11, and with the tenacity of a pit bull does not let go. Disconnecting the Dots is a convincing, extraordinarily researched and footnoted examination of the circumstances surrounding the pre-9/11 activities of two of the nineteen hijackers. In January 2000, Khalid Al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi attended an Al Qaeda planning meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and then flew via Thailand on to Los Angeles a few weeks later. It is not disputed that the National Security Agency knew that at least Al-Mihdhar had a visa that indicated he was to enter the U.S. after the Malaysia conference. The information was passed on to the CIA’s Alec Station, the special joint CIA-FBI task force organized to get Osama bin Laden.

What happened next is thoroughly examined by Fenton in his book. An FBI agent who sees the NSA cable asks to forward this information back to FBI HQ, but he is told to hold off by a female CIA officer known to us only as “Michael,” and Alec Station’s CIA Deputy Chief, Tom Wilshire. Later, “Michael” will draft a cable only days later claiming the Al-Mihdhar information was passed on to the FBI. But this was untrue.

These purported “mistakes” by the CIA’s CounterTerrorism component and Alec Station — at the behest of the CIA’s Tom Wilshire, an FBI agent on the scene was forestalled in warning FBI superiors of Al-Mihdhar’s U.S. itinerary — are compounded again and again over the next 18 months by other CIA personnel, by the FBI, by the NSA, by Wilshire himself yet again (this time tasked to the FBI in the spring/summer of 2001), that the idea that these two Al Qaeda operatives slipped into the U.S. due to “errors” or poor coordination between intelligence and police agencies is debunked once and for all. Fenton obliterates the argument, and leaves us asking “why”?

Fenton, a researcher with HistoryCommons.org, has written a book that will haunt you and keep you up at nights. Utilizing public source material only, he uses unassailable logic and irrefutable evidence to demonstrate his hypothesis that CIA and other intelligence personnel deliberately let the 9/11 terror act take place, for reasons that one can make reasonable assumptions, but which to date lack sufficient documentary evidence. The personnel include former DCI George Tenet, Richard Blee (the CIA manager in charge of Alec Station, and Wilshire’s boss), Tom Wilshire and others, who wittingly or not, contributed to the 9/11 outcome.

Whatever you think about such hypotheses, Fenton has made a major contribution to the examination of what really happened around the 9/11 terror attack, whose consequences have been so dire for the U.S. and the population of the world, who have experienced a major escalation in U.S. armed intervention, not to mention torture and assassinations, throughout Northern and Eastern Africa, and throughout the Middle East and West and Southwestern Asia.

Read this book, and then buy a copy for your friends.

One new entry describes how, from 1998, the US Secret Service included computer simulations of planes crashing into the White House in its training exercises. Another notable exercise was held early on the morning of September 11 in the White House Situation Room, based on the scenario of a terrorist bombing in the Middle East.

Also relating to training exercises, new details have emerged about an FBI anti-terrorist unit that was stranded away from Washington at the time of the 9/11 attacks. The Critical Incident Response Group arrived in San Francisco the day before 9/11 for a week of training. Such was the unit’s importance that the White House made getting it back to Washington a priority in the hours after the attacks.

New entries describe two mistaken reports of hijacked aircraft on the morning of September 11. One of these aircraft was thought to be targeting NORAD’s operations center in Colorado. This incorrect information may have caused NORAD to close the massive blast doors to the operations center. The other aircraft was thought to be heading toward Air Force One as it flew President Bush away from Sarasota, and this may have been one reason why Air Force One suddenly increased its altitude.

Details of the two phone calls made by Flight 175 passenger Brian Sweeney are described, the first call to his wife and the second to his mother, in which Sweeney described a possible passenger fight back against the hijackers.

An entry describes how an air traffic controller changed the flight plan of the hijacked Flight 93, thereby apparently causing mistaken reports that the plane was still airborne after it crashed. Also, a special plane operated by NASA was flying over New York State at the time of the attacks, and at one point Flight 93 flew less than 1,000 feet below it.

A number of new entries detail President Bush’s time at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, where he recorded a short statement to the nation that was later broadcast on television. Base commanders only learned of the imminent arrival of the president shortly in advance. Yet despite the intended secrecy, a local TV crew was waiting near the base and filmed Air Force One when it landed there.

President Bush was provided with a high level of security after he got off his plane, and two A-10 jets were put on alert to protect the base. But the false alarms continued, with officials at Barksdale receiving reports of unidentified aircraft flying toward the base. While at Barksdale, Bush spent much of his time in the office of Lieutenant General Thomas Keck.

For security reasons, the number of people traveling on Air Force One was significantly reduced after Bush landed at Barksdale. But those remaining behind after Air Force One took off from the base were able to return to Washington later in the afternoon on a specially arranged flight.

Finally, an interesting new entry reveals how a novel by a popular thriller writer, published in 2000, predicted the possibility of a terrorist attack involving a jumbo jet crashing into the World Trade Center.

What I’d really like to see is a more “international” presence for HC. We are very US-oriented, with the vast majority of our coverage focusing on events that primarily impact the US in one sense or another. (Two exceptions that come to mind are the Kosovar Albanian and European Football projects.)

We need more international coverage. I’d also like to see a version of HC in, say, German, either using our information in a translated form, and/or a version incorporating German-language original research.

Cross-posted at the History Commons blog.

WASHINGTON — In what amounts to a fight over who gets to write the history of the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath, the Central Intelligence Agency is demanding extensive cuts from the memoir of a former F.B.I. agent who spent years near the center of the battle against Al Qaeda.

The agent, Ali H. Soufan, argues in the book that the C.I.A. missed a chance to derail the 2001 plot by withholding from the F.B.I. information about two future 9/11 hijackers living in San Diego, according to several people who have read the manuscript. And he gives a detailed, firsthand account of the C.I.A.’s move toward brutal treatment in its interrogations, saying the harsh methods used on the agency’s first important captive, Abu Zubaydah, were unnecessary and counterproductive.

Neither critique of the C.I.A. is new. In fact, some of the information that the agency argues is classified, according to two people who have seen the correspondence between the F.B.I. and C.I.A., has previously been disclosed in open Congressional hearings, the report of the national commission on 9/11 and even the 2007 memoir of George J. Tenet, the former C.I.A. director.

Continue reading here.

My comment:

The key sentence is: “The agent, Ali H. Soufan, argues in the book that the C.I.A. missed a chance to derail the 2001 plot by withholding from the F.B.I. information about two future 9/11 hijackers living in San Diego, according to several people who have read the manuscript.” Looks like Soufan is finally going to say publicly what I gather he has thought privately for some time.

Recent allegations made by former counterterrorism “tsar” Richard Clarke against former CIA Director George Tenet and two other former CIA managers, Cofer Black and Richard Blee, have thrown one of the key unanswered questions of 9/11 into sharp relief. What happened at Alec Station, the CIA’s bin Laden unit, after an officer there discovered that two of the 9/11 hijackers, Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi,had entered the US?

The officer, Margaret Gillespie, says she made the discovery on August 21 and the record indicates she began to notify the FBI and other government agencies on this day. However, while a substantial amount of information has been made public about how the news circulated around the FBI, almost nothing is known of how Alec Station dealt with it.

In an interview recently broadcast as a trailer for the forthcoming audio documentary “Who Is Rich Blee?” Clarke alleged that the CIA had deliberately withheld from him information about Almihdhar and Alhazmi—in particular the news that Almihdhar had a US visa—for over twenty months before 9/11. Clarke also highlighted the importance of the information, saying it was more important than, for example, any of the key pieces of intelligence discussed at a controversial meeting with National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice on July 10, 2001.

Continue reading here.

Following the airing of allegations by former counterterrorism “tsar” Richard Clarke that the CIA deliberately withheld from him information about Pentagon hijackers Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, former CIA director George Tenet, former CIA Counterterrorist Center chief Cofer Black and Richard Blee, a mid-level agency official who occupied two key counterterrorist positions before 9/11, have responded with a joint statement.

Clarke said that information about the two men was deliberately withheld from him in January 2000, at the time of a key al-Qaeda meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, which the CIA monitored. Clarke alleged that, based on his knowledge of how the CIA works, Tenet authorised the deliberate withholding. Clarke added that the information was clearly important in the summer of 2001, when the CIA knew that Almihdhar was in the country and, in the words of one of Blee’s former deputies, was “very high interest” in connection with the next al-Qaeda attack. However, the CIA continued to withhold some information from both Clarke and the FBI.

Mark Rossini, one of Blee’s former subordinates at Alec Station, the CIA’s bin Laden unit, has previously admitted deliberately withholding the information from the FBI. According to Rossini, in early January 2000 he and a colleague, Doug Miller, knew they should notify the FBI that Almihdhar had a US visa and presumably intended to soon visit the US. Miller even drafted, but did not send, a cable informing the FBI of Almihdhar’s visa. However, Rossini says he and Miller were instructed by a female CIA officer known as “Michael” and Blee’s deputy, Tom Wilshire, to withhold the information.

Continue reading here.

by Philip Shenon, the Daily Beast

In a new documentary, former national-security aide Richard Clarke suggests the CIA tried to recruit 9/11 hijackers—then covered it up. Philip Shenon on George Tenet’s denial.