9/11 Commission - Page 5 - Big Big Forums

Jolie Rouge · 07-30-2004, 01:35 AM

Retired general pushes for more U.S. spies
Thursday, July 29, 2004 Posted: 5:44 PM EDT (2144 GMT)

Retired U.S. Army Gen. Tommy Franks is shown in a May 2003 photo.

http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/07/29/fra...iew/index.html

(CNN) -- The retired general who led U.S. troops into war in Afghanistan and Iraq bemoans the lack of international aid in toppling Iraq's dictator and criticizes U.S. investment in surveillance widgets instead of human spies.

Former U.S. Army General Tommy Franks makes the comments in an article slated to appear Sunday in Parade magazine.

"We can't send a Princeton-educated New York lawyer to infiltrate al Qaeda," Franks reportedly says in the interview. "To get information, we have to marry the devil or at least employ him. You have to deal."

Under Franks' leadership, the United States squashed Afghanistan's ruling militant regime, the Taliban, which harbored al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden is the recognized mastermind behind the September 11, 2001, attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in the United States.

But a British report released Thursday slams post-war conditions in Afghanistan, warning that the country is on the brink of imploding with disastrous results.

Specifically, that British assessment states a failure to disarm warlords, the continued presence of al Qaeda rebels in the southern and eastern portions of Afghanistan and the inability of Britain and its allies to limit opium production. (Full story)

That same British report said porous security provisions in Iraq have allowed criminals and militias to gain footholds in portions of the country.

Franks, who retired last summer four months after the United States invaded Iraq, reportedly expresses his shock at not finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and disappointment that more foreign troops were not a part of the war effort.

U.S. war planners expected 150,000 additional troops to aid the U.S.-led operation, Franks says in the interview, but the help never came. The British report concludes that the low number of foreign troops deployed to Iraq has contributed to the deterioration in security.

Franks, 59, said many Middle Eastern leaders, including Jordan's King Abdullah and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, told him that deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had, and planned to use, weapons of mass destruction.

Franks states that in January 2003, Mubarak told him, "Saddam has WMD-biologicals, actually, and he will use them on your troops." He also accuses former White House counterterrorism director Richard Clarke of failing to provide him with "a single page of actionable intelligence" and of engaging in "mostly wishful thinking."

Clarke ignited a firestorm in May when he told a a commission investigating the September 11 attacks, that "the Bush administration in the first eight months considered terrorism an important issue, but not an urgent issue."

Clarke also asserted that the Bush administration failed to recognize pending terror attacks against the United States and that the president focused too much on Iraq after September 11 -- charges the White House has vigorously disputed

Jolie Rouge · 08-18-2004, 04:09 PM

The Reason For US Intelligence Failures
by Gary D. Halbert
August 17, 2004

No doubt, you have now heard about the Final Report from the National Commission On Terrorist Attacks Upon The United States, also known as the “9/11 Commission.” As you will recall, this supposedly bipartisan Commission was established to probe into the intelligence failures that led to the surprise 9/11 terrorist attacks, identify weaknesses in our intelligence agencies and suggest reforms to help avoid similar terrorist attacks in the future. Already, the 9/11 Commission’s report has become a political football in the presidential election.

Let me confess that I have not read the entire 9/11 Commission Report. I have read the Executive Summary and various other significant portions of the Report, but I feel no need to read the entire report (almost 600 pages), which has been discussed ad nauseum in the media. With that said, I want to bring you www.Stratfor.com’s latest analysis on the 9/11 Commission Report.

The Commission’s Final Report

As you know, much has been said and written about the Commission’s investigation into the intelligence failures that fell short of detecting the 9/11 attacks. The Commission was also charged with investigating how law enforcement agencies, diplomacy, immigration and border control, flow of assets to terrorist organizations, commercial aviation, congressional oversight and resource allocation, and any other relevant factors may have contributed to the lapse in security that led to the attacks.

With all of that territory to cover, it is no surprise that the Commission’s final report consists of almost 600 pages of information. In preparing the report, the Commission reviewed over 2.5 million pages of documents and conducted some 1,200 interviews in 10 countries, including the highly publicized public testimony of 160 witnesses in the US.

The bottom line of the final report has been widely communicated. In a nutshell, it said that the US was woefully unprepared for a massive terrorist attack, though we should have known one was coming. However, contrary to earlier predictions, the Commission’s report did not point fingers at any one person or persons, since the failures were the result of many years of poor management under various Democratic and Republican administrations.

The Commission’s report also recommended remedies for the problems it encountered. Among these recommendations was the creation of a National Counter-Terrorism Center (NCTC), specifically charged with fighting Islamist terrorism, and the appointment of a new National Intelligence Director to head the NCTC and unify the various intelligence agencies, provide for better sharing of information and strengthen congressional oversight.

While the Commission takes on the question of what happened to make the US vulnerable to terrorist attack, a recent report by Stratfor.com sheds light on WHY our intelligence infrastructure was unprepared for an enemy like al Qaeda.

Stratfor.com On Intelligence

As I have frequently pointed out in this E-Letter, Stratfor.com is one of my very best sources of geopolitical information and forecasts. They often have unique perspectives on various domestic and global issues that are a result of their impressive intelligence network. With their permission, I am able to share some of their intelligence with you periodically.

Just about every news outlet has carried the story of what the 9/11 Commission report said, and are now on to covering the political salvos being lobbed back and forth between Bush and Kerry regarding its recommendations. However, I think it is instructive to see what Stratfor.com has to say about why the US intelligence system became the mess it did. After all, those who do not learn from history are destined to repeat it. So here we go.

It is also significant that this article was written by Dr. George Friedman, Stratfor.com’s founder and CEO. While Stratfor.com’s staff is excellent, I always pay a little more attention to anything George writes himself. Here’s what he had to say about the state of US intelligence capabilities leading up to 9/11:

Quote:

“In trying to think through the root cause of the Sept. 11 attacks, it seems to us, when everything else is boiled away, that there were two fundamental problems. The first was that the U.S. intelligence community was built specifically to deal with the Soviet Union and the threat posed by Soviet intelligence. The end of the Cold War should have led to a rethinking of both mission and organization. There was a bit of the former, but hardly any of the latter.
Second, U.S. leaders did not understand the changes that were taking place in the Islamic world. They viewed al Qaeda as simply a new manifestation of the Arab organizations that had used terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s for limited political aims. The United States failed to realize that al Qaeda was fundamentally different. The second failure was rooted in the first failure -- indeed, it was the first failure that made the second almost inevitable.
The Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and the vast apparatus of the U.S. intelligence community were created in the late 1940s with one purpose: to combat the Soviet Union. They were constructed to contain and defeat Soviet power, and specifically to undermine the efforts of Soviet intelligence. In a very real sense, Soviet intelligence -- to which we will refer as the KGB for the sake of convenience -- was the model on which the U.S. intelligence organizations were built….
…U.S. intelligence was created to block the KGB. But on a more subtle level, it was built as a mirror of Soviet intelligence -- designed to do to Soviet agents what they were doing to the United States. Like its Soviet counterpart, the U.S. intelligence apparatus saw its primary mission as penetrating the Soviet leadership, particularly the KGB, and preventing the Soviets from returning the favor. The second purpose was misleading the Soviets about U.S. capabilities and intentions. The third -- much less important for the United States than for the Soviets, but not trivial -- was stealing Soviet military technology. And finally, blocking Soviet attempts to use the intelligence services to recruit and manage assets in Third World countries -- while doing the same itself -- was critical to the United States.
U.S. and Soviet efforts diverged over time in a fundamental way. The United States became much more heavily dependent on technical means of intelligence-gathering than did the Soviets. Where the Soviets would try to recruit well-placed Americans to extract information, the United States would try to tap into Soviet systems of communication to gather the same information. …Obviously, the United States ran agents and the Soviets had technology, but on this point there was a relative divergence of emphasis.”

This insight from Stratfor.com helps to understand the weakening of the human intelligence capabilities of the CIA during the Clinton Administration. As you will recall, under Clinton the CIA was told to stop dealing with “distasteful people,” presumably in an effort to appease human rights organizations. Since not many spies regularly attend Sunday School, this action limited the available covert resources and thus reduced the agency’s abilities to infiltrate terrorist organizations. However, as Friedman points out, this would not have been viewed as a major problem by an agency that mostly relied upon technological resources for information gathering.

Jolie Rouge · 08-18-2004, 04:13 PM

Stratfor.com continues:

Quote:

“However, each side was obsessed with the other's covert capabilities. Each side looked at the world through the prism of that obsession. For the United States, the terrorist groups of the 1970s and 1980s were not seen as independent actors, but as entities designed or at least guided by the KGB toward psychological and political ends. On the whole, this was not a bad way to view the world.

The KGB used these groups -- particularly Palestinian groups -- to create political environments that were conducive to Soviet ends. This was not to say that these groups were simply puppets of the KGB -- it was far more complicated than that -- but to say that these groups were enabled by the KGB and satellite organizations and could not have been nearly as effective without them. The Soviets maintained a program designed to seduce, manipulate and manage the leadership of these terrorist groups. The United States understood that the best way to defeat these groups was by disrupting their relations with the Soviets. Both sides were quite realistic.
After The Soviet Collapse, A Ship Without A Compass

By the time of Desert Storm, the Soviets were no longer key enablers of terrorism. The problem was that the CIA had lost the prism through which it viewed organizations that were using terrorism as a weapon. To be more precise, where the United States previously had viewed the Arab world through the prism of the CIA-KGB competition, the end of the rivalry did not bring with it a new prism. The CIA knew that the Soviets were no longer managing the situation, but they did not develop a new way of thinking about that situation.

Indeed, it could be put this way: The United States, during the Cold War, did not take seriously most groups that did not have a tie to the KGB. Without such a tie, such groups were not viewed as posing challenges to the United States and -- even if they wished to -- could not be effective unless they had access to a national intelligence agency. It was an article of faith that any group that was effective had a dependency on a national intelligence service -- almost invariably Soviet-bloc.

Al Qaeda -- not accidentally -- was designed to be as different as possible from predecessor groups that used terrorism. First, there was no dependency on a single intelligence agency: Al Qaeda used relations with Pakistani and Saudi intelligence, among others, but did not depend on them. Second, the group understood how the Soviets and Americans had used intelligence during the Cold War, and created an organization that was not easily penetrated by either human or technical means. They admitted into the inner circle only those they knew well so that agents could not easily be slipped in. They did not run cables that submarines could tap into or chatter on car phones, so the NSA had limited opportunities to intercept.

From the standpoint of the CIA therefore, al Qaeda was not a strategic threat. Without a state sponsor that controlled them, the CIA believed, they could not muster the resources needed to be truly effective. Since they avoided using the communications systems that U.S. intelligence regarded as essential for global operations, the assumption was that they did not represent a global threat.

The CIA did not take al Qaeda seriously because, from all appearances, it seemed to be the kind of organization that would have been easily dismissed during the Cold War. It did not fit into the paradigm the CIA had been working from during the previous 40 or 50 years. The CIA viewed al Qaeda as weak and underdeveloped -- primitive. The agency did not recognize al Qaeda as a group that had evolved in such a way as to deliberately come in below the U.S. intelligence radar, from both a technical and scientific standpoint. Al Qaeda did not intend to look threatening, and it was not perceived as threatening.

The CIA, institutionally, did not have a frame of reference for al Qaeda. The agency was organized for penetrating the upper circles and lines of communication of a nation-state or a state-sponsored group. It was built to deal with the KGB and its creations. Its analysts -- not all of them, by any means, but enough in senior positions -- despite understanding that the Soviet Union had collapsed, could not understand how the global threat had therefore changed.

The conclusion drawn by many in the CIA -- along with most of American society -- was that the threat to the United States had declined because of the fall of the Soviet Union. The idea that the nature of the threat had been transformed by the loss of an enabling superpower and that a range of unpredictable threats was now developing was not an idea that was easily embraced. To the CIA, the collapse of its main adversary could only mean that the world was safer. The agency was not ready to move into a world in which new adversaries existed.

That meant that there was no urgency in transforming the U.S. intelligence community as a whole. The same panoply of institutions -- CIA, DIA, NSA, NRO, etc. -- that had served in the Cold War was left in place. The internal structure of these organizations also was left in place. What had been built to be congruent with Soviet intelligence was now left standing alone, congruent with nothing....

This was, as the 9/11 commission put it, a failure of imagination. We would argue that it was, in some ways, an understandable -- if not defensible -- failure. What was harder to understand was not the events leading up to Sept. 11, but the events after Sept. 11. A reasonable person could have thought on Sept. 10 that there was time to redesign the intelligence community; no reasonable person could have believed on Sept. 12 that a system designed to defeat the KGB was going to be appropriate for defeating al Qaeda. Yet George W. Bush, in his most inexplicable action as president, made no substantial changes in either the structure of the intelligence community or in its personnel.

Yet -- and this is the critical thing -- the fact is that the old hands of the intelligence community, even after Sept. 11, did not think they were out of their league. Even after that defeat, they believed profoundly and completely that the same organizational structure and people that took down the KGB would eventually take down al Qaeda -- no wholesale changes required. It is understandable that people who had triumphed once would think that they could triumph again using the same tools….”

As you might expect, I disagree with George regarding the allegation that the Bush Administration did nothing to improve US intelligence capabilities after 9/11. I recall that the restriction on using undesirables in human intelligence was almost immediately reversed, as was the Ford-era restriction on using assassination where appropriate.

In addition, the Bush Administration orchestrated the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in an effort to coordinate the various agencies charged with keeping America safe. Bush also pushed the Patriot Act, which gave domestic intelligence additional tools, albeit at the cost of certain civil liberties. While these efforts may have been flawed, I hardly consider them to be doing nothing.

Report Now Becoming A Political Football

As we might expect in this election year, the 9/11 Commission’s report has now become the latest political bone of contention between Bush and Kerry. Liberals rejoice in the Commission’s finding that they found no evidence of a collaborative relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda prior to 9/11. Conservatives take heart in the same discussion because it proves there was contact between the two.

The conservative media and their liberal counterparts are having a field day slicing and dicing the Commission’s report to suit their own agendas. The sad fact is, as Stratfor.com points out, that the intelligence organization that had evolved since the 1940’s during many different Democratic and Republican administrations was to blame, and it needs to be fixed.

However, even the fix is now becoming politicized beyond recognition. While the Commission’s members have completed their task, some are making the talk show circuits to press for passage of their recommendations. No doubt some members are probably working on books to cash in on the blame-game craze that has made other authors so much money during this election cycle.

Jolie Rouge · 08-18-2004, 04:14 PM

Conclusions

The most important thing for the US government to do is to fix the intelligence problems that led to the 9/11 attacks. It should be the heart-felt desire of EVERY elected official, Republican or Democrat, to make sure our way of life remains secure. It is definitely not the time to try to use the Commission’s recommendations to score partisan political points. It’s time for our elected representatives and senators to do their job. I am contacting my representative and senators to let them know how I feel, and I hope you do the same.

Even before the 9/11 Commission’s final report, Conservative Democratic Senator Zell Miller recognized the divisiveness that the Commission’s hearings were creating, and how this was not only hurting the chances for true bipartisan reform, but also sending the wrong message to our enemies and our troops. While his comments related to dredging up the past for political gain, they remain relevant to the political discussion regarding implementation of the Commission’s recommendations. I leave you today with a brief excerpt from Senator Miller’s March 30, 2004 speech, as only he can say it:

Quote:

“…Tragically, these hearings have proved to be a very divisive diversion for this country. Tragically, they have devoured valuable time looking backward instead of looking forward. Can you imagine handling the attack on Pearl Harbor this way?… Some partisans tried that ploy, but they were soon quieted by the patriots who understood how important it was to get on with the war and take the battle to America 's enemies and not dwell on what FDR knew, when. You see, back then the highest priority was to win a war, not to win an election.

…A congressional hearing in Washington, DC is the ultimate aphrodisiac for political groupies and partisan punks. But it is not the groupies, punks, and television-sotted American public that I am worried about…No, it is the real enemies of America that I am concerned about. These evil killers who right now are gleefully watching the shrill partisan finger-pointing of these hearings and grinning like a mule eating briars.

Chances are very good that these evil enemies of America will attempt to influence our 2004 election in a similar dramatic way as they did Spain’s. And to think that could never be in this country is to stick your head in the sand.
…That is why the sooner we stop this endless bickering over the past and join together to prepare for the future, the better off this country will be. There are some things--whether this city believes it or not--that are just more important than political campaigns. The recent past is so ripe for political second-guessing, ``gotcha,'' and Monday morning quarterbacking. And it is so tempting in an election year. We should not allow ourselves to indulge that temptation. We should put our country first.”

Amen, Brother Zell, preach on!

Very best regards,

Gary D. Halbert

SPECIAL ARTICLES

Holiday in Cambodia.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editor...l?id=110005483

A Central banker's nightmare.
http://online.wsj.com/public/article...free%5Ffeature

Why governors make better presidents.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/column.../?id=110005433

Should Kerry sue SVBT?
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=express&s=baer081104

The economy: always partly cloudy.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/04224/359663.stm

New CBO Study Confirms Wealthiest Americans Bear Income Tax Burden
http://www.taxfoundation.org/ff/cbostudy2.html

Copyright 2004 Gary D. Halbert.

kvmj · 08-18-2004, 04:21 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jolie Rouge

The Reason For US Intelligence Failures
by Gary D. Halbert
August 17, 2004

This insight from Stratfor.com helps to understand the weakening of the human intelligence capabilities of the CIA during the Clinton Administration. As you will recall, under Clinton the CIA was told to stop dealing with “distasteful people,” presumably in an effort to appease human rights organizations. Since not many spies regularly attend Sunday School, this action limited the available covert resources and thus reduced the agency’s abilities to infiltrate terrorist organizations. However, as Friedman points out, this would not have been viewed as a major problem by an agency that mostly relied upon technological resources for information gathering.

You cannot lay the failure to restructure the CIA on Clinton. It should have started with Reagan. At any rate, the same techniques will not work with Al Qaeda.

As explained in the report, the closer they went into the KGB, the more corrupt it became; the more willing it's members would be to talk. The opposite is true with Al Qaeda. The closer you get to the top leaders, the more loyal they are.

Jolie Rouge · 08-18-2004, 04:32 PM

Quote:

You cannot lay the failure to restructure the CIA on Clinton.

Review materials provided concerning Gorelick and Clinton earlier in this thread ...

Jolie Rouge · 08-23-2004, 01:50 AM

9/11 panel describes how attackers got money
New details on hijackers' visa, immigration violations
From Phil Hirschkorn -- CNN
Sunday, August 22, 2004 Posted: 2:08 PM EDT (1808 GMT)

http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/...ion/index.html

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The 9/11 commission has released new details about how 19 hijackers and suspected conspirators in the attacks of September 11, 2001, were financed.

The two new reports -- released Saturday shortly before the commission closed -- also revealed visa and immigration violations among the suspected hijackers.

The commission released pictures of hijackers' visas -- including the charred remains of Ziad Jarrah's visa, plucked from the wreckage of United Flight 93 near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

Eight other alleged 9/11 conspirators applied for visas, and three of them succeeded, the reports said. Alleged plot mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed secured a visa in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in July 2001 under an alias, according to the reports.

The other two visas obtained were for Mushabib al-Hamlan, who ultimately did not participate, and Mohamed al-Kahtani, who was refused entry into the United States by an alert customs officer, the reports said.

Mohammed was captured in March 2003 and is being held at an unknown location. Al-Kahtani is being held at the U.S. detainee facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Al-Hamlan's whereabouts are not publicly known.

The independent National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States released its so-called "final report" on July 22 in a 570-page book.

Congress established the bipartisan panel to investigate events before, during and immediately after the attacks.

Financing terror
The first of the new reports -- referred to as monographs -- deals with financing. It concluded -- as in previous reports -- that preparations for the attacks cost somewhere between $400,000 and $500,000 -- of which about $300,000 was spent in the United States. The costs do not include expenses for terrorist camp training, the report said.

Al Qaeda, which spent at estimated $30 million a year according to the CIA, was funded primarily by donors and corrupt charities, not Osama bin Laden's personal wealth or bin Laden-owned business fronts, the report says.

Bin Laden received $1 million a year from his family and was cut off in 1994. The origin of 9/11 funds is unknown but no money for the attacks was raised in the United States. The hijackers did not self-finance or have jobs.

The monograph reveals in detail how the hijackers received money from wire transfers, cash and traveler's checks, and credit or debit cards for overseas bank accounts. The report says most of the funds were sent by Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, a nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Immigration violations
A second monograph details how all of the 9/11 hijackers violated some aspect of immigration U.S. laws while gaining entry to, or remaining in, the United States:

Jarrah attended flight school in June 2000 without properly adjusting his immigration status, rendering him inadmissible each of the subsequent six times he reentered the United States between June 2000 and August 5, 2001.

Hani Hanjour did not attend school after entering on a student visa in December 2000.

Mohamed Atta failed to present a proper M-1 (vocational school) visa when he entered the United States in January 2001 and had previously overstayed his tourist visa.

Nawaf al-Hazmi and Satam al-Suqami overstayed the terms of their admission.

Each of the 19 submitted a visa application stating that he was not seeking to enter the United States to engage in terrorism.

At the time they presented themselves to U.S. ports of entry, all 19 had been trained in Afghan camps and had prepared for and planned terrorist activity.

At least two (al-Suqami and Abdul Aziz al-Omari) and possibly as many as seven of the 19 had false travel stamps -- associated with al Qaeda -- on their passports when they applied for visas.

The new documents also explain that the al Qaeda terrorist network favored using Saudi passports for its operatives because irregularities in the country's passport issuance system made the passports more readily available.

Saudis flee the U.S.
The second monograph also details 11 flights that left the United States between September 13 and September 24, 2001, carrying Saudi nationals, including members of bin Laden's family.

"Fearing reprisals against Saudi nationals, Rihab Massoud, deputy chief of mission of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in Washington, D.C., called Dale Watson, the FBI's assistant director for counterterrorism, shortly after the attack and asked for help in getting some of the kingdom's citizens out of the country," the document states.

The commission says White House Counterterrorism Security Coordinator Richard Clarke appears to be the most senior official involved in approving the flights.

"President Bush and Vice President Cheney told the commission that they did not speak with Saudi government officials about the flights before their departure," the document states. "The president told the commission that the first he knew about the issue was when he read about it in the newspaper."

The commission states that all the Saudi nationals were screened by the FBI to make certain they were not a threat to national security, and that no terrorists escaped from the United States on any of the Saudi flights.

Jolie Rouge · 10-20-2004, 01:16 AM

Probe: Intense Flames Sped WTC Collapse
By DEVLIN BARRETT

http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/sto...=20010911NY118

WASHINGTON (AP) - Federal investigators believe the second World Trade Center tower fell much more quickly than the first because it faced a more concentrated, intense fire inside, officials said Tuesday.

The detailed hypothesis was discussed at a meeting of investigators with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, part of the Commerce Department.

NIST investigators are preparing a report, to be released later this year, detailing how and why the towers collapsed after being struck by fuel-filled jetliners on Sept. 11, 2001.

Lead investigator Dr. Shyam Sunder said Tower 2 collapsed more quickly than Tower 1 because the fire was more concentrated, weakening sections of interior and exterior support columns more quickly.

Tower 1 was struck first and stood for 103 minutes, almost twice as long as Tower 2, which remained standing for only 56 minutes.

``In Tower 2, you had a large concentration of combustible debris in the northeast corner, and the fire there was a more persistent fire,'' said Sunder.

The flames stayed strong in part because the impact of the plane stripped away much of the fireproofing along the floors, investigators said.

NIST probers now suspect the stripping effect of the collision was far more decisive in the course of the fire than whether individual floors had more or less fireproofing material.

Investigators also say the towers would have probably remained standing were it not for the raging fires inside, which weakened the steel supports. The jet fuel from the planes burned away within minutes, but the office material and the plane debris continued to burn and break down the structural integrity of the buildings.

As the fire continued, the heat and extra stress on the interior support columns caused them to compress downward. When the building's steel skin couldn't handle the extra weight, it began to buckle.

Investigators have singled out an Associated Press photograph that they said may provide evidence to support their theory of how the buildings collapsed. The photo, taken shortly before the collapse of Tower 2, shows a ``kink'' in the building's corner at the 106th floor.

On the Net:

National Institute of Standards and Technology: http://wtc.nist.gov/

10/19/04 21:59

Jolie Rouge · 10-31-2004, 04:07 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jolie Rouge

911 panel report: 'We must act'
Reforms 'need to be enacted and enacted speedily'
Thursday, July 22, 2004 Posted: 1:49 PM EDT (1749 GMT)

http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/...ort/index.html

The unanimous report of the 10-member, bipartisan panel found that neither Bush nor predecessor President Bill Clinton grasped the depth of the terrorist threat posed before the suicide hijackings that killed almost 3,000 people.

"Given the character and pace of their policy efforts, we do not believe they fully understood just how many people al Qaeda might kill, and how soon it might do it," the commission found. "At some level that is hard to define, we believe the threat had not yet become compelling."

It also said there were limits to what the CIA was able to achieve by using proxies to try to capture Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants in Afghanistan.

Commissioners found that terrorism was not the overriding national security concern for the U.S. government before the attacks and that missed opportunities to thwart the hijackings were symptoms of a broader inability by the government to adapt to new challenges.

KEY FINDINGS

U.S. leaders did not understand the "gravity of the threat."

The United States wasn't prepared to meet al Qaeda's challenges.

Terrorism wasn't the chief security concern of the Bush or Clinton administrations.

Failures to thwart 9/11 highlight agencies' inability to adapt to new problems.

CIA effectiveness was limited by use of intermediaries to pursue Osama bin Laden.

Information and analysis wasn't shared across agencies.

Bumping for kvmj

kvmj · 10-31-2004, 04:44 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jolie Rouge

Bumping for kvmj

Gorelick was not responsible for the failure of the agencies to communicate; that problem existed long before Clinton took office. Everything used to be geared towards obtaining info from the Soviets where the closer you got to the leadership, the more corrupt (and corruptible) it became. The exact opposite is true with Al Qaeda. All this is spelled out quite clearly in the report.

How odd that everyone expected Clinton to take action on the Cole when it wasn't definitely linked to Al Qaeda til January, 2000. Bush was warned that Al Qaeda was the greatest threat facing this country, he ignored the warning. 9/11 happened on his watch.

At any rate, Bush has now had over 37 months to do something about Al Qaeda. To me. OBL looked healthy and well fed. The greatest threat to this nation has been forgotten while Bush pursues his quest for empire.

Interesting on the collapse of the second tower. Horrible day.

Jolie Rouge · 02-10-2005, 11:47 AM

Report: FAA Had 52 Pre-9/11 Warnings

NEW YORK (AP) - Federal Aviation Administration officials received 52 warnings prior to Sept. 11, 2001, from their own security experts about potential al-Qaida attacks, including some that mentioned airline hijackings or suicide attacks, The New York Times reported.

The Times said in Thursday editions that a previously undisclosed report by the 9/11 commission that investigated the suicide airliner attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon detailed warnings given to FAA leaders from April to Sept. 10, 2001, about the radical Islamic terrorist group and its leader, Osama bin Laden.

The commission report, written last August, said five security warnings mentioned al-Qaida's training for hijackings and two reports concerned suicide operations not connected to aviation.

The Times said that a classified version and a partially declassified version of the 120-page report were given to the National Archives two weeks ago. The Times story cited the declassified version of the document.

Al Felzenberg, former spokesman for the 9/11 commission, which went out of business last summer, said the government had not completed review of the report for declassification purposes until recently. He said the Justice Department delivered the two versions of the document to the Archives. An Archives spokeswoman said the unclassified version of the document was not yet available Wednesday night.

The Times gave these highlights from the commission report:

Aviation officials were ``lulled into a false sense of security'' and ``intelligence that indicated a real and growing threat leading up to 9/ll did not stimulate significant increases in security procedures.''

It takes the FAA to task for not expanding the use of in-flight air marshals or tightening airport screening for weapons. It said FAA officials were more concerned with reducing airline congestion, lessening delays and easing air carriers' financial problems than thwarting a terrorist attack.

Information in this report was available to members of the 9/11 commission when they issued their public report last summer. That report itself contained criticisms of FAA operations.

02/10/05 09:39

http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/ns/news/...69.htm&sc=1110