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All you need to read
: The headlines over the August 6 White House memo tell the whole story … the whole story of the media spin, that is.
Cori Dauber points us to two headlines regarding this same story in the Washington Post: On the story itself, the headline reads, “”Declassified Memo Said Al Qaeda Was in U.S.” That’s true. But the headline on the Washington Post’s home page says: “Bush Warned of Possible Attacks Before Sept. 11.” That’s high RPM.
What liberal (D) media?
That WP hed is a lazy susan compared to CNN’s Bill Schneider: “I think it could be seriously damaging. What this says is, the White House knew what bin Laden was capable of planning, where he intended to do it, which was New York or Washington, D.C., how he was going to do it. There was only one thing missing, which was exactly when he was going to do it, which turns out to be September 11.”
Let’s face it GWB was taking lots of vacation time (the whole month of August?) and golfing and not doing anything. What the CIA and FBI were doing wasn’t enough. Let’s now take off the hair shirts and FIX what was wrong in our intelligence agencies and make it better. There is plenty of blame to go around. Let’s start working together so we aren’t having more hair shirt hearings in 2005.
Will the Commissions’s findings support the Patriot Act?
According to the 8/6 brief, I knew 9/11 was about to happen also — hijacking, attacking the U.S. domestically. Nothing to it, really.
High PRM????
The thing is titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”
Not Europe. Not Canada. The U.S.
9/11 wasn’t the Bush administration’s fault, but . . . let’s call a spade a spade. Regardless of anyone’s political affiliation, it’s most important that we evaluate what happened with rigorous honesty.
Yes, Robert, let’s do that. What the hell was Bush supposed to do on the basis of such useful information as ‘Bin Laden wants to attack Washington’ or that some intelligence is ‘consistent with’ terrorist activities in the US, possibly including hijackings? This is not the sort of specific information the administration could have acted on. Are the dems now telling us the administration should have imposed Patriot Act-like measures on the basis of this August 6 memo? That doesn’t even pass the laugh test. (Thought experiment for you: imagine an alternate universe in which Bush had taken severe security measures before 9/11 and the attacks hadn’t happened. Do you really expect us to believe the dems wouldn’t now be using the same PDB to argue that Bush had no real basis for imposing those measures?)
So yes, let’s call a spade a spade. The left-of-the-aisle establishment has NO INTEREST in learning from the events leading up to 9/11. Their only concern is to try to damage the current adminstration as much as possible, regardless of how dishonest they must be to do it or what the consequences of their partisanship might be to national security. Sickening.
What the hell was Bush supposed to do on the basis of such useful information as ‘Bin Laden wants to attack Washington’ or that some intelligence is ‘consistent with’ terrorist activities in the US, possibly including hijackings?
Hmmm? Let’s see…How ’bout making sure the FBI had the list of known al Quada members that the the CIA had the names of. Then maybe the FBI could have told Norm Mineta, the Sec of Transportation. And even though he was a hold-over from the Clinton administration, I’ll bet he could have gotten his people to make up some sort of list. Then maybe a red flag might have gone up before the known al Quada members got on the planes on 9/11. How ’bout something like that?
(from the faux-artist formerly known as jt aka JayT, in SiliCow Valley…)-;
This was all discussed during the initial engagements in the Battle of Afghanistan (which is still going on, if you recall).
We’re in the middle of WWIII, and the intelligence agencies rely on computer metrics rather than on-ground intelligence. For many reasons.. only some of which money and honesty can solve…
It is, unfortunately, some-a the facts of existence that some problems are solved by people dying.. and ANY”thing” that lives dies to be consumed by what remains to live on, in one form or another.
Hey, O , that would have been a swell plan had the law on 9/11 allowed such an exchange of information between the FBI and CIA. That was not allowed until the Patriot Act.
All of you same people who are looking to point fingers are the same ones who get upset over the raising of terrorists alerts aren’t you.
Sorry, catherine, you are just plain wrong. That is another bit of info spun by the spinners for your stupification.
Condoleezza Rice on the Patriot Act and responses
Excerpts from April 8, 2004, testimony of National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice: “I think there have been very important changes made between the CIA and FBI. Yes, everybody knew that they had trouble sharing, but in fact, we had legal restrictions to their sharing…. The Congress cooperated after September 11th with the president to come up with the Patriot Act, which does give to the FBI and the CIA and other intelligence agencies the kind of ability, legal ability, to share between them that was simply not there before.”
Response from Center for Democracy & Technology : “There was never a legal bar to intelligence agencies sharing information with prosecutors. Intelligence and law enforcement officials weren’t effectively sharing information and using their existing powers not because of legal barriers, but because of their overly strict interpretation of then-existing law, cultural problems, and turf wars among agencies.”
Lance Gay, Naples Daily News: “The White House office of counter-terrorism was created to coordinate intelligence reports gathered by domestic and foreign agencies. Richard Clarke, who headed that agency in 2001, said the FBI attended meetings at which CIA reports on bin Laden’s plans were discussed, and Clarke is mystified why that information wasn’t conveyed to local FBI field offices.”
Not an expert, but I believe that under the Patriot Act they are mandated to share pertinent info expeditiously. I think it also opened up sharing info gathered by a grand jury. There was never any law that forbid the agencies from sharing the type of info that they had about the hijackers. They just miserably failed to do so.
Now to deal with this tasty little bit of snark:
All of you same people who are looking to point fingers are the same ones who get upset over the raising of terrorists alerts aren’t you.
I live in NYC. I’ve worked across the street from the WTC site for almost 15 years. Wasn’t there that day, but I took my last subway ride out of the WTC at midnight on 9/10/01. After literally working in a supply closet in temporary office space midtown, our company was one of the first to go back downtown in early Dec. ’01. I made my first trip back in as soon as they would let us, about two weeks after the attack, through two national guard checkpoints and with a police escort to help retrieve my co-workers personal belongings left behind in their flight. I can still smell it. As a freelancer over the years, I worked in three different offices in the towers, as well as a long stint in the Deutche Bank Building. My 12-yr-old son saw the towers fall from his classroom window. I asked him if 9/11 made him want to move somewhere else, but he said “No, it makes me want to stay!” I don’t really pay that much attention, but we New Yorkers haven’t been off high alert since 9/11/01. No, I “aren’t” one of your “same [finger-pointing] people”.
Hmmm? Let’s see…How ’bout making sure the FBI had the list of known al Quada members that the the CIA had the names of.
Against the law, ever since the Church Committee.
Then maybe the FBI could have told Norm Mineta, the Sec of Transportation.
Read the sources: FBI told Transportation.
And even though he was a hold-over from the Clinton administration, I’ll bet he could have gotten his people to make up some sort of list.
They did.
Then maybe a red flag might have gone up before the known al Quada members got on the planes on 9/11. How ’bout something like that?
Thereby leading to a couple dozen men of Arab descent, in the country legally, being detained on the basis of intelligence information the sources of which couldn’t be revealed. Shortly to follow: the ACLU joins with People for the American Way to denounce the action; lawsuits all around; Teddy Kennedy and Jesse Jackson demanding a purge of the racists at the FBI; and, most likely, the “early retirement” of whoever the SAIC who signed off on the process was.
Assuming they tried it once, I can assure you FBI wouldn’t have tried it twice.
thats a great comment, O.
you’ve got a fine son.
Yeah tony, I couldn’t be prouder. He passed a tough test and will be starting at Brooklyn Technical HS in the fall. He is so smart and cool. He also has an encyclopaedic knowledge of sports and pitched a no-hitter in little league when he was eleven. When I picked him up from school on that day, on the way home I told him that he would remember this day for the rest of his life. Without missing a beat he said, “September 11, 2001. A day that will live in infamy.” And he hadn’t even seen any tv coverage yet. He’s very interested in politics, possibly as a career. Maybe things will be better by then.
Charlie, I think you are wrong about the Church Committee in this case. Give me some sources and I’ll read ’em though. According to Clarke’s book (on p. 13) they didn’t tell Transportation or the FBI, but if you know something that he didn’t write about, by all means put out the source for us to read. If the authorities stopped guys who had connections to al Quada, bin Laden and Ramzi Yousef, I think your assumptive theory would be wrong, too. Yeah, sure there would be some bleeding-heart nuts, but not like you paint. Personal safely trumps just about everything.
O, I have one for you.
I worked at DB until 3/26/04 – a few weeks ago. My last stop being 60 Wall Street. Before that it was Bankers Trust. My friend and co-workers all lived through that day too. Thinking it was the end of the world and praying with strangers in an fing cloud in Battery Park So don’t Fing tell me anything I don’t know. When the lights went out last August, all of the people from 130 were the people who didn’t wait to find out what the problem was. They were down the stairs in seconds while others waited to find out what was wrong.
Also, unlike many of my friends, I was back in the city on 9/13 when I had to buy books for school. I have friends who think the war on terrorism is some kind of GWB fiction (all about the oil, man) who wouldn’t come into the city for months afterwards because they weren’t “ready.”
When that AA Jet went down in the Rockaways, I held my breath and went to work as usual.
Sorry, but you really touched a nerve. My remark off topic wasn’t necessarily about YOU, it occurred to me as most of the panty waists I know who wouldn’t go into the city for months are the same who think terror alerts are a joke. Probably too much of an emotional subject so take this all with a grain of salt.
As for the legal issues while according to SOMEONE’s OPINION, that they COULD have shared information if every officer and supervisor and their boss had a lawyer with them every step of the way, I don’t think anyone would have gone out on that limb to risk their families, their career and possible jail time for someone who DIDN’T agree with the interpretation of the so called Center for Democracy. They sound like another bunch of Johnny come lately’s to me.
Exhaling….
Clarke again, hasnt he debunked himself enough yet?
What was the worst Terrorist attack on American Soil before 9/11.
Ok City, Clarke says in his book he could tie AQ and Tim McVeigh together. Clarke says McVeigh met AQ’s number 2 in the phillipines. If this is true, why wasn’t AQ taken down sooner?
Oh yes, Hillary blamed it on Talk Radio. Ha.
From Drudge, a link to Human Events: “Sen. Bob Graham (D.-Fla.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told HUMAN EVENTS May 21 [2002] that his committee had received all the same terrorism intelligence prior to September 11 as the Bush administration.
“Yes, we had seen all the information,” said Graham. “But we didn’t see it on a single piece of paper, the way the President did.”
Graham added that threats of hijacking in an August 6 memo to President Bush were based on very old intelligence that the committee had seen earlier. ‘The particular report that was in the President’s Daily Briefing that day was about three years old,’ Graham said. ‘It was not a contemporary piece of information.’”
http://www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?id=3558
“I think it could be seriously damaging. What this says is, the White House knew what bin Laden was capable of planning, where he intended to do it, which was New York or Washington, D.C., how he was going to do it. There was only one thing missing, which was exactly when he was going to do it, which turns out to be September 11.”
What a load of bullshit that analysis is…
The press/left spin debunked
http://www.nationalreview.com/levin/levin200404121009.asp
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/story/0,9171,1101981221-140773,00.html
The fact is that the previous administration recevied more specific warnings earlier, when there was more likelihood it could have been stopped. Such things might be brought up if we had a fair commission investigating it.
As I was saying to O’McSomething – Agents are not lawyers and standards imposed on them included not sharing information with an agent across the room from you:
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/mccarthy200404130845.asp
But the Justice Department, with Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick in the thick of important policy decisions, did not see it that way. Committed to the bitter end to the law-enforcement mindset, and overwrought at the mere possibility of violating the ill-conceived “primary purpose” test, DOJ made matters significantly worse. It imposed severe procedural barriers against competent intelligence gathering. As described by the FISA Court of Review in 2002:
[T]he 1995 Procedures limited contacts between the FBI and [DOJ’s] Criminal Division in cases where FISA surveillance or searches were being conducted by the FBI for foreign intelligence (FI) or foreign counterintelligence (FCI) purposes. . . . The procedures state that “the FBI and Criminal Division should ensure that advice intended to preserve the option of a criminal prosecution does not inadvertently result in either the fact or the appearance of the Criminal Division’s directing or controlling the FI or FCI investigation toward law enforcement objectives.” 1995 Procedures at 2, 6 (emphasis added). Although these procedures provided for significant information sharing and coordination between criminal and FI or FCI investigations, based at least in part on the “directing or controlling” language, they eventually came to be narrowly interpreted within the Department of Justice, and most particularly by [the Justice Department’s Office of Intelligence Policy Review (OIPR)], as requiring OIPR to act as a “wall” to prevent the FBI intelligence officials from communicating with the Criminal Division regarding ongoing FI or FCI investigations. . . . Thus, the focus became the nature of the underlying investigation, rather than the general purpose of the surveillance. Once prosecution of the target was being considered, the procedures, as interpreted by OIPR in light of the case law, prevented the Criminal Division from providing any meaningful advice to the FBI.
It is important here to remember that most FBI agents are not practicing lawyers. Yes, as the Review Court noted, the regulations left some daylight for cooperation between criminal and intelligence agents. In practice, however, things were much worse: Agents basically understood that criminal and intelligence investigators were not allowed to compare notes, period. That is, the problem is not simply the wide range of perfectly appropriate communications that the regulations expressly prohibited, but is magnified by the ethos the regulations instilled: While justifying communications required a series of mental gymnastics, the agents knew that they could not get in trouble if they just avoided communications entirely.