9/11 - What The Bush Administration Knew
Byrnzie
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http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/apr2004/pdb-a12.shtml
CIA briefing memo exposes Bush lies on 9/11
By Barry Grey
12 April 2004
The declassification and release of the president’s daily brief (PDB) for August 6, 2001, coming on the heels of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice’s appearance before the commission appointed to investigate the events of September 11, has thoroughly exposed the official version of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington as a tissue of lies.
Whatever shred of credibility remained for the Bush administration’s claims that it had no prior warnings of an attack by Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network on the US mainland has been shattered by the publication of the CIA memo, entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.”
The administration’s decision to release the memo, like every other concession it has made to demands for a public investigation of the 9/11 attacks, was taken in a grudging attempt to quell growing skepticism over the official line, and the vocal protests of family members of 9/11 victims, many of whom are outraged over White House stonewalling and sabotage of efforts to uncover the facts surrounding the worst single attack on US civilians in American history.
When the existence of the August 2001 PDB was first revealed in May of 2002, White House officials, first and foremost, Condoleezza Rice, dismissed it as irrelevant. Rice declared at the time that the memo dealt entirely with possible terrorist attacks outside the US. She was, as is now proven, lying then, and, as even a cursory examination of her sworn testimony last week before the 9/11 panel shows, she is lying still.
For nearly two years the White House refused to release the document, given to President Bush more than a month before the hijack-bombings of the World Trade Center and Pentagon. It only agreed to do so in the wake of the controversy sparked by the testimony last month of Bush’s former counter-terrorism chief, Richard Clarke, who told the 9/11 panel that the Bush administration took no serious action in response to multiple warnings of an impending, massive attack within the US by Al Qaeda, and then exploited the death of nearly 3,000 people on September 11, 2001 to implement an agenda for invading and occupying Iraq that had preoccupied Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and company from the outset of the Bush administration.
The content of the August 6, 2001 PDB makes clear why the administration was so reluctant to release the document. It is a clear and stark warning that Al Qaeda is actively preparing an attack within the US, that its previous attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania show that it has the capability to do so, and that a likely method of attack involves the hijacking of one or more US commercial aircraft.
In her April 8 testimony before the 9/11 panel, Rice, under prodding from one of the commissioners, former Watergate prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste, gave out the title of the August 6 presidential brief. The official heading of the suppressed document produced an audible gasp from the audience in the hearing room, which included dozens of family members of 9/11 victims.
Yet Rice continued to lie about the contents and implications of the PDB. Her dissembling had three essential components.
* Lie number one: Rice declared numerous times that the PDB was not a “threat warning.” It was merely a “historical” review of past events and old intelligence, and contained no warnings of current threats. Nor did it, she claimed, give any indication as to specific cities or buildings to be targeted.
* Lie number two: Notwithstanding the title of the document, Rice continued to maintain that it contained no warnings of attacks within the US.
* Lie number three: Rice reiterated her previous assertions that the PDB in no way pointed to the possibility of hijacked airplanes being used as missiles.
Unfortunately for Rice and the rest of the Bush administration, the plain language of the document, and the actual context in which it appeared, flatly contradict all three contentions.
The claim that the memo was purely of a “historical” character and contained no warnings of current or specific threats is belied by the following information in the document:
Al Qaeda, it said, had active cells in the US that were planning attacks. It mentioned the existence of such cells in California and New York. It said the FBI had collected information since 1998 indicating “patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.” (Our emphasis).
The document also referred to the World Trade Center bombing of 1993 in connection with a statement by bin Laden that he wanted to follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and “bring the fighting to America.” It further said that the foiled Al Qaeda plot to bomb the airport in Los Angeles during the millennium celebrations of December-January 2000 “may have been part of bin Laden’s first serious attempt to implement a terrorist strike in the US.” It cited statements from convicted plotter Ahmed Ressam to the FBI that bin Laden was aware of the plot and that a top bin Laden lieutenant helped facilitate it. (This history, it should be noted, was anything but remote, since the aborted attack on Los Angeles occurred only twenty months prior to the August 6, 2001 briefing).
The document went on to say that the FBI was conducting 70 full-field investigations throughout the US into bin Laden threats, and that the FBI and CIA were investigating a tip that bin Laden supporters in the US were planning attacks with explosives. (Why would the FBI and CIA be conducting such probes if there were no current threats? Rice did not explain this conundrum).
Finally—and in a sense most damaging to Rice’s characterization of the memo as merely of “historical” interest—the CIA briefers wrote that bin Laden was “patient,” that he began planning for attacks years in advance, and was not deterred by setbacks. This comment could have only one meaning: it was a specific caution against any tendency to belittle the looming threat on the grounds that most of the hard information at hand dealt with past events and previously gathered intelligence.
Rice’s second lie—that the PDB did not contain threat warnings of attacks within the US—is contradicted by virtually everything in the document, beginning with the title. Among the specific potential targets named in the memo are: California, New York and Washington DC. The memo, moreover, suggests that federal buildings in New York and the World Trade Center are prime objectives.
Rice’s third lie—that no one could reasonably be expected to infer from the PDB that bin Laden might seek to use hijacked planes as bombs—is perhaps the most cynical of all. The August 6 PDB occurred in the midst of growing alarms from local FBI offices over a suspicious pattern of Arab and Muslim immigrants taking training courses in the piloting of commercial jets at US flight schools. On July 10, less than a month before Bush received the CIA briefing while vacationing at his Texas ranch, an FBI agent in the Phoenix, Arizona office sent a memo to FBI headquarters in Washington urging that it undertake a national survey of American flight schools to see if there was evidence of an Islamist terrorist plot to hijack commercial aircraft.
Ten days later, Italian authorities, in collaboration with the US, shut down air space around Genoa, the site of the Group of 8 summit, and declared the area a no-fly zone. War ships were stationed in the area as well. These precautions were taken specifically out of concern that Al Qaeda terrorists might hijack airplanes and use them to bomb the summit, which was attended by the leaders of the major powers, including George W. Bush.
In his testimony before the 9/11 commission, Richard Clarke said he briefed Rice, to whom he reported, on the warnings that terrorists might use aircraft to attack the G-8 summit. Rice herself testified that she knew at the time that Italian and American authorities were acting to guard the summit from air attacks.
Finally, one week after Bush received the August 6 PDB, immigration authorities in Minneapolis, Minnesota arrested Zaccarias Moussaoui, an Islamic fundamentalist extremist who had sought training in flying a Boeing 747 at a Minneapolis-area flight school. The US government has since charged Moussaoui with being a co-conspirator in the September 11 attacks.
At the time of Moussaoui’s detention, FBI officials in Minneapolis sent a series of urgent requests to FBI headquarters in Washington for authorization to pursue an investigation into the man’s suspected links to Al Qaeda. The agents explicitly cited fears that Moussaoui was training to fly commercial jets in order to pilot one into a skyscraper, and named the World Trade Center as a likely target. Top FBI officials denied their requests and refused to authorize a search of Moussaoui’s computer hard drive.
Neither the Bush administration, nor congressional investigators, nor any other official body has ever explained this extraordinary decision on the part of FBI headquarters. One thing can be said for certain, however: had the Bush White House been seriously interested in pursuing the warnings contained in the PDB it received one week prior to Moussaoui’s detention and two weeks after the Genoa summit, the alarms raised by the Minneapolis FBI would not have gone unheeded and steps would have been taken that would have likely unraveled the plot that was, within a few weeks, to destroy the World Trade Center and the lives of some 3,000 civilians.
Instead, Bush remained on vacation at his Crawford, Texas ranch for another three weeks, fishing and clearing brush. And, as Rice has acknowledged, the first and only cabinet meeting prior to 9/11 dedicated to a discussion of the threat of Al Qaeda terrorist attacks occurred on September 4, 2001—one week before the hijack-bombings.
Even as Rice insisted to the 9/11 commission that the August 6, 2001 PDB did not contain warnings of an imminent attack in the US, she maintained that the Bush administration vigorously acted to protect the American people, issuing orders, alerts and instructions to all relevant intelligence and police agencies, as well as to the air transport industry. She repeatedly spoke of “tasking” the FBI to conduct intensive “full-field” investigations into reports of Al Qaeda activity in the US.
But the remarks of two commissioners, which went uncontested, utterly exposed these claims as fraudulent. Jamie Gorelick, deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, said:
“Secretary [Norman] Mineta, the secretary of transportation, had no idea of a threat. The administration of the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration], responsible for security on our airlines, had no idea. Yes, the attorney general was briefed, but there was no evidence of any activity by him about this.
“You indicate in your statement that the FBI tasked its field offices to find out what was going on out there. We have no record of that. The Washington field office international terrorism people say they never heard about the warnings, they were not asked to come to the table and shake those trees. SACs, special agents in charge, around the country—Miami in particular—had no knowledge of this.”
Another commissioner, former Democratic congressman Timothy Roemer, said:
“We have done thousands of interviews here at the 9/11 commission. We’ve gone through literally millions of pieces of paper. To date, we have found nobody—nobody at the FBI who knows anything about a tasking of field offices.
“We have talked to the director at the time of the FBI during this threat period, Mr. Pickard. He said he did not tell the field offices to do this. And we have talked to the special agents in charge. They don’t have any recollections of receiving a notice of threat.”
Finally, there was the following exchange between commissioner Ben-Veniste and Rice:
Ben-Veniste: “Did the president meet with the director of the FBI between August 6 and September 11?”
Rice: “I will have to get back to you on that. I am not certain.”
The facts cited here constitute only a small part of a veritable mountain of evidence demonstrating that the Bush administration, the CIA and the FBI played a crucial role in one of the greatest crimes in US history. In its aftermath, every branch of government, both political parties, and the media have been engaged in a non-stop effort to conceal this role from the American people. The 9/11 commission itself is part and parcel of the official coverup. It proceeds entirely from the premise that the ability of 19 foreign terrorists, a number of whom were known to US authorities, to commandeer four commercial jets and fly three of them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, without the slightest interference from the government or air industry officials, was simply a “failure of intelligence.”
But this “failure” does not admit of any innocent explanation. Suffice it to note that even the most elementary and obvious measures taken in response to a welter of threat warnings in the summer of 2001 would have, at the very least, saved hundreds of lives. Had airport and airline officials been properly alerted, and the identities of known Al Qaeda operatives living in the US been revealed to them, it is highly unlikely that all, or even any, of the hijackers would have been able to board the targeted planes.
Had the World Trade Center, a likely target of attack, been alerted of the threats, and New York City officials been “tasked” with drawing up emergency response plans, orders would have gone out to vacate all buildings in the vicinity within seconds of the actual terrorist strike. Many lives would have been spared, even had the hijackers succeeded in hitting the first of the twin towers at the World Trade Center.
No such measures were taken. There are only two plausible explanations for this. One is a level of incompetence and indifference to the public’s safety on the part of the Bush administration and the responsible federal authorities—beginning with the president himself and the power behind the throne, Vice President Dick Cheney—that rises to the level of criminal negligence. Here the emphasis must be placed on “criminal,” especially in light of the cynical manner in which the tragedy of 9/11 was used to implement the most sweeping and reactionary foreign and domestic policies, including the barbaric invasion and occupation of Iraq and an unprecedented assault on democratic rights within the US.
The alternate explanation is a deliberate and calculated decision to “stand down” the intelligence and security apparatus, in order to allow a terrorist attack within the US to occur. Certainly the role of top FBI officials in running interference for Al Qaeda operatives and blocking an investigation of their flight training activities points in this direction.
It is not necessary to assume that those involved in such a conspiracy would have known of or anticipated the enormous scale of the attacks. They may have expected a “traditional” hijacking, for example. But it would not be the first time that a regime in crisis resorted to such methods to extricate itself from intractable problems and create conditions for stampeding the country behind policies that otherwise would be politically impossible to implement.
It is no secret that the “war on terror” that Bush announced within hours of the 9/11 attacks corresponds to the program of military aggression, domestic repression and global hegemony that was drawn up prior to the theft of the 2000 election by those who were to become leading figures in the present administration.
As Rice told the 9/11 commission, referring to the “opportunity” provided by the September 11 disaster:
“Bold and comprehensive changes are sometimes only possible in the wake of catastrophic events—events which create a new consensus that allows us to transcend old ways of thinking and acting.”
CIA briefing memo exposes Bush lies on 9/11
By Barry Grey
12 April 2004
The declassification and release of the president’s daily brief (PDB) for August 6, 2001, coming on the heels of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice’s appearance before the commission appointed to investigate the events of September 11, has thoroughly exposed the official version of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington as a tissue of lies.
Whatever shred of credibility remained for the Bush administration’s claims that it had no prior warnings of an attack by Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network on the US mainland has been shattered by the publication of the CIA memo, entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.”
The administration’s decision to release the memo, like every other concession it has made to demands for a public investigation of the 9/11 attacks, was taken in a grudging attempt to quell growing skepticism over the official line, and the vocal protests of family members of 9/11 victims, many of whom are outraged over White House stonewalling and sabotage of efforts to uncover the facts surrounding the worst single attack on US civilians in American history.
When the existence of the August 2001 PDB was first revealed in May of 2002, White House officials, first and foremost, Condoleezza Rice, dismissed it as irrelevant. Rice declared at the time that the memo dealt entirely with possible terrorist attacks outside the US. She was, as is now proven, lying then, and, as even a cursory examination of her sworn testimony last week before the 9/11 panel shows, she is lying still.
For nearly two years the White House refused to release the document, given to President Bush more than a month before the hijack-bombings of the World Trade Center and Pentagon. It only agreed to do so in the wake of the controversy sparked by the testimony last month of Bush’s former counter-terrorism chief, Richard Clarke, who told the 9/11 panel that the Bush administration took no serious action in response to multiple warnings of an impending, massive attack within the US by Al Qaeda, and then exploited the death of nearly 3,000 people on September 11, 2001 to implement an agenda for invading and occupying Iraq that had preoccupied Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and company from the outset of the Bush administration.
The content of the August 6, 2001 PDB makes clear why the administration was so reluctant to release the document. It is a clear and stark warning that Al Qaeda is actively preparing an attack within the US, that its previous attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania show that it has the capability to do so, and that a likely method of attack involves the hijacking of one or more US commercial aircraft.
In her April 8 testimony before the 9/11 panel, Rice, under prodding from one of the commissioners, former Watergate prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste, gave out the title of the August 6 presidential brief. The official heading of the suppressed document produced an audible gasp from the audience in the hearing room, which included dozens of family members of 9/11 victims.
Yet Rice continued to lie about the contents and implications of the PDB. Her dissembling had three essential components.
* Lie number one: Rice declared numerous times that the PDB was not a “threat warning.” It was merely a “historical” review of past events and old intelligence, and contained no warnings of current threats. Nor did it, she claimed, give any indication as to specific cities or buildings to be targeted.
* Lie number two: Notwithstanding the title of the document, Rice continued to maintain that it contained no warnings of attacks within the US.
* Lie number three: Rice reiterated her previous assertions that the PDB in no way pointed to the possibility of hijacked airplanes being used as missiles.
Unfortunately for Rice and the rest of the Bush administration, the plain language of the document, and the actual context in which it appeared, flatly contradict all three contentions.
The claim that the memo was purely of a “historical” character and contained no warnings of current or specific threats is belied by the following information in the document:
Al Qaeda, it said, had active cells in the US that were planning attacks. It mentioned the existence of such cells in California and New York. It said the FBI had collected information since 1998 indicating “patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.” (Our emphasis).
The document also referred to the World Trade Center bombing of 1993 in connection with a statement by bin Laden that he wanted to follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and “bring the fighting to America.” It further said that the foiled Al Qaeda plot to bomb the airport in Los Angeles during the millennium celebrations of December-January 2000 “may have been part of bin Laden’s first serious attempt to implement a terrorist strike in the US.” It cited statements from convicted plotter Ahmed Ressam to the FBI that bin Laden was aware of the plot and that a top bin Laden lieutenant helped facilitate it. (This history, it should be noted, was anything but remote, since the aborted attack on Los Angeles occurred only twenty months prior to the August 6, 2001 briefing).
The document went on to say that the FBI was conducting 70 full-field investigations throughout the US into bin Laden threats, and that the FBI and CIA were investigating a tip that bin Laden supporters in the US were planning attacks with explosives. (Why would the FBI and CIA be conducting such probes if there were no current threats? Rice did not explain this conundrum).
Finally—and in a sense most damaging to Rice’s characterization of the memo as merely of “historical” interest—the CIA briefers wrote that bin Laden was “patient,” that he began planning for attacks years in advance, and was not deterred by setbacks. This comment could have only one meaning: it was a specific caution against any tendency to belittle the looming threat on the grounds that most of the hard information at hand dealt with past events and previously gathered intelligence.
Rice’s second lie—that the PDB did not contain threat warnings of attacks within the US—is contradicted by virtually everything in the document, beginning with the title. Among the specific potential targets named in the memo are: California, New York and Washington DC. The memo, moreover, suggests that federal buildings in New York and the World Trade Center are prime objectives.
Rice’s third lie—that no one could reasonably be expected to infer from the PDB that bin Laden might seek to use hijacked planes as bombs—is perhaps the most cynical of all. The August 6 PDB occurred in the midst of growing alarms from local FBI offices over a suspicious pattern of Arab and Muslim immigrants taking training courses in the piloting of commercial jets at US flight schools. On July 10, less than a month before Bush received the CIA briefing while vacationing at his Texas ranch, an FBI agent in the Phoenix, Arizona office sent a memo to FBI headquarters in Washington urging that it undertake a national survey of American flight schools to see if there was evidence of an Islamist terrorist plot to hijack commercial aircraft.
Ten days later, Italian authorities, in collaboration with the US, shut down air space around Genoa, the site of the Group of 8 summit, and declared the area a no-fly zone. War ships were stationed in the area as well. These precautions were taken specifically out of concern that Al Qaeda terrorists might hijack airplanes and use them to bomb the summit, which was attended by the leaders of the major powers, including George W. Bush.
In his testimony before the 9/11 commission, Richard Clarke said he briefed Rice, to whom he reported, on the warnings that terrorists might use aircraft to attack the G-8 summit. Rice herself testified that she knew at the time that Italian and American authorities were acting to guard the summit from air attacks.
Finally, one week after Bush received the August 6 PDB, immigration authorities in Minneapolis, Minnesota arrested Zaccarias Moussaoui, an Islamic fundamentalist extremist who had sought training in flying a Boeing 747 at a Minneapolis-area flight school. The US government has since charged Moussaoui with being a co-conspirator in the September 11 attacks.
At the time of Moussaoui’s detention, FBI officials in Minneapolis sent a series of urgent requests to FBI headquarters in Washington for authorization to pursue an investigation into the man’s suspected links to Al Qaeda. The agents explicitly cited fears that Moussaoui was training to fly commercial jets in order to pilot one into a skyscraper, and named the World Trade Center as a likely target. Top FBI officials denied their requests and refused to authorize a search of Moussaoui’s computer hard drive.
Neither the Bush administration, nor congressional investigators, nor any other official body has ever explained this extraordinary decision on the part of FBI headquarters. One thing can be said for certain, however: had the Bush White House been seriously interested in pursuing the warnings contained in the PDB it received one week prior to Moussaoui’s detention and two weeks after the Genoa summit, the alarms raised by the Minneapolis FBI would not have gone unheeded and steps would have been taken that would have likely unraveled the plot that was, within a few weeks, to destroy the World Trade Center and the lives of some 3,000 civilians.
Instead, Bush remained on vacation at his Crawford, Texas ranch for another three weeks, fishing and clearing brush. And, as Rice has acknowledged, the first and only cabinet meeting prior to 9/11 dedicated to a discussion of the threat of Al Qaeda terrorist attacks occurred on September 4, 2001—one week before the hijack-bombings.
Even as Rice insisted to the 9/11 commission that the August 6, 2001 PDB did not contain warnings of an imminent attack in the US, she maintained that the Bush administration vigorously acted to protect the American people, issuing orders, alerts and instructions to all relevant intelligence and police agencies, as well as to the air transport industry. She repeatedly spoke of “tasking” the FBI to conduct intensive “full-field” investigations into reports of Al Qaeda activity in the US.
But the remarks of two commissioners, which went uncontested, utterly exposed these claims as fraudulent. Jamie Gorelick, deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, said:
“Secretary [Norman] Mineta, the secretary of transportation, had no idea of a threat. The administration of the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration], responsible for security on our airlines, had no idea. Yes, the attorney general was briefed, but there was no evidence of any activity by him about this.
“You indicate in your statement that the FBI tasked its field offices to find out what was going on out there. We have no record of that. The Washington field office international terrorism people say they never heard about the warnings, they were not asked to come to the table and shake those trees. SACs, special agents in charge, around the country—Miami in particular—had no knowledge of this.”
Another commissioner, former Democratic congressman Timothy Roemer, said:
“We have done thousands of interviews here at the 9/11 commission. We’ve gone through literally millions of pieces of paper. To date, we have found nobody—nobody at the FBI who knows anything about a tasking of field offices.
“We have talked to the director at the time of the FBI during this threat period, Mr. Pickard. He said he did not tell the field offices to do this. And we have talked to the special agents in charge. They don’t have any recollections of receiving a notice of threat.”
Finally, there was the following exchange between commissioner Ben-Veniste and Rice:
Ben-Veniste: “Did the president meet with the director of the FBI between August 6 and September 11?”
Rice: “I will have to get back to you on that. I am not certain.”
The facts cited here constitute only a small part of a veritable mountain of evidence demonstrating that the Bush administration, the CIA and the FBI played a crucial role in one of the greatest crimes in US history. In its aftermath, every branch of government, both political parties, and the media have been engaged in a non-stop effort to conceal this role from the American people. The 9/11 commission itself is part and parcel of the official coverup. It proceeds entirely from the premise that the ability of 19 foreign terrorists, a number of whom were known to US authorities, to commandeer four commercial jets and fly three of them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, without the slightest interference from the government or air industry officials, was simply a “failure of intelligence.”
But this “failure” does not admit of any innocent explanation. Suffice it to note that even the most elementary and obvious measures taken in response to a welter of threat warnings in the summer of 2001 would have, at the very least, saved hundreds of lives. Had airport and airline officials been properly alerted, and the identities of known Al Qaeda operatives living in the US been revealed to them, it is highly unlikely that all, or even any, of the hijackers would have been able to board the targeted planes.
Had the World Trade Center, a likely target of attack, been alerted of the threats, and New York City officials been “tasked” with drawing up emergency response plans, orders would have gone out to vacate all buildings in the vicinity within seconds of the actual terrorist strike. Many lives would have been spared, even had the hijackers succeeded in hitting the first of the twin towers at the World Trade Center.
No such measures were taken. There are only two plausible explanations for this. One is a level of incompetence and indifference to the public’s safety on the part of the Bush administration and the responsible federal authorities—beginning with the president himself and the power behind the throne, Vice President Dick Cheney—that rises to the level of criminal negligence. Here the emphasis must be placed on “criminal,” especially in light of the cynical manner in which the tragedy of 9/11 was used to implement the most sweeping and reactionary foreign and domestic policies, including the barbaric invasion and occupation of Iraq and an unprecedented assault on democratic rights within the US.
The alternate explanation is a deliberate and calculated decision to “stand down” the intelligence and security apparatus, in order to allow a terrorist attack within the US to occur. Certainly the role of top FBI officials in running interference for Al Qaeda operatives and blocking an investigation of their flight training activities points in this direction.
It is not necessary to assume that those involved in such a conspiracy would have known of or anticipated the enormous scale of the attacks. They may have expected a “traditional” hijacking, for example. But it would not be the first time that a regime in crisis resorted to such methods to extricate itself from intractable problems and create conditions for stampeding the country behind policies that otherwise would be politically impossible to implement.
It is no secret that the “war on terror” that Bush announced within hours of the 9/11 attacks corresponds to the program of military aggression, domestic repression and global hegemony that was drawn up prior to the theft of the 2000 election by those who were to become leading figures in the present administration.
As Rice told the 9/11 commission, referring to the “opportunity” provided by the September 11 disaster:
“Bold and comprehensive changes are sometimes only possible in the wake of catastrophic events—events which create a new consensus that allows us to transcend old ways of thinking and acting.”
Post edited by Unknown User on
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Comments
what do you think you could dig up on obama or clinton....or FDR and kennedy ?? now it's the bush admin
not just bush.
Godfather.
http://www.cnn.com/2011/POLITICS/09/05/ ... hpt=po_bn1
Godfather.
What does this have to do with what I posted above?
I fail to see what you find so amusing.
Did you read the article above, or did you just read the title?
They sure did. They had all the info they needed, and yet they chose to do sweet nothing.
it's polite way of saying Dick Cheney.
You know, I wonder what the backlash would have been had they instituted the increased airport/airplane security measures etc in order to prevent 9/11 and they were successful. We'll never know, but I have a feeling they would have taken a verbal beating. But that would have been better than what happened for sure.
look i hate bush and cheney but let me play devils advocate here - unless they knew specific dates and targets what really could they have done? possibly maybe stopped a few before they got on the planes but no way could stop it all and no way could they anticipate the final results of the day (unless you are a conspiracy person and think they brought the towers down themselves which in case i'll step away to let your crazy mind run wild). there are thousands of flights in this country every day, pretty hard to try and randomly keep them all safe every day all the time if a few nutjobs are organized enough to plan and execute like they did. sure they could have done more but doubt much would have made a difference. short of intelligence and stopping them before they execute their plans there really isn't any way to stop terrorism.
America's air defense system - N.O.R.A.D - had been alerted approx 100 times already in 2001 in cases of suspected hijackings of commercial airliners, and fighter jets had been scrambled every time. This is routine.
However, on 9/11 N.O.R.A.D failed. It also happened to be the first instance when overall command of America's air defense system was placed in the hands of Dick Cheney:
'For the past 50 years, NORAD has had the duty of protecting US airspace from attack, and has always been under the direct command of select US Military Generals. Three months before the attack of 9-11, Dick Cheney usurped control of NORAD, and therefore he, and no one else, had the power to call for military sorties on the hijacked airliners on 9-11. He did not exercise that power, and consequently, the Pentagon, WTC2 and WTC7 were left unprotected, and then destroyed, resulting in the death of thousands of innocents. Three months after 9/11, he relinquished command of NORAD and returned it to military operation.'
Never mind. I'm sure this was just a coincidence.
Godfather.
1st off unless you knew when the hijackings were taking place you still would have a hard time scrambling military aircraft to take down the planes into the trade centers. we barely knew at that point what was going on.
and the plane that went down in Schwenksville Pa. at worst was being trailed my fighter jets and in the opinion of some was taken down by said fighter jets (and i think there is a real possibility it was).
Plus weren't the planes that hit the WTC travelling from Boston to NYC. So unless fighters managed to catch up to the planes over the ocean at some point, they would have had to shoot them down over heavily populated areas. This would have meant that even if the planes had not made it to the towers, there would have been a lot of casualties.
I think that if our democracy was better, there'd be less need for conspiracy theories of the "truther" sort. Asking questions is healthy ... Generating conspiracy theories to the extent that some people do is a symptom of a system where basic levels of trust and decency have broken down.
this isn't a conspiracy theory ... it should be readily accepted by now that the bush administration did nothing to prevent the attacks of 9/11 and exploited the event to launch into a profiteering-influenced war in iraq ... whether you want to believe 9/11 was an inside job or not is up to you ... but there is a reason why they whitewashed the commission report ...
the biggest fraud is that everyone wants to believe they used faulty intelligence when they went into iraq but then didn't act on intelligence such as the one available in the OP!??
no offense guys but this is just a little hard to believe, we get attacked and people are in a huge hurry to blame the Bush admin...conspiracy theory ? yes it sounds like one to me.
Godfather.
Here, check this out... it is a documentary on U.S. Intelligence pre-9/11 and spans across both the Clinton and Bush Administrations:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/knew/
Hail, Hail!!!
Godfather.
I was referring to the inside job conspiracy theories, which are poorly argued and have no basis in observable facts (at this point, anyway). The view that Bush capitalized on what happened to launch the Iraq war is an intuitive and sensible position that does have some evidence in support of it. I do think its possible that people bungled the available intelligence on 9-11 (as opposed to willfully ignoring it): either way, pretty fucked.
No, they LEFT from Boston and NY heading to the west coast.
Watch it... that is the great irony of O'Neill.
He was unable to get all of the pieces because of politics and bureaucratic bullshit, not with other intelligence agencies, but within the FBI. All of the pieces that pointed to the September 11, 2001 attacks were there... but, everyone wanted a their own piece to themselves in order to further their own careers. This spans both Clinton and Bush administrations.
It is a fascinating tragic story.
Hail, Hail!!!
...
If there were sucessful in pulling such a large scale, heavily co-ordinated, multi-faceted secret mission...
THEN...
WHY couldn't they smuggle some weapons of mass destruction into Iraq... so they could say, 'I told you so'?
...
My opinion is the Bush Administration USED the attacks as a reason to get Saddam Hussein... several in that administration had personal vendettas against Hussein.
Hail, Hail!!!
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
You need to be more specific... What exactly is Obama doing... or what has he done or not done?
Hail, Hail!!!
3 tea bag congressmen are skipping obama's speech tonight, and mcconnell today was saying he is automatically already against obama's jobs plan before he even announces it...so yeah...they have no respect for the man, nor for the office of the president.
also, why are you asking ed to speak out? he probably feels that obama now is better than any of the gop field. just like i do. and i don't need ed to tell me how to think and feel.
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
What I'm saying about Ed is, he can't possibly think obama is doing a good job. Look at how many wars we are currently in. I don't see anybody protesting. I don't need Ed to tell me how to think and feel. I don't agree with Ed on anything he's about. This country is in the worst shape it's ever been. If it were a repub. In office you guys wouldn't shut up but another liberal destroys this country and your nowhere to be found. I got off topic, actually was never on topic so I'll end my discussion or rant.
and theres the thing... consiracy theorists are all too willing to keep adding to the number of people who were involved and who consequently must stay quiet. its ridiculous.
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say