9/11 Commission

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Stay with CNN for reports in the run-up to the coming 9/11 commission hearings with former FBI Director Louis Freeh, Attorney General John Ashcroft and others. CNN plans live coverage beginning at 9:30 a.m. ET Tuesday.

PLANNED 9/11 TESTIMONY

Tuesday, April 13:


Louis Freeh, 9:30 a.m. ET

Janet Reno, 11 a.m. ET

Thomas Pickering, J. Cofer Black, 2 p.m. ET

John Ashcroft, 3:30 p.m. ET

Wednesday, April 14:


George Tenet, 9:30 a.m. ET

Robert Mueller, 2:30 p.m. ET

Watch CNN-USA for live coverage of these testimony sessions and ongoing analysis and updates on their impact.

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Bush: Nothing in memo indicated 'imminent attack'
President cites possible changes for intelligence services
Monday, April 12, 2004 Posted: 4:03 PM EDT (2003 GMT)

www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/04/12/bush.911/index.html

CRAWFORD, Texas (CNN) -- Facing questions about his administration's anti-terrorism policies, President Bush said Monday that an intelligence memo delivered to him a month before the September 11, 2001, attacks did not indicate "something is about to happen in America."

Bush also said some changes might be in order for the intelligence services.

"There was nothing there that said, you know, 'There's an imminent attack,' " Bush said during a brief news conference with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. The Egyptian leader visited Bush's Texas ranch to talk about the Middle East.

The August 6, 2001, memo, called the Presidential Daily Briefing, or PDB, was titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." It was released Saturday evening at the urging of the 9/11 commission investigating the attacks.

Some Democrats have suggested the memo shows the Bush administration did not take the threat of terrorism seriously enough before the attacks on New York and Washington.

But Bush -- who has made the war on terrorism a central part of his re-election campaign -- described the memo as a historical document that contained little new information. He said that the memo had come forth after he asked for an intelligence assessment.

"I read it and obviously was discomforted by the fact that Osama bin Laden hated America," Bush said. "But as I mentioned yesterday, we already knew that."

Bush's comments Monday follow similar remarks he made Sunday when he said there was no "actionable intelligence" that could have helped him thwart the 9/11 attacks.

He amplified those comments Monday, saying the FBI never presented anything that required him to act immediately. He noted that the memo cited some 70 ongoing FBI investigations into al Qaeda, bin Laden's terrorist network.

Those investigations, Bush said, "comforted me. You see, it meant the FBI was doing its job, the FBI was running down any lead."

At the same time, Bush referred to possible changes for intelligence agencies.

"Now may be a time to revamp and reform our intelligence services," Bush said. "And we look forward to hearing recommendations. We're thinking about that ourselves, and we look forward to working with the commission."

His comments came a day before the 9/11 commission is scheduled to take a critical look at U.S. intelligence and law enforcement before the terrorist attacks.

Bush is due to meet in private with the commission, accompanied by Vice President Dick Cheney.

The panel already has heard from former President Clinton and former Vice President Al Gore, also in private sessions, and received public testimony from administration figures past and present.

On another matter, Bush announced that he would hold a formal news conference Tuesday evening at the White House.

The White House said the news conference will be held in prime time.

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Transcript 8/06/01 Meno :
Bin Laden determined to strike in US

Saturday, April 10, 2004 Posted: 6:51 PM EDT

www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/04/10/august6.memo/index.html

The following is a transcript of the August 6, 2001, presidential daily briefing entitled Bin Laden determined to strike in US. Parts of the original document were not made public by the White House for security reasons.

Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate bin Laden since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US. Bin Laden implied in U.S. television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and "bring the fighting to America."

After U.S. missile strikes on his base in Afghanistan in 1998, bin Laden told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington, according to a -- -- service.

An Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) operative told - - service at the same time that bin Laden was planning to exploit the operative's access to the U.S. to mount a terrorist strike.

The millennium plotting in Canada in 1999 may have been part of bin Laden's first serious attempt to implement a terrorist strike in the U.S.

Convicted plotter Ahmed Ressam has told the FBI that he conceived the idea to attack Los Angeles International Airport himself, but that in ---, Laden lieutenant Abu Zubaydah encouraged him and helped facilitate the operation. Ressam also said that in 1998 Abu Zubaydah was planning his own U.S. attack.

Ressam says bin Laden was aware of the Los Angeles operation. Although Bin Laden has not succeeded, his attacks against the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 demonstrate that he prepares operations years in advance and is not deterred by setbacks. Bin Laden associates surveyed our embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam as early as 1993, and some members of the Nairobi cell planning the bombings were arrested and deported in 1997.

Al Qaeda members -- including some who are U.S. citizens -- have resided in or traveled to the U.S. for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks.

Two al-Qaeda members found guilty in the conspiracy to bomb our embassies in East Africa were U.S. citizens, and a senior EIJ member lived in California in the mid-1990s.

A clandestine source said in 1998 that a bin Laden cell in New York was recruiting Muslim-American youth for attacks.

We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a ---- service in 1998 saying that Bin Laden wanted to hijack a U.S. aircraft to gain the release of "Blind Sheikh" Omar Abdel Rahman and other U.S.-held extremists.

Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates 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.

The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full-field investigations throughout the U.S. that it considers bin Laden-related. CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our embassy in the UAE in May saying that a group or bin Laden supporters was in the U.S. planning attacks with explosives.

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Transcript of Rice's 9/11 commission statement
Thursday, April 8, 2004 Posted: 10:24 PM EDT

Excerpts from opening comments of national security adviser Condoleezza Rice

"Tragically, for all the language of war spoken before September 11, this country simply was not on a war footing."


"We ... moved to develop a new and comprehensive strategy to eliminate the al Qaeda terroist network."


"We understood that the network posed a serious threat to the United States."


"We wanted to ensure there was no respite in the fight against al-Qaeda. On an operational level, we decided immediately to continue to pursue the Clinton administration's covert action authorities and other efforts to fight the network."


WASHINGTON (CNN) -- National security adviser Condoleezza Rice testified Thursday under oath and in public before the independent National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States investigating the attacks of September 11, 2001. The White House initially refused to allow Rice's public testimony but reversed its position after pressure from relatives of 9/11 victims, commission members and politicians.

Following is a transcript of Rice's testimony before the commission:

RICE: I thank the commission for arranging this special session. Thank you for helping to find a way to meet the nation's need to learn all we can about the September 11 attacks, while preserving important constitutional principles.

This commission, and those who appear before it, have a vital charge. We owe it to those we lost, and to their loved ones, and to our country, to learn all we can about that tragic day, and the events that led to it. Many families of the victims are here today, and I thank them for their contributions to the Commission's work.

The terrorist threat to our nation did not emerge on September 11, 2001. Long before that day, radical, freedom-hating terrorists declared war on America and on the civilized world. The attack on the Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983, the hijacking of the Achille Lauro in 1985, the rise of al Qaeda and the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, the attacks on American installations in Saudi Arabia in 1995 and 1996, the East Africa embassy bombings of 1998, the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, these and other atrocities were part of a sustained, systematic campaign to spread devastation and chaos and to murder innocent Americans.

The terrorists were at war with us, but we were not yet at war with them. For more than 20 years, the terrorist threat gathered, and America's response across several administrations of both parties was insufficient. Historically, democratic societies have been slow to react to gathering threats, tending instead to wait to confront threats until they are too dangerous to ignore or until it is too late.

Despite the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 and continued German harassment of American shipping, the United States did not enter the First World War until two years later. Despite Nazi Germany's repeated violations of the Versailles Treaty and its string of provocations throughout the mid-1930s, the Western democracies did not take action until 1939.

The U.S. government did not act against the growing threat from Imperial Japan until the threat became all too evident at Pearl Harbor. And, tragically, for all the language of war spoken before September 11, this country simply was not on a war footing.

Since then, America has been at war. And under President Bush's leadership, we will remain at war until the terrorist threat to our Nation is ended. The world has changed so much that it is hard to remember what our lives were like before that day. But I do want to describe the actions this administration was taking to fight terrorism before September 11, 2001.

After President Bush was elected, we were briefed by the Clinton administration on many national security issues during the transition. The president-elect and I were briefed by George Tenet on terrorism and on the al Qaeda network. Members of Sandy Berger's NSC staff briefed me, along with other members of the new national security team, on counterterrorism and al Qaeda.

This briefing lasted about one hour, and it reviewed the Clinton administration's counterterrorism approach and the various counterterrorism activities then underway. Sandy and I personally discussed a variety of other topics, including North Korea, Iraq, the Middle East and the Balkans.

Because of these briefings and because we had watched the rise of al Qaeda over the years, we understood that the network posed a serious threat to the United States. We wanted to ensure there was no respite in the fight against al Qaeda.

On an operational level, we decided immediately to continue pursuing the Clinton administration's covert action authorities and other efforts to fight the network. President Bush retained George Tenet as director of central intelligence, and Louis Freeh remained the director of the FBI. I took the unusual step of retaining Dick Clarke and the entire Clinton administration's counterterrorism team on the NSC staff.

I knew Dick to be an expert in his field, as well as an experienced crisis manager. Our goal was to ensure continuity of operations while we developed new and more aggressive policies.

At the beginning of the administration, President Bush revived the practice of meeting with the director of central intelligence almost every day in the Oval Office -- meetings which I attended, along with the vice president and the chief of staff. At these meetings, the president received up-to-date intelligence and asked questions of his most senior intelligence officials.

From January 20 through September 10, the president received at these daily meetings more than 40 briefing items on al Qaeda, and 13 of these were in response to questions he or his top advisers had posed. In addition to seeing DCI Tenet almost every morning, I generally spoke by telephone every morning at 7:15 with Secretaries Powell and Rumsfeld. I also met and spoke regularly with the DCI about al Qaeda and terrorism.

{{{{ there are several pages more : hit the link to read entire transcript }}}

www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/04/08/rice.transcript/index.html

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9/11 commission faults U.S. intelligence

Tenet, Mueller testify before panel

Wednesday, April 14, 2004 Posted: 9:18 PM EDT

www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/04/14/911.commission/index.html

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. intelligence gathering was fragmented and poorly coordinated before the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the 9/11 commission reported Wednesday, adding that it remains unclear how such crucial information is managed.

"A question remains: Who is in charge of intelligence," reads the final line of a critical report by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, as the bipartisan 9/11 panel is formally known.

The report, examining the performance of the intelligence community, described a "loose collection" of intelligence agencies that often operated independently of one another with little communication or cooperation. And it faulted CIA Director George Tenet for not having a management strategy to battle terrorism before the 9/11 attacks.

"The vision of central coordination has not been realized," the report said.

Tenet, who testified before the commission on Wednesday, called the report "flat wrong."

"By no stretch of the imagination am I going to tell you that I've solved all the problems of the community in terms of integrating and in lashing it up," said Tenet, who has led the CIA since 1997. "But we've made an enormous amount of progress."

Tenet said the agency's "plumbing" -- the infrastructure needed to train and field spies -- had been long neglected and was under repair at the time of the attacks.

But Tenet also told the 9/11 commission that it will take the U.S. intelligence community "another five years to have the kind of clandestine service our country needs" to fight terrorism.

That estimate clearly worried the panel.

"It scares me a bit that we dismantled the CIA to the point that it now takes five years to rebuild it," 9/11 commission chairman Thomas Kean told reporters after the hearing.

Vice chairman Lee Hamilton agreed. "I was personally kind of discouraged with that statement," he said. "This is not a new problem."

With its critical assessment of U.S. intelligence before 9/11, Wednesday's public hearing followed one Tuesday when the FBI was taken to task by the commission for missing "connections" with terrorist activity and not working collaboratively with other agencies.

The CIA and FBI, in particular, were blasted in the wake of the 9/11 attacks by many lawmakers and experts for not sharing tips and information.

FBI 'in transition'

But the FBI found something of a respite at Wednesday's session when commission members greeted FBI Director Robert Mueller warmly with praise for his cooperation with the panel. And a separate staff report on reforming law enforcement was largely laudatory of Mueller's efforts.

It called the FBI "an institution in transition" and acknowledged progress at the agency.

"Important structural challenges remain to be addressed in order to improve the flow of information and to enhance the FBI's counterterrorism effectiveness," the report said.

Mueller testified Wednesday that the agency has broken down walls within itself -- between intelligence and law enforcement operations in particular -- and with others to better fight terrorism.

"The bureau is moving steadily in the right direction," Mueller told the 9/11 commission.


FBI Director Robert Mueller testifies before the 9/11 commission.
Turning to an idea being mulled by the commission and some lawmakers, Mueller said that creating a separate agency to collect intelligence information in the United States "would be a grave mistake."

Splitting the law enforcement and intelligence functions would leave both "fighting the war on terrorism with one hand tied behind their backs," he said.

President Bush earlier this week signaled an interest in possible changes to U.S. intelligence, saying he was looking forward to recommendations from the 9/11 commission.

"Now may be a time to revamp and reform our intelligence services," Bush said Monday, but he did not outline any ideas.

Some lawmakers have proposed a domestic intelligence agency modeled after what Great Britain has in place, and that model has been cited by some commission members as well.

"Our sense is that the commission supports reform of the intelligence community, but we have come to no judgment about the nature of reform that we will recommend," Hamilton told reporters.

Kean said he is concerned that U.S. intelligence, as structured, isn't providing the president with the kind of information he needs.

"I think there's a real question in my mind and I think of several other commissioners as to whether the president's getting decent information, as to whether the president's getting the kind of thing the president needs to make the kind of decisions that the president every day has to make," Kean said after the public hearing.

During his testimony, Tenet said that the agency's failure to stop the September 11, 2001, terror plot "haunts all of us to this day." But he defended his efforts to battle the al Qaeda terror network before the attacks. "Three thousand people died," Tenet told the 9/11 commission. "No matter how hard we worked or how desperately we tried, it was not enough. The victims and the families of 9/11 deserve better."

On another matter, Kean and Hamilton dismissed a suggestion by a Republican lawmaker that one commissioner, Jamie Gorelick, resign.

Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Tennessee, said Gorelick should step down because she has a "conflict of interest." It came out at Tuesday's hearing that Gorelick was the author of a memo when she was at the Justice Department that Attorney General John Ashcroft says hobbled the FBI on intelligence matters.

Kean called Sensenbrenner's suggestion a "silly statement" and said Gorelick had followed all rules about recusing herself from matters where she had either been involved or had an interest. "People ought to stay out of our business," Kean said.

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Vacationing Bush Not Told of 9/11 'Clue'
By Tabassum Zakaria

http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/story.jsp?floc=FF-RTO-rontz&idq=/ff/stor y/0002%2F20040414%2F1621811698.htm&sc=rontz

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The head of the CIA never informed a vacationing President Bush in August 2001 that a suspected Islamic extremist had been detected taking flight lessons, the panel investigating the Sept. 11 jetliner attacks on New York and Washington heard on Wednesday.

As several commission members criticized what they called a complete intelligence failure ahead of the attacks, in which nearly 3,000 people were killed, CIA Director George Tenet also said it would take another five years to bring U.S. spying capabilities to the level the country needs.

Commissioner Tim Roemer, a former Democratic congressman, asked Tenet if he had ever mentioned to Bush the arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui in mid-August 2001 after he had been detected behaving suspiciously in a Minnesota flight school.

Tenet said he had not spoken to the president that month, when Bush was staying at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, nor did he bring it to the attention of other senior officials, saying simply it did not fit the agenda. "He's in Texas and I'm either here or on leave for some of that time," he said. "In this time period, I'm not talking to him, no."


But a CIA spokesman later said that Tenet had flown to Texas to brief Bush on Aug. 17 and resumed regular briefings on Aug. 31 after the president returned to the White House. Tenet said he was briefed about Moussaoui on Aug. 23 or 24. The briefing to Tenet and other top CIA officials was titled "Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly," a commission report said.

A CIA briefer was with the president during his time in Texas and gave him the now-famous Aug. 6 report, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US." The CIA director did not bring up the Moussaoui case at a meeting of top administration officials to discuss Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda organization on Sept. 4, a week before the attacks.

Tenet said they were discussing the Predator unmanned aircraft. "All I can tell you is just it wasn't the appropriate place. I just can't take you any farther than that." A commission report on Tuesday said Tenet had told the panel no connection between Moussaoui and al Qaeda was apparent before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Moussaoui, originally detained for immigration violations, was later charged with conspiracy in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks, and faces a possible death penalty if convicted. He is often cited as a key missed clue for unraveling the plot because he was in custody before the attack.

'PROBLEM OF WARNING'

A commission staff report issued at the start of the day's hearings said the United States had developed defenses against surprise military strikes after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 but never applied them to potential terrorist threats. "With the important exception of attacks with chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons, the methods developed for decades to warn of surprise attacks were not applied to the problem of warning against terrorist attacks," the report said.

Republican commissioner John Lehman called the staff report a "damning evaluation of a system that is broken." Other commission members called for an intelligence "revolution."

But Tenet said the report was wrong to state he had no strategic plan to manage the war on terrorism or to integrate and share data across the intelligence community.
However, he did acknowledge that his and other agencies failed to devise an effective defense against bin Laden's al Qaeda operatives in 2001.

"We all understood bin Laden's attempt to strike the homeland. We never translated this knowledge into an effective defense of the country," Tenet said. "No matter how hard we worked, or how desperately we tried, it was not enough. The victims and the families of 9/11 deserved better."

The bipartisan commission, which is due to report to the nation in July at the height of the presidential campaign, has issued a series of highly critical reports on what it sees as a succession of failures leading up to the attack.

A second staff statement issued on Wednesday said that despite efforts to overhaul the system since Sept. 11, "it is clear that gaps in intelligence sharing still exist ... We found there is no national strategy for sharing information to counter terrorism."

U.S. officials insist there was no single piece of information that would have revealed the plot in time to stop it. But the commission staff report said the CIA failed to foresee or analyze how a hijacked aircraft or other explosives-laden aircraft might be used as a weapon.


04/14/04 16:21

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Poll: Bush Vulnerable, but Kerry Undefined
By WILL LESTER

http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/story.jsp?floc=FF-APO-1131&idq=/ff/story /0001%2F20040414%2F1350804799.htm&sc=1131

WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush appears vulnerable on several fronts, including support for whether he deserves re-election and worries about the country's direction, but Democratic rival John Kerry has been unable to capitalize on those weaknesses, a bipartisan poll suggests.

The result six months before the Nov. 2 presidential election is a tight race between a vulnerable incumbent and a challenger who has not yet defined himself, according to the Battleground 2004 poll released Wednesday. The survey was conducted by Republican pollster Ed Goeas and Democratic pollster Celinda Lake and sponsored by George Washington University.

Bush and Kerry were virtually tied in the survey, with Kerry at 49 percent support and Bush at 48 percent. When the pollsters asked an open-ended question on who voters supported for president, Bush had a slight lead.

When people were asked who they support but given no choices, 15 percent said they were undecided. That's the same level of undecided voters on that question right before the 2000 election, Goeas said.


``We are starting this campaign right where we finished the last campaign,'' said Goeas.


The poll found Bush retains an advantage on personal qualities like strong leadership, and on such issues as his handling of the campaign against terrorism and the war in Iraq. Kerry holds a slight edge on such qualities as compassion, and leads Bush on handling the economy and health care.


But on the intensity of those feelings, Bush has the advantage, with 38 percent saying they feel strongly for Bush and 26 percent saying the same about Kerry.


That intensity of feeling helps Bush stay close to Kerry despite mixed feelings about his re-election and Kerry's advantage on the economy, health care and Social Security.


``With advantages like this, we should be way ahead,'' Lake said. ``How do we translate Kerry's issue advantages into a lead against Bush?''


The poll was taken before the recent spike in violence in Iraq.


GOP pollster Goeas said it's important for Bush's re-election campaign to define Kerry and turn his softer supporters into opponents. In some other polls, as many as four in 10 people say they don't know enough about Kerry to decide how they feel about him.


The poll suggested Bush supporters feel more intensity in their backing for the president so Democrats will be under pressure make sure Kerry supporters go to the polls.


The poll of 1,000 likely voters was taken from March 28-31 and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.


On the Net:
Battleground 2004 poll: www.tarrance.com

04/14/04 13:50


Kerry Says There Is 'Better Way' in Iraq
By John Whitesides

http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/story.jsp?floc=FF-RTO-rontz&idq=/ff/stor y/0002%2F20040414%2F1716814975.htm&sc=rontz

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Democratic White House challenger John Kerry said on Wednesday President Bush's "stubborn" Iraq policy was costing U.S. lives and money and renewed calls for a broader diplomatic effort to share the burden.

The day after Bush defended his policy in a prime-time news conference and vowed to stay the course, Kerry promised to find "a better way" in Iraq by creating a partnership with the United Nations to rebuild the country and government.

"The approach of this administration has been consistent and stubborn in the way that they persist in the American occupation and in proceeding down its own road," Kerry told reporters after an appearance at City College. "It has made that mistake from day one and it is costing us money and I think it is costing us lives," he said.

Kerry, locked in a tight election battle with Bush in which Iraq has become a key issue, said "we should embrace a much more significant effort of outreach and diplomacy" to build international support and enter a full U.N. partnership. That partnership would save U.S. lives and money and create a more stable government for Iraqis, he said.
"We shouldn't only be tough, we have to be smart," Kerry said. "There is a smarter way to accomplish this mission."

Asked if foreign governments had hardened their opposition to the U.S. role in Iraq too much to rebuild their trust, Kerry said a change in direction would help. "It may take a new president to be able to change the atmosphere in order to be able to accomplish what we need to. I hope not," said Kerry, who denied he was playing politics with the issue.

"I believe there is a better way to share the responsibility for this burden," Kerry said. "I believe it is possible to reduce the costs and the burden and the risk to American soldiers."

Kerry, who voted to authorize the war in October 2002 but has regularly criticized Bush's conduct of it, was confronted at a town hall meeting at City College by Walter Daum, a math professor who said the Massachusetts senator had taken the same approach as Bush.

Protesters held a banner behind Kerry during the event, reading: "Kerry Take a Stand, Troops Out Now."


PULLING TROOPS CAUSES CHAOS

Kerry said pulling troops out of Iraq immediately would lead to further chaos and endanger Americans and Iraqis, and said he would be willing to commit more troops if the Pentagon said it was necessary.

Reacting for the Bush campaign, former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger said "Kerry's policy is not a policy" but just a political means of attacking the president. "It's just a lot of criticism and pessimism," Weinberger said. "The United Nations is totally incapable of doing any kind of job as pacifying or removing terrorism from a country like Iraq."


Kerry came to New York for three fund-raisers and to unveil details of his plan to pay for college tuition for students who commit to two years of national service after their education. Kerry's program would give up to 200,000 students who agree to perform key community service jobs four years of free tuition at public universities, and partial breaks to 300,000 students who would work part-time.

"We cannot be a country where all we do is take care of ourselves," he said, adding there was great value in community service and "we need a president who sees that."
He said the estimated $13 billion program would be paid for by overhauling the student loan system, requiring banks to win student loan contracts at auction and reducing their profits.

Kerry was joined at City College by New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Rep. Charles Rangel. Clinton, who later joined Kerry on a visit to a Manhattan pre-school, said Kerry had the right combination of "grit and imagination, of understanding and tenacity" for the White House.



04/14/04 17:16

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9/11 Panel Member Faults Clinton Inaction
By HOPE YEN

http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/story.jsp?floc=FF-APO-1151&idq=/ff/story /0001%2F20040409%2F1818625505.htm&sc=1151&photoid=20040408JWE135

WASHINGTON (AP) - A Sept. 11 commission Democrat disagreed Friday with President Clinton's assessment there wasn't enough intelligence linking al-Qaida to a deadly attack on a Navy ship to justify an attack on the terrorist organization.

Former Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey said he believes Clinton should have launched a military strike against al-Qaida following the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole that killed 17 sailors.


``I think he did have enough proof to take action,'' Kerrey said on ABC's ``Good Morning America.

The commission interviewed Clinton behind closed doors Thursday for nearly four hours, with many of their questions focused on the Cole attack.


A person familiar with the Clinton session said the former president told the commission he did not order retaliatory military strikes because he could not get ``a clear, firm judgment of responsibility'' from U.S. intelligence before he left office the following January.


U.S. intelligence didn't conclude that al-Qaida had sponsored the attack on the ship in the harbor at Aden, Yemen, until after the Bush administration took office.


Bush officials have said they didn't retaliate because they didn't want an inadequate ``tit-for-tat'' response that would embolden the terrorists.


The commission held a private session with former Vice President Al Gore on Friday. The three-hour session was described by the panel as ``candid and forthcoming.''


``He answered all our questions. We talked a lot about airline safety and security, the Cole, and the Clinton White House attitude toward terrorism,'' said Republican commissioner James R. Thompson, a former Illinois governor. He declined to give specifics.


A preliminary report on airline security that the panel released in January noted Gore had chaired a 1996 presidential Commission on Aviation Safety and Security that focused on the danger of explosives on aircraft rather than potential foreign hijackings.


``It's too soon to be making assessments at this point,'' Thompson said.


President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney also will meet privately with the full panel in a joint session in coming weeks. They initially restricted the interview to one hour with two panel members, but under mounting public pressure agreed last week to a joint session without time constraints.



04/09/04 18:17

[Jolie Rouge]

by Gary D. Halbert
April 20, 2004

So, have you been watching the 9-11 Commission hearings recently? Not much. That’s probably good. Not at all. That’s even better. The 9-11 Commission hearings have ranged from highly energized exchanges to utter boredom. The Commission’s public hearings (10 so far) have included an embarrassing amount of grandstanding and partisan spectacles, especially on the part of the Democrats.

Several of the commissioners seem much more intent on advancing their personal agendas and careers than they do about seeking the truth about 9-11. It is clear that some of the commissioners are jockeying for positions in a Kerry administration should he be the next president. Conflicts of interest abound on the Commission.

The Commission claims to have interviewed over 1,000 witnesses and yet little, if any, new information has been gleaned. Nevertheless, the Commission is expected to release a final report in late July which reportedly will claim that the 9-11 tragedy could have been prevented.

We’re not quite sure how the terror attacks could have been prevented, or even how the Commission has already drawn such a conclusion. We don’t understand how the CIA and the FBI, which were legally prohibited from sharing certain information going all the way back to 1978, would have or could have collaborated and connected all the dots pertaining to the 9-11 attacks. Even if they had, could we have prevented it? Apparently, the 9-11 Commission wants us to believe that the answer is yes.

It’s called the Blame Game. It is becoming increasingly clear that a majority of the members of the Commission wants to lay the blame for the 9-11 tragedy on President Bush. This week, we will examine the 9-11 Commission, its penchant for blaming Bush and its many conflicts of interest.


Makeup Of The Commission

The “National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States” (aka, the 9-11 Commission) was created as a result of congressional legislation and was signed into law by President Bush in November 2002. The Commission was supposed to be a bipartisan group consisting of five Republicans and five Democrats, with a mandate to investigate “facts and circumstances relating to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001” and a budget (so far) of $15 million taxpayer dollars.

The chairman is Thomas Keen (Rep.), former New Jersey governor and longtime political insider. The vice chairman is Lee Hamilton (Dem.), who previously spent 34 years in the House of Representatives from Indiana.

The four Republican commissioners are Fred Fielding (former US attorney), Slade Gorton (former Senator and attorney), John Lehman (former Navy Secretary) and Timothy Roemer (former House member). The four Democratic commissioners are Richard Ben-Veniste (former US attorney), Bob Kerrey (former Senator), James Thompson (former IL governor and US attorney) and Jamie Gorelick (more details on her below).

The 9-11 Commission also has a staff of apprx. 80 people, over half of which are attorneys.

What We Have Learned – Nothing New

So what have we learned so far from the “blue ribbon” Commission? The media would have us believe that the following are new revelations, but they aren’t. For example, Bush received a briefing (PDB) from Condi Rice on August 6, 2001 which warned that Osama bin Laden was intent on attacking the US, possibly including the hijacking of commercial airliners. Yet this news generated a firestorm in the media back in May 2002.

We are also led to believe it is new news that the CIA had serious concerns about Zacarias Moussaoui (the 20th hijacker) after his suspicious behavior in a Minnesota flight school, but didn’t pass this information on the Bush administration. Ditto for the fact that the FBI knew that two of the other 9-11 hijackers were in the US, but they did not attempt to locate and arrest them due to federal restrictions on such activity. This is all old news.

Jamie Gorelick & The CIA/FBI “Wall”

One of the biggest controversies arising from the 9-11 Commission hearings – which is also not new news - has to do with the so-called “wall” between the CIA and the FBI, which prevented the sharing of information. 9-11 commissioner Jamie Gorelick, who served as Deputy Attorney General under Janet Reno in the Clinton administration, came under fire from the current Attorney General John Ashcroft. Ashcroft made public a classified memo that Gorelick sent to the FBI and others in the intelligence community, warning the agencies about sharing information.

The Gorelick memo was entitled, “Instructions on Separation of Certain Foreign Counterintelligence and Criminal Investigations.” It contained new directives to the agencies regarding intelligence sharing and included the following:
“We believe that it is prudent to establish a set of instructions that will more clearly separate the counterintelligence investigation [CIA] from the more limited, but continued, criminal investigations [FBI]. These procedures, which go beyond what is legally required, will prevent any risk of creating an unwarranted appearance that FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] is being used to avoid procedural safeguards which would apply in a criminal investigation.”

While many believed that Ashcroft was trying to lay the blame for the 9-11 tragedy on Gorelick, and in particular her 1995 memo, he did point out that the intelligence sharing wall had existed for years prior to 1995. Here are some excerpts from Ashcroft’s testimony before the Commission:
“Although you understand the debilitating impact of the wall, I cannot imagine that the commission knew about this memorandum, so I have declassified it for you and the public to review. Full disclosure compels me to inform you that its author is a member of this commission… Government erected this wall. Government buttressed this wall. And before September 11, government was blinded by this wall…the wall that segregated criminal investigators and intelligence agents…

The Justice Department was so addicted to the wall, it actually opposed legislation to lower the wall. Finally, the USA Patriot Act tore down this wall between our intelligence and law enforcement personnel in 2001. And when the Patriot Act was challenged, the FISA Court of Review upheld the law, ruling that the 1995 [Gorelick] guidelines were required by neither the Constitution nor the law…

But the simple fact of September 11 is this: We did not know an attack was coming because for nearly a decade our government had blinded itself to its enemies… [Agents] were isolated by government-imposed walls, handcuffed by government-imposed restrictions, and starved for basic information technology. The old national intelligence system in place on September 11 was destined to fail.”

Ashcroft’s testimony sparked a firestorm of criticism directed at Jamie Gorelick, and many groups called for her resignation from the Commission. As this is written, she has not stepped down, and I don’t expect she will. I have linked below an editorial she wrote in her own defense last week in the Washington Post.

The truth is, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was signed into law in 1978 by President Jimmy Carter. It placed restrictions on the sharing of so-called “foreign intelligence” (such as the CIA allegedly had on certain of the 9-11 hijackers) with other government agencies and/or law enforcement.

The point is, the information sharing wall existed long before Jamie Gorelick became Deputy AG under Clinton/Reno. This is not new news. It jumped into the spotlight, however, shortly after 9-11 when it became clear to the public that the CIA and the FBI were not communicating.

[Jolie Rouge]

What We Seem To Have Forgotten

Former President Bill Clinton was interviewed in private by the Commission in early April. Had I been on the Commission, I would have asked him about the following events as described in my E-Letter dated May 24, 2001 (better skip this part if you are a big Clinton fan):


“February 1993 - A massive van bomb explodes in the underground parking garage of the World Trade Center killing six and wounding 1,042. The operation was carried out by four Islamist extremists and was masterminded by Ramsey Yousef. Yet following that disaster, there was no 'shake-up' in the government intelligence community. President Clinton did not even visit the World Trade Center. Clinton was (reportedly) the first modern president to not take daily intelligence briefings, and this practice reportedly continued even after the WTC attack.

1995- Airliners as Missiles: Intelligence sources in the Philippines uncovered a plot to hijack multiple US commercial airplanes and crash them into buildings. This was called "Project Bojinka," and it was again masterminded by Yousef and reportedly funded by Osama bin Laden. This was the first link to Al-Qaeda. Other evidence found was used to link Yousef to the 1993 WTC bombing and convict him. Elements of the Clinton administration became increasingly concerned with future terror attacks, yet the President still did not take daily intelligence briefs. The CIA Director (reportedly) could not even get a meeting with Clinton.

1996- Gore To Investigate: Finally, after additional pressure from his Cabinet and the National Security Agency, who feared additional terrorist attacks, Clinton assigned VP Al Gore the task of reviewing airline and airport security. Though there were several good suggestions and improvements placed on the table, in the end, few if any were actually implemented in order to fix the airports or the airlines. Yet the effort was heralded as a success.

1996- Torricelli Guts CIA/FBI: In this same year, Sen. Robert Torricelli proposed legislation that would ‘scrub’ the US intelligence agencies of supposed human rights violations. Specifically, it barred them from recruiting 'thugs' or 'unsavory characters' within the bad guy networks around the world. This resulted in the hobbling of the ‘HUMINT’ (human intelligence) capabilities of our intelligence agencies. The Clinton administration supported it whole-heartedly.

1996- Sudan Offers Up Bin Laden: The government of Sudan (reportedly) offered to arrest Osama bin Laden and turn him over directly to the US, but the Clinton administration declined on the grounds they feared we did not have enough direct evidence to indict him.

After Clinton declined the first offer, Sudan (reportedly) even offered to arrest bin Laden and deport him to a mutually agreed upon third country, where the US could take him into custody and do whatever we would with him. Again, Clinton declined the offer, after which Sudan forced bin Laden to find another host country. He went to Afghanistan. We know the rest of the story.”


There were other terrorist attacks against the US overseas which were admittedly the work of Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. The Khobar Towers in June 1996; the US embassies in Nairobi and Tanzania in August 1998; and the USS Cole in October 2000. Hundreds were killed including dozens of US citizens and service men and women. Still there was no major overhaul of national security or our intelligence agencies. We did bomb an aspirin factory in Sudan and a deserted al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan in 1998 at the height of the Monica Lewinski scandal.


** Interestingly, the diplomat who claims to have negotiated the handover of Osama bin Laden by Sudan to the Clinton administration is scheduled to testify before the 9-11 Commission on May 7. However, the Commission has chosen to interview Mansoor Ijaz only in private. It will be interesting to see if his testimony ever sees the light of day.


Blaming Bush & Advancing Their Careers

The Democrats on the Commission clearly want to lay the blame for 9-11 on the Bush administration. Clinton would get a “pass” if they have their way. Even Commission chairman Thomas Keen – who is a Republican – seems willing to play along. He was one of the first to say publicly that he believes 9-11 could have been prevented.

I believe it would have been next to impossible for the Bush administration to have prevented 9-11. Yet from what we read, the final report from the Commission (which is already being drafted before all the witnesses are heard) may indeed lay much of the blame on President Bush and his advisors.

Dare we look at some of the motivations behind certain of these 9-11 commissioners? Yes, we do. Former Senator Bob Kerrey has been perhaps the most vocal and fiery member of the Commission. Rumor has it that Kerrey is on the short list of possible VP running mates for John Kerry (“Kerry/Kerrey” – wouldn’t that be interesting), or if not, possibly Secretary of State in a John Kerry cabinet.

Richard Ben-Veniste is a long-time power broker in Washington, along the lines of Vernon Jordan during the Clinton years. Ben-Veniste was, among other things, a Special Prosecutor and chief of the Watergate Task Force back in the 1970s. He was also chief counsel for the Senate Whitewater Committee. He could be positioning for a general counsel spot in a Kerry White House.

And Jamie Gorelick? Presumably, she would love to be Attorney General in a Kerry administration.

The point is, all of the Democrats on the Commission have conflicts of interest and/or strong motivations to see Bush defeated by Kerry in November. Maybe this explains some of their behaviors and actions while supposedly being non-partisan.


Richard Clarke – The Most Damning Evidence?

Richard Clarke’s testimony before the 9-11 Commission is cited as being perhaps the most damning evidence of the Bush administration’s lack of concern about national security and a terrorist attack. Though his book seems to go further in blaming the Bush administration than he did under oath, it was still clear that Clarke expected Bush to do in eight months what he himself had failed to do in his long career as the nation’s counter-terrorism czar.

However, the liberal press failed to mention how Clarke’s 9-11 testimony (not to mention his book) directly contradicted his comments during an August 2002 press conference.
Clarke praised the Bush administration for not only continuing the anti-terrorism policies and strategies of the Clinton administration, and accelerating them, but also for increasing funding for covert anti-terrorism activities by five-fold.

Perhaps Clarke has provided the most damning evidence of all, but not of Bush’s complacency. His evidence helps to prove that most of those who have been most critical of the Bush Administration's handling of the threat of a terrorist attack have definite ulterior motives, as I have discussed above. Mr. Clarke held his tongue on any criticism of Bush until an election year in which his expose' was to be published. Remarkable timing, wouldn't you say?


Conclusions :

As I have written before, the Democrats and the liberal media are in an all-out effort to see that Bush is not re-elected. The politicization of the 9-11 Commission, sadly, is little more than a last-ditch effort to bring Bush down. As a result, most of the rhetoric you hear coming from this Commission is much ado about nothing. It is more about defeating Bush at all costs and about advancing their personal agendas.

I predict that the work of this Commission is going to be disregarded as a flawed piece of political propaganda, rather than a constructive review of the intelligence process. They have forgotten their mandate to review the events that led up to the 9-11 attacks and to recommend how security and the intelligence community can be improved to prevent future attacks.

The truth is, there have been security failures and lapses in all recent administrations. I would argue that the most egregious failures occurred on Bill Clinton’s watch, but we will never hear that admitted (or even hinted) by the 9-11 Commission or the media.

As noted earlier, I don’t believe the Bush administration could have prevented the 9-11 attacks. Certainly, there was intelligence that was not shared or didn’t make it into the right hands. Even if it had, it is doubtful that most of the hijackers could have been stopped.

This also raises the question of whether or not lawmakers and the American people would have tolerated – in advance - the extreme measures that would have been necessary to prevent the 9-11 tragedy. But I will leave that question, and discussion of same, for another time.

The good news is, a great deal has already been done to increase our security, largely at the initiative of President Bush. I have no doubt that the terrorists would have already struck us again if they could. Rather than playing the blame game, the 9-11 Commission should carry out its mandate and provide the administration and our intelligence agencies the information they need.

Very best regards,
Gary D. Halbert

[Jolie Rouge]

Should 9/11 commissioner Jamie Gorelick be forced to step down from the commission due to her conflict of interest?

Yes 99%

No 1%



Total Votes: 741

[kvmj]

I have to believe that this poll comes from some ultra conservative site and is therefore worthless.

Richard Clarke is considered a credible witness. His account is backed up by others. The praise given the Bush administration to which you refer is probably the first time ever that an administration official has tried to spin events in a more positive light.

[Jolie Rouge]

kvmj : I have to believe that this poll comes from some ultra conservative site and is therefore worthless.

The site is www.campainbuilder.com and is unabashedly conservative. If however it had supported some view that you did agree with, it would be considered definative. I actually posted it as a joke, as it is very biased.



Richard Clarke is considered a credible witness. His account is backed up by others. The praise given the Bush administration to which you refer is probably the first time ever that an administration official has tried to spin events in a more positive light.

Do I detect a note of sarcasm ?


I have posted such information as it has been found on the internet. I found information critical of the present *and* past administrations. Clarke advised several Presidents; was Bush supposed to do in eight months what Clinton neglected in eight years ? All polititicians and "players" have their own adgendas - we have to figure out what it is based on information available.

Please post information and articles relevant to the issue at hand; I would be interested in your views and insights.

[Jolie Rouge]

/11 Panel Quizzes Bush, Cheney for Hours

By DEB RIECHMANN

http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/story.jsp?floc=FF-APO-1151&idq=/ff/story/0001%2F20040429%2F1349509289.htm&sc=1151&photoid=20040429LLJ102

WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney answered questions Thursday from Sept. 11 commissioners trying to learn how followers of Osama bin Laden pulled off the worst terrorist attack in American history. ``I answered every question,'' Bush said after the session lasting over three hours.

Speaking with reporters in the Rose Garden of the White House, Bush declined to say what questions the commission members specifically asked. But he did say the session was cordial. ``I'm glad I did it. I'm glad I took the time...I enjoyed it.''

The 10 commissioners gathered around Bush and Cheney, who were seated on chairs near the fireplace in the Oval Office for the unprecedented closed-door meeting that was off-limits to all but White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and two members of his staff.

Asked why Bush felt it necessary to appear jointly with Cheney, the president vigorously defended that arrangement.

``If we had something to hide, we wouldn't have met with them in the first place,'' Bush said. Critics have suggested the two men met together to make certain there were no discrepancies in their statements.


While he declined to say what the questions focused on, Bush told reporters, ``I was never advised by my counsel not to answer anything. I answered every question they asked.''

``There was a lot of interest about how to better protect America,'' he said. ``They're very interested in the recommendations that they're going to lay out and I'm interested in that as well.''

``I was impressed by the questions. I think it helped them understand how I think and how I run the White House and how we deal with threats,'' Bush said.


In a statement issued by the panel after the meeting, commissioners said they found the president and vice president ``forthcoming and candid.''

``The information they provided will be of great assistance to the Commission as it completes its final report. We thank the president and the vice president for their continued cooperation with the commission,'' the statement said.

One commissioner, Jim Thompson, said the questions included everything ``across the board'' that had been in public hearings. ``The president was asked the vast majority of the questions and he answered them. There was no questions the president or vice president did not answer.''

``There was some laughter from time to time. The president is a bit of a tease,'' Thompson said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. ``There were no tense moments. I thought the president gave a five-star performance. I wish the American people could have seen it.''



04/29/04 13:49

[Jolie Rouge]

Tape of 9/11 Controllers Was Destroyed

By LESLIE MILLER

http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/story.jsp?floc=FF-APO-PLS&idq=/ff/story/0001/20040507/0034846551.htm

WASHINGTON (AP) - Air traffic controllers who handled two of the hijacked flights on Sept. 11, 2001, recorded their experiences shortly after the planes crashed into the World Trade Center but a supervisor destroyed the tape, government investigators said Thursday.

A report by Transportation Department Inspector General Kenneth Mead said the manager for the New York-area air traffic control center asked the controllers to make the recordings a few hours after the crashes in belief they would be important for law enforcement.

Investigators never heard it. Sometime between December 2001 and February 2002, an unidentified Federal Aviation Administration quality assurance manager crushed the cassette case in his hand, cut the tape into small pieces and threw them away in multiple trash cans, the report said.

``We were told that nobody ever listened to, transcribed or duplicated the tape,'' Mead said in the report sent to Sen. John McCain. The Arizona Republican asked the inspector general to look into how well the agency was cooperating with the independent panel investigating the attacks.


Neither manager told anyone outside the center - including their superiors and law enforcement officials - about the tape's existence, the report said. The Sept. 11 commission learned of the tape during interviews with New York air traffic control center personnel between September and October.


The destruction occurred even though the FAA sent a directive three days after the hijackings: ``Retain and secure until further notice ALL Administrative/Operational data and records. ... If a question arises whether or not you should retain the data, RETAIN IT.''


The quality assurance manager said he destroyed the tape because he felt it violated FAA policy calling for written statements from controllers who have handled a plane involved in an accident or other serious incident. He also said he felt the controllers were not in the right frame of mind to have consented to the taping, the report said.


The manager said he waited several months to destroy the tape because he promised the local controllers' union vice president that he would get rid of it once the control center's formal accident package was complete, the report said. That package was sent to FAA headquarters in November 2001.


The report did not characterize the tape's destruction as an attempted cover-up. But it said the recording could have helped provide a fuller explanation of what happened on Sept. 11.


``What those six controllers recounted in a group setting on Sept. 11, in their own voices, about what transpired that morning, are no longer available to assist any investigation or inform the public,'' the report said.


Mead said his office referred the case to federal prosecutors in New York, but they declined to prosecute because of lack of criminal intent.


FAA spokesman Greg Martin said the quality control manager was disciplined for violating the directive to keep everything relating to the hijackings and to turn them over to investigators. He said privacy considerations prevented him from disclosing how the manager was disciplined.


Martin said the FAA believes the tape is consistent with written statements and other materials provided to investigators. It ``would not have added in any significant way to the information already provided to investigators and members of the 9-11 commission,'' Martin said.


The report said the controllers who made the tape had either talked to the hijacked planes that crashed into the World Trade Center or were working radar positions that intersected with the jetliners' flight paths.


The report concluded that there was ``some measure of consistency'' between witness statements later taken from the controllers and what was recorded on the tape. That conclusion was based on interviews with the six controllers and all 10 witnesses to the taping, and on sketchy notes taken during the tape recording. Also retained were radar data and recordings of radio transmissions from the cockpit.


John Carr, president of the air traffic controllers' union, said he did not know whether the manager did the right thing by destroying the tape. ``It was a traumatic time for him,'' he said. ``He was the custodian for the darkest moment in our nation's history.''


On the Net:

Federal Aviation Administration: www.faa.gov



05/07/04 00:34

[Jolie Rouge]

Report: Communications Broke Down on 9/11

http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/ns/news/story.jsp?maxphotos=4&phototerm=Sept.+11+Commission&floc=FF-APO-PLS&idq=/ff/story/0001/20040514/0921194379.htm&photoid=/cp/news/top/i/sept_11200.jpg

NEW YORK (AP) - Draft reports from the federal Sept. 11 Commission say emergency workers performed with bravery at the World Trade Center but were not coordinated in their efforts, according to a published report.

Among the communication breakdowns was a warning from a police helicopter that the north tower was about to fall that went unheard by firefighters, The New York Times reported Friday, citing people who have seen some or all of the findings.



The draft findings, subject to revision, were prepared by commission staff in preparation for hearings scheduled for next week in New York. The reports also cite unreliable communication between fire chiefs and firefighters in the building, who relied on hand-held radios when they believed a repeater, which boosts radio signals, was broken.

The Times said the commission's findings suggest the repeater may have actually been working, though the significance of that finding is unclear.

Other problems cited include reports of public address announcements telling people to stay in the south tower after the north tower was hit. In addition, the reports say, tenants had not been told during fire drills that they should not go to the roof during fires, so some who were trapped tried to escape that way.

The reports say admirable performance by civilian fire wardens and building staff, improved stairway lighting and glowing paint along the steps in the trade center, and the preparation of tenants for an emergency helped in the evacuation, the Times said.

Portions of the reports, expected to be made public during next week's hearings in New York, were shared with police and fire officials, the city's corporation counsel, Port Authority of New York and New Jersey officials and lawyers from former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's consulting firm, the Times said.

05/14/04 09:20

[Jolie Rouge]

/11 Panel Scolds Ex-Police, Fire Chiefs

By DEVLIN BARRETT

http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/story.jsp?floc=FF-APO-1110&idq=/ff/story/0001%2F20040518%2F1713356965.htm&sc=1110

NEW YORK (AP) - The former police and fire chiefs who were lionized after the World Trade Center attack came under harsh criticism Tuesday from the Sept. 11 commission, with one member saying the departments' lack of cooperation was scandalous and ``not worthy of the Boy Scouts.''

Commission members, in New York for an emotional two-day hearing, focused on how leaders of the two departments failed to share information effectively in the early frantic moments after two hijacked planes slammed into the World Trade Center.

Former fire commissioner Thomas Von Essen and former police chief Bernard Kerik shot back with infuriated responses to commissioner John Lehman's questions, the strongest of a series of pointed statements from the panel. '`I couldn't disagree with you more strongly,'' Von Essen replied. ``I think it's outrageous that you make a statement like that.'' Outside the hearing, he called the questioning ``despicable.''


Families of Sept. 11 victims applauded the tough questioning and shook their heads sadly as the panel enumerated a litany of communication breakdowns between the departments. Family members sporadically mocked and booed Von Essen, Kerik and Richard Sheirer, former Office of Emergency Management commissioner, and they wept earlier in the day as they watched videotape of the buildings collapsing.

http://channels.netscape.com/fotosrch/2/20040518XNYR312.jpg

As Von Essen testified, Sally Regenhard - who lost her firefighter son - held up a piece of paper reading: ``LIES.''

The 10-member bipartisan panel has been holding hearings over the last year, including high-profile meetings in Washington last month about intelligence failures, to examine what led to the attacks and determine ways to avoid future attacks. The panel will issue its final report July 26.

Former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani was scheduled to testify at the second day of hearings Wednesday.

While the New York hearings - held 1 1/2 miles from ground zero - were meant to examine problems in the city's emergency response system, officials also were asked about what they knew about terrorism threats in the months before Sept. 11.

The former director of the World Trade Center told the commission that he knew nothing of Osama bin Laden's terror network until the summer before the attacks, and was never privy to FBI intelligence that Islamic terrorists might hijack U.S. planes.

Alan Reiss said he first heard about bin Laden's al-Qaida network when ex-FBI agent John O'Neill was hired in the summer of 2001 as head of security at the trade center. O'Neill, who had hunted bin Laden for years, was one of the 2,749 people killed in the attack. ``I was aware of the plot against some of the other Port Authority tunnels and the U.N.,'' Reiss testified. ``But we were never briefed'' by the FBI.

Reiss also said he was more focused on fending off possible bioterrorism attacks such as anthrax, spending more than $100,000 to protect the building from such an assault. ``We felt this (anthrax) was the next coming wave,'' he said. ``We had developed plans on how to isolate the air conditioning system and shut it down but never did we have a thought of what happened on 9-11.''

Reiss bristled under questioning from commission member Bob Kerrey, who asked him if he is angry that ``things might have been different had they (FBI) trusted you enough'' to deliver important intelligence. Reiss said he was not angry at the FBI, but rather at ``19 people in an airplane,'' referring to the hijackers.

Kerrey said he shared Reiss' anger. ``These 19 people ... defeated the INS, they defeated the Customs (Department), they defeated the FBI, they defeated the CIA,'' the former Nebraska senator said as family members of the victims chimed in with the loudest applause of the morning.

But Kerrey said he was more concerned that ``we may not be delivering the key intelligence, the facts, the information'' to the first responders. Later, the miscommunication was termed ``a scandal'' by Lehman, who then complained it was ``not worthy of the Boy Scouts, let alone this great city.''

Family members cheered when commission member Slade Gorton launched an aggressive line of questioning about the city's 911 emergency system to Kerik, Von Essen and Sheirer. When the agency heads tried to defer to their successors, Gorton refused to let them. ``I'm asking ... what was going on Sept. 11,'' Gorton said to applause from the families.

Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly was asked if the city was prepared to handle a chemical attack with 10,000 injuries. ``I would say no,'' he replied.

For some family members, it was a day for reflection rather than protest. Terry McGovern, whose mother died in the south tower, said she came away with an understanding of what happened that day. ``For me, it was reliving what my mother heard, what she saw, what her last moments were,'' McGovern said.

The hearing began with a commission report recounting how city officials were forced to make life-and-death decisions based on incomplete communications, leading to some of the deaths in the twin 110-story buildings.

The communication problems resulted in incidents such as the deaths of Port Authority workers told to wait for help on the 64th floor of one tower. Many of them died when the building collapsed.

Communications breakdowns also prevented announcements to evacuate from reaching civilians in one of the buildings. One survivor recounted calling 911 from the 44th floor of the south tower, only to be placed on hold twice.
That was not a surprise, since emergency operators had a ``lack of awareness'' about what was happening at the twin towers and were overwhelmed by the sheer volume of calls, said commission staffer Sam Casperson.



Associated Press Writers Sara Kugler and Michael Weissenstein contributed to this report.


On the Net:

www.9-11commission.gov



05/18/04 17:12

[Jolie Rouge]

Fire, Police Rivalry Hurt Sept. 11 Rescue
By Ellen Wulfhorst

http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/story.jsp?photoid=/cp/news/top/i/sept_11200.jpg&floc=NW_1-T&oldflok=FF-RTO-PLS&idq=/ff/story/0002/20040518/1232347806.htm

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Rivalry between New York's police and fire departments and conflicting advice from emergency teams on Sept. 11, 2001, hampered efforts to save lives as the Twin Towers collapsed in a heap of smoke, the commission investigating the attacks said on Tuesday.

The panel, meeting less than 2 miles (3 km) from the former site of the World Trade Center, said the "long-standing rivalry" between the two departments meant they considered themselves "operationally autonomous" and failed to work together in the largest rescue operation in New York's history. "This rivalry has been acknowledged by every witness we have asked about it," a commission staff report read out at the public hearing said.

The report also said emergency operators answering distress calls from the burning towers gave conflicting advice or were unable to provide even the most basic information, such as the floors affected by the attacks. While some evacuees were told to return to their offices, others were told to leave the building. Faced with choking black smoke, insufferable heat and no prospect of relief, some of those trapped in the towers jumped from the building, the staff report said.


To help analyze what went wrong on Sept. 11, the independent commission presented dramatic footage of the day nearly 3,000 people, including around 343 firefighters and 23 police officers, died in the suicide airplane attacks on New York and Washington. The videos of the crashes also included statements from fire and police officials on duty that day.

Hundreds of victims' relatives were attending the hearings, some with pictures of their lost loved ones pinned to their shirts. Gasps filled the auditorium as the commission showed footage of the low-flying passenger planes smashing into the World Trade Center and erupting into balls of fire.

"I feel a responsibility to know everything that impacted my brother. He died without anybody to give him the information. I need to give him that respect," said Wells Noonan, whose brother Robert Noonan, 36, worked on the 103rd floor of one tower and died in the attacks.

POOR COMMUNICATIONS

The commission report said rescue efforts were also hampered by communications equipment that was damaged in the attacks or was not "interoperable" between departments. This meant rescue teams had little idea what was going on other floors, in other buildings, or outside the towers. For example, forces inside the towers did not know about the damage visible from police helicopters circling overhead.

The commission report said rescue officials did not anticipate the towers would collapse, and certainly not so quickly. The two towers imploded within roughly 1-3/4 hours of the first airplane impact. "We didn't have a lot of information coming in. We didn't receive any reports from what was seen from the helicopters," said Joseph Pfeifer, a battalion chief for the New York Fire Department who was at the disaster site that day.

"It was impossible to know how much damage was done on the upper flowers, whether the stairwells were intact or not ... As a matter of fact, what you saw on TV, we did not have that information," he said of the video footage.

When the first tower collapsed in a tremendous roar, rescue officials in the remaining North Tower had no idea what had happened. Unaware of the extent of the disaster, rescue officials lacked a uniform sense of urgency to evacuate the remaining building, which collapsed about half an hour later.


05/18/04 12:32

[Jolie Rouge]

Families Lash Out at Giuliani at Hearing
By MICHAEL WEISSENSTEIN

http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/ns/news/story.jsp?maxphotos=5&phototerm=Rudolph+Giuliani&photoid=20040519XNYR309&floc=FF-RTO-PLS&idq=/ff/story/0001%2F20040519%2F1546398680.htm&sc=1110

NEW YORK (AP) - Outraged relatives of World Trade Center victims heckled former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani on Wednesday as their hopes that he would be grilled by the Sept. 11 commission faded in the face of gentle questioning and effusive praise from panel members.

``My son was murdered because of your incompetence!'' shouted Sally Regenhard, whose firefighter son died in the trade center. Seated three rows behind Giuliani, she jabbed her finger at the former mayor and waved a sign that read ``Fiction'' as he gave the city's emergency response a glowing review.


Giuliani finished his testimony and abruptly left the auditorium minutes later, leaving many family members upset that they received few answers. Monica Gabrielle, who lost her husband, Richard, called it a ``lost opportunity.'' '`This was not a time for Rudy Giuliani to talk about all the great things he did on 9/11,'' she said. ``He can save that for his talking tours. He should have told us what went wrong and what we should do now.''


The acrimonious hearing brought together the mayor, who became a symbol of heroism for his steady response to the attack, and the activist relatives who have become a voice of dissent over his administration's emergency planning and response. Their complaints have been supported by a growing mass of critical findings on gaps in command, control and communications among New York's agencies in charge of emergency response.


The anger directed at Giuliani came on the second and final day of hearings in New York by the Sept. 11 commission, created by Congress last year to investigate the attacks and advise the country on ways to avoid future attacks. The hearings resume in Washington on June 8-9 and the final report is due July 26.


The commission released two reports that mark the most comprehensive probe to date of New York's response on Sept 11. The findings detailed a list of failings including poor communication, gulfs in cooperation between police and firefighters and grave deficiencies in the city's 911 emergency telephone network.


The report led to an aggressive interrogation of Giuliani's top fire, police and emergency management officials Tuesday, with Republican appointee John F. Lehman, a former Navy secretary under President Reagan, calling the failings ``a scandal'' and ``not worthy of the Boy Scouts.''

Ex-fire commissioner Thomas Von Essen later called Lehman's comments ``outrageous'' and ``despicable.''




The harsh questioning of Giuliani's former team was a sharp contrast to the universal praise that commission members heaped on the former mayor Wednesday. His positive assessment of such hotly debated topics as the 911 phone system and gaps in fire and police communications went virtually unchallenged. ``New York City, on that terrible day, in a sense was blessed because it had you as leader,'' said commission chairman and former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean. ``It had somebody who was a great, great leader to take charge of a terrible, terrible event. You also had, as you've told us, some of the best people in the country to call on who worked for you and worked for the city.''


Family members called the Giuliani questioning weak. ``A lot of these questions that the public has may die with this commission,'' said Patricia Casazza, whose husband died as the offices of Cantor Fitzgerald filled with smoke.


Giuliani began his testimony Wednesday with a call to focus on the nation's true enemies and not criticize each other. ``Our enemy is not each other but the terrorists who attacked us, murdered our loved ones and continue to offer a threat to our security, safety and survival,'' Giuliani said to applause.


Later, Giuliani was chastised by members of the public. A longtime city gadfly berated him and the commission, yelling, ``Three thousand people murdered does not mean leadership!'' He and another person were hustled out of the room. Others in the audience shouted about the failure of Fire Department radios, shouting, ``Talk about the radios!''


``You're simply wasting time at this point,'' commission head Thomas Kean told the family members.


``YOU'RE wasting time!'' came the angry reply.


Giuliani began his remarks by describing a September morning that began at breakfast with two friends and quickly turned into unimaginable horror as two hijacked planes slammed into the twin towers, killing 2,749 people and rattling the city's psyche. As Giuliani recalled watching a man leap from around the 102nd floor of the north tower, family members began to cry, clearly disturbed by the account.


The hearing was held at the New School University in Greenwich Village - about 1 1/2 miles from ground zero. Giuliani also told the commission that warnings of a possible terrorist attack on New York contained in an Aug. 6, 2001, White House briefing paper never reached City Hall, but probably would not have changed local security precautions.


The intelligence briefing for President Bush referred to evidence of federal buildings in New York possibly being cased by terrorists. It mentioned New York or the World Trade Center three times. ``If that information had been given to us, or more warnings had been given in the summer of 2001, I can't honestly tell you we'd do anything differently,'' said Giuliani, who has become one of the Bush administration's most vocal supporters. ``We were doing at the time everything we could think of ... to protect the city.''


Current Mayor Michael Bloomberg later testified that New York was recently advised by Congress that its homeland security funding for the 2004 budget year would be cut by nearly 50 percent. Thinly populated states such as Nebraska, North Dakota and Wyoming receive several times more funding per capita than New York, he said. ``This is pork-barrel politics at its worst,'' the mayor said. ``It also, unfortunately, has the effect of aiding and abetting those who hate us and plot against us.''



05/19/04 15:46

[Jolie Rouge]

Families Heckle Giuliani at 9/11 Hearing
By MICHAEL WEISSENSTEIN

http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/story.jsp?floc=FF-APO-1110&idq=/ff/story/0001%2F20040519%2F2244416208.htm&sc=1110&photoid=20040519XNYR303

NEW YORK (AP) - Outraged relatives of World Trade Center victims heckled former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani on Wednesday as their hopes that he would be grilled by the Sept. 11 commission faded in the face of gentle questioning and effusive praise from panel members.

``My son was murdered because of your incompetence!'' shouted Sally Regenhard, whose firefighter son died in the trade center. Seated three rows behind Giuliani, she jabbed her finger at the former mayor and waved a sign that read ``Fiction'' as he gave the city's emergency response a glowing review.

Giuliani finished his testimony and abruptly left the auditorium minutes later, upsetting family members who said they received few answers. Monica Gabrielle, who lost her husband, Richard, called it a ``lost opportunity.''
``This was not a time for Rudy Giuliani to talk about all the great things he did on 9/11,'' she said. ``He can save that for his talking tours. He should have told us what went wrong and what we should do now.''


The acrimonious hearing brought together the mayor, who became a symbol of heroism for his steady response to the attack, and the activist relatives who have become a voice of dissent over his administration's emergency planning and response. Their complaints have been supported by a growing mass of critical findings on gaps in command, control and communications among New York's agencies in charge of emergency response.

The anger directed at Giuliani came on the second and final day of hearings in New York by the Sept. 11 commission, created by Congress last year to investigate the attacks and advise the country on ways to avoid future attacks. The hearings resume in Washington on June 8-9 and the final report is due July 26.


The commission released two reports that mark the most comprehensive probe to date of New York's response on Sept 11. The findings detailed a list of failings including poor communication, gulfs in cooperation between police and firefighters and grave deficiencies in the city's 911 emergency telephone network.


The report led to an aggressive interrogation of Giuliani's top fire, police and emergency management officials Tuesday, with Republican appointee John F. Lehman, a former Navy secretary under President Reagan, calling the failings ``a scandal'' and ``not worthy of the Boy Scouts.''


Ex-fire commissioner Thomas Von Essen later called Lehman's comments ``outrageous'' and ``despicable.''


Lehman told The Associated Press on Wednesday that the comments were misunderstood and that he was not trying to criticize those who led the Sept. 11 effort. ``I was on the side of the witnesses, against the system,'' he said.


The harsh questioning of Giuliani's former team was a sharp contrast to the universal praise that commission members heaped on the former mayor Wednesday. His positive assessment of such hotly debated topics as the 911 phone system and gaps in fire and police communications went virtually unchallenged. ``New York City, on that terrible day, in a sense was blessed because it had you as leader,'' said commission chairman and former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean. ``It had somebody who was a great, great leader to take charge of a terrible, terrible event. You also had, as you've told us, some of the best people in the country to call on who worked for you and worked for the city.''


Family members called the Giuliani questioning weak.


``A lot of these questions that the public has may die with this commission,'' said Patricia Casazza, whose husband died as the offices of Cantor Fitzgerald filled with smoke.


Giuliani began his testimony Wednesday with a call to focus on the nation's true enemies and not criticize each other. ``Our enemy is not each other but the terrorists who attacked us, murdered our loved ones and continue to offer a threat to our security, safety and survival,'' Giuliani said to applause.


Later, Giuliani was chastised by members of the public. A longtime city gadfly berated him and the commission, yelling, ``Three thousand people murdered does not mean leadership!'' He and another person were hustled out of the room. Others in the audience shouted about the failure of Fire Department radios, shouting, ``Talk about the radios!''


``You're simply wasting time at this point,'' commission head Thomas Kean told the family members.


``YOU'RE wasting time!'' came the angry reply.


Asked afterward about the outbursts, Giuliani said: ``I knew that that would happen. ... I attribute it to the stress and the trauma that they're going through.''


Giuliani began his remarks by describing a September morning that began at breakfast with two friends and quickly turned into unimaginable horror as two hijacked planes slammed into the twin towers, killing 2,749 people and rattling the city's psyche. As Giuliani recalled watching a man leap from around the 102nd floor of the north tower, family members began to cry, clearly disturbed by the account.
The hearing was held at the New School University in Greenwich Village - about 1 1/2 miles from ground zero.


Giuliani also told the commission that warnings of a possible terrorist attack on New York contained in an Aug. 6, 2001, White House briefing paper never reached City Hall, but probably would not have changed local security precautions.


The intelligence briefing for President Bush referred to evidence of federal buildings in New York possibly being cased by terrorists. It mentioned New York or the World Trade Center three times. ``If that information had been given to us, or more warnings had been given in the summer of 2001, I can't honestly tell you we'd do anything differently,'' said Giuliani, who has become one of the Bush administration's most vocal supporters. ``We were doing at the time everything we could think of ... to protect the city.''


Current Mayor Michael Bloomberg later testified that New York was recently advised by Congress that its homeland security funding for the 2004 budget year would be cut by nearly 50 percent. Thinly populated states such as Nebraska, North Dakota and Wyoming receive several times more funding per capita than New York, he said. ``This is pork-barrel politics at its worst,'' the mayor said. ``It also, unfortunately, has the effect of aiding and abetting those who hate us and plot against us.''



05/19/04 22:44

[Jolie Rouge]

Sept. 11 Commission Holds Final Hearings
By JOHN J. LUMPKIN

http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/story.jsp?flok=FF-APO-1110&idq=/ff/story/0001%2F20040615%2F2259717133.htm&sc=1110

WASHINGTON (AP) - Of all the lines of defense that failed to stop the Sept. 11 attacks, the final one - military jet fighters - never really came into play. As the Sept. 11 commission wraps up its work, it will look into why.

The panel holds its final two-day public hearing Wednesday and Thursday. The first day will be devoted to al-Qaida and the 9/11 plot and the second to whether the Pentagon and Federal Aviation Administration could have done more to limit the damage.

One of two commission staff reports that were to be released Wednesday discloses the plot initially may have been planned for May or June 2001, rather than Sept. 11, according to a senior law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of agency policy. The official said the information about the delay probably came from U.S. interrogation of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a top al-Qaida leader captured in Pakistan in March 2003.


Commissioners, meanwhile, won't hear from a German prosecutor who had been expected to detail a key element of the plot - the so-called Hamburg al-Qaida cell. That group helped arrange financial support and housing for Sept. 11 hijackers as they planned the attacks. Matthias Krauss cited a scheduling conflict as the reason for the last-minute cancellation. A spokeswoman said he would submit written testimony.


On Thursday, the commission will end its series of public hearings by taking up the question of whether military jet fighters from NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, could have limited the destruction caused by the Sept. 11 hijackers by shooting down the airliners. Officials have acknowledged the fighters did not get airborne as quickly as possible.


Kristen Breitweiser of Middletown Township, N.J., whose husband, Ronald, died in the World Trade Center, said a lack of foresight on the part of those agencies was compounded by officials' mistakes on the morning of Sept. 11. ``I think we were ill-prepared, and I think people showed poor judgment,'' Breitweiser said. The plane that crashed into the Pentagon, in particular, could have been stopped, she contended.


Both NORAD and Federal Aviation Administration officials say changes have been implemented since the attacks. They have established chains of communication. Generals - rather than just the president - have been given authority to order the fighter pilots to shoot down hijacked aircraft. The number of warplanes on alert has been increased, and fighters are put on patrol over U.S. cities and events deemed possible terrorist targets.


When the Sept. 11 terrorists struck, the United States and Canada were defended by 20 fighter aircraft, arrayed in pairs in 10 locations, said Lt. Col. Roberto Garza, a NORAD spokesman. They were kept armed and fueled, with pilots nearby, ready to take off in less than 15 minutes. They were a remnant of the Cold War, when North America worried more about intercepting Soviet bombers than hijacked airliners. On Sept. 11, their focus was directed outward, toward threats that might approach American coastlines. Potential hijackings were the domain of law enforcement. The only fighters that were close to the attacks were in Massachusetts and Virginia.


The best information about the sequence of events on Sept. 11 comes from a timeline provided by NORAD in the months after the attacks. NORAD spokesman Garza said some aspects of the timeline now are considered inaccurate, however, but he refused to be more specific.


The two Boston flights that hit the World Trade Center, American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175, were the first to take off and the first to be hijacked. When two NORAD F-15 Eagle fighters rocketed into the sky from Otis Air National Guard Base, Mass., Flight 11 had already hit the North Tower, and the fighters were 10 minutes away when Flight 175 struck the South Tower.


The FAA and NORAD had a better chance of stopping American Airlines Flight 77, which had broken from its flight path just before 9 a.m., relatives of the victims say. The government had 45 minutes until the plane would hit the Pentagon.


By then, American skies were in chaos. At one point, the FAA was tracking 11 planes that it feared could have been hijacked, said Laura Brown, a spokeswoman for the agency. Air Force fighters were taking off from bases unarmed, and someone floated the idea of using one of them to ram a hijacked airliner.


Still, two events would have been required for the Pentagon strike to have been averted. First, President Bush would have had to have ordered that any hijacked airliners be shot down. Bush ultimately did make that call, but only after the Pentagon was hit.

Second, NORAD's F-16 Fighting Falcons at Langley Air Force Base, near Norfolk, Va., would have had to have been launched sooner.


Why they weren't is unclear.


On the Net:


Sept. 11 panel: www.9-11commission.gov



06/15/04 22:59




By then, American skies were in chaos. At one point, the FAA was tracking 11 planes that it feared could have been hijacked, said Laura Brown, a spokeswoman for the agency. Air Force fighters were taking off from bases unarmed, and someone floated the idea of using one of them to ram a hijacked airliner.


Still, two events would have been required for the Pentagon strike to have been averted. First, President Bush would have had to have ordered that any hijacked airliners be shot down. Bush ultimately did make that call, but only after the Pentagon was hit.

How was he supposed to choose which planes to take down ?

[Jolie Rouge]

9/11 Panel: Confusion Hindered Response
By HOPE YEN

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WASHINGTON (AP) - The terror strikes of Sept. 11, 2001 overwhelmed all immediate efforts at response or even full comprehension, a bipartisan commission reported Thursday, and spread confusion to the point that Vice President Dick Cheney mistakenly thought U.S. warplanes shot down two aircraft.

The front line civilian and military agencies struggled to ``improvise a homeland defense against an unprecedented challenge they had never encountered and had never trained to meet,'' the panel said.

``We fought many phantoms that day,'' Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the panel. He noted that reports of car bombings and other terrorist acts spread quickly - and falsely - in the nerves-on-edge hours after the World Trade Center and Pentagon were struck by planes hijacked by terrorists.

The panel met as President Bush personally disputed its day-old finding that there was no ``collaborative relationship'' between Saddam Hussein and the al-Qaida terrorist network responsible for the attacks. ``There was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida,'' the president said after a Cabinet meeting at the White House.


The dispute is a significant one, since Bush and top administration officials cited ties between al-Qaida and the Iraqi dictator in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.


The bipartisan commission issued its latest findings as it held the final public session of a momentous review of the worst terror strikes in the nation's history. The panel is expected to make a final report next month into the events that killed nearly 3,000.


The commission said efforts to respond to four hijackings that day were plagued on multiple fronts.


The military never received more than nine minutes notice from the FAA on any of the four hijackings, it said.


Moreover, it added, there was a delay in passing along an order for pilots to shoot down any hostile aircraft.


Additionally:


The first call from the FAA to the military for help prompted a question: ``Is this real-world or exercise?


One plane moved into a gap in Federal Aviation Administration radar coverage.


A single air traffic controller wound up with responsibility for two hijacked planes simultaneously.


The FAA failed to notify the military that one of the four planes had been hijacked.


The FAA incorrectly told the military that the first plane to crash into the World Trade Center was still in the air after impact.


The commission's report steered clear of any claims that the planes could have been intercepted. ``NORAD (North American Air Defense Command) officials have maintained that they would have intercepted and shot down United 93. We are not so sure,'' the report said. That was the hijacked plane that crashed into the Pennsylvania countryside, evidently after passengers struggled with the terrorists aboard. ``Their actions saved the lives of countless others,'' the panel said.


If FAA and NORAD officials were scrambling to deal with the strikes, so, too, were top officials of the government. President Bush was in Florida, telling Cheney in a phone conversation after planes had hit targets in New York and Washington, ``We're at war....Somebody's going to pay.'' Cheney, in a secure, below-ground White House facility, received Bush's approval for pilots to shoot down aircraft deemed hostile. The vice president conveyed the order.


At midmorning, more than a half-hour after the order had been given, Cheney told Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld he thought it had been carried out. ``It's my understanding that they've already taken a couple of aircraft out,'' Cheney said, according to the partial transcript of a conference call that the commission released.


While it is customary for commission staff to read their report aloud, this one was augmented by snippets of tape recordings made that day as well as graphics demonstrating the flight paths of the four hijacked plans.


A particularly haunting transmission came from the cockpit of American Airlines Flight 11, which took off from Boston and was the first plane to strike the World Trade Center. A person believed to be Mohamed Atta, the alleged ringleader of the 19 hijackers, who piloted the plane, is heard saying to passengers: ``We have some planes. Just stay quiet and you'll be OK. We are returning to the airport.'' Later, Atta tells the passengers, ``If you try to make any moves, you'll endanger yourself and the airplane.''


The report largely blamed inadequate emergency procedures that contemplated more time to react to a traditional hijacking rather than a suicide hijacking.


In many cases, the panel praised the actions of government personnel forced to make split-second decisions. In the hours just after the attacks occurred, nearly 4,500 planes in the air had to be landed as quickly as possible. To do that, air traffic controllers first had to reroute about a quarter of them - juggling 50 times the usual number of planes rerouted each hour. ``We do not believe that an accurate understanding of the events of that morning reflects discredit on the operational personnel,'' the report said.


The report said air traffic controllers realized at 8:24 a.m. on Sept. 11 that Flight 11 was being hijacked, but lost several minutes notifying layers of command - according to protocol - before contacting NORAD. The plane crashed at 8:46 a.m.

Controllers, meanwhile, didn't realize American Airlines Flight 77 - which took off from Dulles Airport outside Washington - might be hijacked when it mysteriously started veering off course at 8:54 a.m. The plane then traveled undetected for 36 minutes toward Washington, due in part to a radar glitch. The confusion meant only an unarmed military cargo plane could be diverted to track the plane. The plane located Flight 77 but could do nothing as the commercial jetliner crashed into the Pentagon.


The commission is winding down its 1 1/2-year investigation after interviewing more than 1,000 witnesses, including Bush, and reviewing more than 2 million documents.


On the Net:


Sept. 11 panel: www.9-11commission.gov



06/17/04 14:23

[Jolie Rouge]

By TERENCE HUNT

http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/ns/news/story.jsp?flok=FF-APO-1110&idq=/ff/story/0001%2F20040617%2F1142838588.htm&sc=1110

WASHINGTON (AP) - Vice President Dick Cheney repeatedly authorized U.S. fighters to shoot down hijacked airliners as the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks unfolded but his orders did not reach military pilots until the last of the four planes had already crashed, the commission investigating the terrorist attacks said Thursday.

Cheney at one point believed incorrectly that his orders had resulted in the shoot-down of a couple aircraft.

The commission's report documented a day of confusion and miscommunication at the White House, Pentagon, the Federal Aviation Administration and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD).

President Bush, at an elementary school in Florida to talk about education, was initially told that a small, twin-engine plane had crashed into the World Trade Center in New York. He thought it was a case of pilot error. At the White House, Cheney was wondering ``how the hell a plane could hit the World Trade Center'' when he saw on television the second aircraft strike the South Tower.


When it became clear that the nation was under attack, Bush decided to continue his remarks to a classroom of second graders. ``The president told us his instinct was to project calm, not to have the country see an excited reaction at a moment of crisis.'' Fifty minutes later, he was on Air Force One as it climbed into the sky with no certain destination. The objective was to get into the air as fast as possible and decide where to go, the commission said.


Cheney, in an underground bunker at the White House, held a series of telephone calls with Bush. He asked the president to decide the rules of engagement for combat planes being scrambled over Washington. Bush said he authorized that hijacked planes be shot down.


Cheney's command post received word at 10:02 a.m. that a plane, presumably hijacked, was heading for Washington. It was United flight 93 which crashed in the Pennsylvania countryside at 10:03 a.m. But the White House was unaware of the crash and was told the plane was still bearing down on Washington.


Sometime between 10:10 a.m. and 10:15 a.m., a military aide said the aircraft was 80 miles out and Cheney was asked for authority to shoot down the plane. He issued the order, the commission said. Minutes later, the military aide reported that the plane was 60 miles out and Cheney again was asked for authorization. Again, he said yes.


White House deputy chief of staff Joshua Bolten, at the conference table with Cheney, suggested that the vice president contact Bush and confirm his authorization. Cheney called the president and got the confirmation, the commission said. Cheney's group received word that a plane was down in Pennsylvania, and people in the conference room wondered if it had been shot down at Cheney's direction.


About 10:30 a.m., officials with Cheney began receiving reports of another hijacked plane, five to 10 miles out. Cheney issued yet another order to engage the aircraft but it turned out to be a Medevac helicopter.


In most cases, the commission said, the chain of command in authorizing the use of force runs from the president to the secretary of defense and from the secretary to military commanders. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was briefed by Cheney at 10:39 a.m. that he had been authorized by Bush to instruct fighters to shoot down hijacked planes.


``And it's my understanding they've already taken a couple of aircraft out,'' Cheney told Rumsfeld, according to the commission. Rumsfeld replied, ``We can't confirm that. We're told that one aircraft is down but we do not have a pilot report that they did it.''



06/17/04 11:42

[Jolie Rouge]

By EILEEN PUTMAN

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WASHINGTON (AP) - Chilling radio transmissions by the Sept. 11 hijackers from the planes they commandeered were played publicly for the first time Thursday, providing a vivid and horrifying portrait as they unfolded on that fateful day before confused air traffic officials and military personnel.

``We have some planes. Just stay quiet and you'll be O.K. We are returning to the airport,'' a hijacker, believed to be Mohamed Atta, the alleged ringleader of the 19 hijackers, told the passengers of American Airlines Flight 11. The tape was played for the audience at the commission's hearing.

That transmission was the first inkling federal air traffic controllers had of the hijacking of American Airlines Flight 11 shortly after takeoff from Boston's Logan Airport at 8 a.m. EDT. Atta had been speaking to the plane's passengers, but the radio transmission was received at the FAA's Boston Center.

As FAA controllers tried desperately to contact the plane, which had changed its transponder code, they picked up another transmission, also apparently from Atta.

``Nobody move. Everything will be O.K. If you try to make any moves, you'll endanger yourself and the airplane. Just stay quiet.''

Controllers tried to contact the military, even trying to raise a military alert center in Atlantic City, N.J., unaware that facility had been phased out. The FAA finally reached the appropriate military office at 8:37 a.m.

``We have a problem here,'' the FAA's Boston Center told NEADS, the North East Air Defense Sector. ``We have a hijacked aircraft headed towards New York, and we need you guys to, we need someone to scramble some F-16s or something up there, help us out.''

``Is this real-world or exercise?'' asked the incredulous NEADS officer.

``No, this is not an exercise, not a test,'' the FAA responded.

F-15 fighter jets were ordered scrambled from Otis Air Force Base at 8:46 a.m. Forty seconds later, Flight 11 hit the north tower of the World Trade Center.

For United Flight 175, the second plane hijacked from Logan, the situation was similarly disjointed. That plane took off at 8:14 a.m. from Boston's Logan Airport. At 8:47 a.m., almost the same time as Flight 11 crashed into the World Trade Center, Flight 175 changed its transponder code.

At 8:58 a.m., a controller at the FAA's New York Center told another New York controller, ``We might have a hijack over here, two of them.'' At 9 a.m., a New York Center manager tells the FAA Command Center in Herndon, Va., ``We have several situations going on here. It's escalating big, big time. We need to get the military involved with us.''

Flight 175 hit the south tower of the World Trade Center at 9:03 a.m.


The third hijacked plane, American Airlines Flight 77, had left Dulles International Airport near Washington at 8:20 a.m. At 8:54 a.m., the plane deviated from its flight plan. It was tracked by an Indianapolis-based controller, then unaware of the other hijackings. When the controller couldn't raise the aircraft, it notified other agencies that it was missing and may have crashed.

The military did not know about the search for Flight 77. Instead, it was mistakenly told by the FAA's Boston Center that American's Flight 11 was still in the air and headed toward Washington. Fighter jets were ordered scrambled from Langley Air Force Base at 9:24 a.m.

Instead of heading north to Washington, the fighter jets headed east over the ocean because the initial scramble order didn't include the target's location or distance. A ``generic'' flight plan incorrectly led the fighter jet pilots to believe they were to fly east for 60 miles, the report said.

FAA radar, meanwhile, had apparently been able to track Flight 77, but for what the commission said were technical reasons, the information was not immediately displayed to controllers at the Indianapolis center. It eventually re-emerged on radar, and by 9:32 a.m. controllers at Dulles observed that it was headed to Washington.

The FAA asked an unarmed military cargo plane to identify and follow the airliner. At 9:38 a.m., the pilot of that plane reported to the Washington control tower that it ``looks like that aircraft crashed into the Pentagon, sir.''


United Airlines Flight 93 had taken off from Newark at 8:42 a.m. Its last transmission was at 9:28 a.m. A minute later, the Cleveland-based FAA controller heard ``a radio transmission of unintelligible sounds of possible screaming or a struggle from an unknown origin.''

There was a second transmission, with sounds of screaming someone yelling, ``Get out of here, get out of here.'' Then came another transmission. ``Keep remaining sitting. We have a bomb on board.''

Between 9:34 a.m. and 9:38 a.m., the controller observed United 93 climbing and moved several aircraft out of its way. Then another transmission came from the plane. ``Uh, is the captain. Would like you all to remain seated. There is a bomb on board and are going back to the airport, and to have our demands (unintelligible). Please remain quiet.''


United 93 was spotted by another aircraft and reported to be ``waving its wings.'' It crashed in Pennsylvania at 10:03:11 a.m. near Johnstown.



On the Net:


Sept. 11 panel: http://www.9-11commission.gov



06/17/04 15:52

[Jolie Rouge]

9/11 Panel Questions Two Hijackers' Help
By CURT ANDERSON

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WASHINGTON (AP) - The FBI long has contended that not a single al-Qaida operative in the United States collaborated with the 19 hijackers in the Sept. 11 attacks. Yet the commission investigating the attacks has identified two Muslim men who may have had advance knowledge of the plot.

The commission found that two hijackers got substantial help from Mohdar Abdullah and Anwar Aulaqi after settling in California in 2000. The bipartisan panel created by Congress said it cannot discount the possibility the men knew the hijackers' plans.

Abdullah, who recently was deported to Yemen, helped the hijackers get driver's licenses. He bragged, while in U.S. custody after the hijackings, that he had known the attacks were coming.

Aulaqi, a cleric who left the United States shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, introduced the two hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, to other people who helped provide living arrangements in this country.


The previously undisclosed information about Abdullah and Aulaqi was contained in one of the commission reports released this month.


The FBI is seeking to find and interview Aulaqi about his contacts with al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar. It is unclear if U.S. officials know where Aulaqi is.


FBI spokesman Mike Kortan said the Sept. 11 investigation is ``ongoing and active'' and that any new evidence will be examined closely.


A congressional investigation has concluded that the discovery of al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar in the United States probably represented the best chance for the FBI and CIA to disrupt the plot.


Both were known to the CIA because of connections to the October 2000 terrorist bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen that killed 17 U.S. sailors. Both had contacts with a longtime FBI informant.


FBI agents were searching for them in the weeks before the attacks because their names were on terrorism watch lists.


Al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar were among the first four al-Qaida members chosen in 1999 by Osama bin Laden for the hijacking plot proposed by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, or KSM, the Sept. 11 mastermind now in U.S. custody.


Much of the commission report is derived from classified interrogations of Mohammed and another senior al-Qaida planner also in custody - Ramzi Binalshibh.


In general, the 19 hijackers were told to blend in while in the United States by avoiding mosques and fellow Islamic extremists. But al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar were different.


``Recognizing that neither Hazmi nor Mihdhar spoke English or was familiar with Western culture, KSM instructed these operatives to seek help from the local Muslim community,'' the report said.


Mohammed told the men to settle in San Diego. So they went there in February 2000 from Los Angeles with help from Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi who had an apartment complex there. Although Bayoumi helped the hijackers settle in San Diego, there is no evidence he knew they were terrorists, investigators say.


Al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar made friends in San Diego with some foreign students at the Rabat Mosque in suburban La Mesa. One was Mohdar Abdullah, who the report said was among those students who ``appear to have held extremist sympathies.''


Abdullah helped al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar get driver's licenses and enroll in schools in California. Shortly after the attacks, Abdullah told FBI agents in an interview he knew nothing about the plot.


But later, while held on immigration charges, Abdullah bragged to follow inmates that he had advance knowledge of the Sept. 11 mission and even had instructions to pick up plot operatives at Los Angeles International Airport before the attacks, according to the commission's report.


A fellow inmate wrote the Homeland Department last spring about Abdullah's claim, according to Jacqueline Maguire, an FBI agent working on the Sept. 11 investigation.


The FBI could not corroborate the inmate's story, she told the commission during its public hearing two weeks ago.


``Another inmate gave another story and the details differed quite significantly,'' Maguire said. Ultimately, the FBI chose not to seek criminal charges against Abdullah. The bureau did have Abdullah deported to Yemen in May. Maguire said the CIA was aware of the decision and knows he is in Yemen.


According to the commission report, Al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar also established a relationship with Aulaqi, an imam at the Rabat Mosque. Aulaqi later moved to Virginia and worshipped at the Dar al-Hijra mosque in Falls Church, Va. Early in 2001, al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar drove across the country, settled in Alexandria, Va., and began attending Dar al-Hijra.


The commission report cited information that Aulaqi had ``extremist ties, and the circumstances surrounding his relationship with the hijackers remains suspicious. However, we have not uncovered evidence that he associated with the hijackers knowing they were terrorists.''


At the Falls Church mosque, the imam introduced the hijackers to a Jordanian, Eyad al Rababah, who helped them find an apartment.


In May 2001, al Rababah suggested that al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar move with him to Fairfield, Conn. The three eventually traveled to Paterson, N.J., where they rented an apartment with two other al-Qaida operatives.


The commission report said that despite this assistance, there is ``insufficient basis'' to conclude that Rababah knew that al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar were terrorists.


While al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar did not succeed in their original mission - to learn English and become pilots - they were part of the team that commandeered the plane that crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11.


On the Net:


Sept. 11 commission: http://www.9-11commission.gov


FBI: http://www.fbi.gov



06/27/04 15:44

[Jolie Rouge]

Some Witnesses for the 9/11 Commission
By Michael Reagan
FrontPageMagazine.com | April 19, 2004

www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=13042

It is ignoring a document that shows that President Clinton was alerted in 1996 about the possibility of 9/11 style attack, while instead focusing on the August 6 Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB).

Having harassed the Bush administration into declassifying the August 6 PDB, the Commission must now demand that a PDB from the Clinton administration also be declassified. Unlike the August 6 document which had no information about hijacking jets to crash into U.S. Targets, the 1996 PDB gave specifics about al Qaeda plans to carry out exactly that kind of attack.

Sometime in the summer of 1996, President Clinton was given a PDB which described in chilling detail an al Qaeda plot known as Operation Bojinka (Arabic for "Loud Bang"). It involved using hijacked jet planes to crash into The Pentagon, the White House, the World Trade Center, and other buildings in the U.S.

The PDB was based on information from Philippine authorities who broke up an al Qaeda cell in Manila that, among other things, had been plotting to fly explosives-laden planes into the Pentagon, and possibly some skyscrapers.

According to Allan J. Favish writing in the October 14, 2003, FrontPageMagazine (frontpagemag.com), the CIA knew about the plot and so did the FBI. "We told the Americans about the plans to turn planes into flying bombs as far back as 1995," a Philippine official said. "Why didn't they pay attention?"

The plot was never implemented because the terrorist network was unable to find the pilots needed to carry it out. That problem was later remedied when al-Qaeda sent operatives to U.S. flight schools after giving them thorough training abroad in hijack techniques.

Sometime in the summer of 1996, the Operation Bojinka information was communicated to President Clinton in a PDB, according to now retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Robert "Buzz" Patterson. Patterson was a military aide to Clinton from May 1996 to May 1998 one of five officers entrusted with carrying the bag containing the codes for launching nuclear weapons.

On page 139 of Patterson’s book Dereliction of Duty - The eyewitness Account of How Bill Clinton Compromised National Security published in March 2003, he wrote:


"During the summer of the 1996 attacks, I myself learned first-hand that the administration knew that terrorists were plotting to use commercial airliners as weapons. The president received a Presidential Daily Brief, or PDB, every morning. It…contained the president’s daily intelligence update from the NSC. A senior NSC representative normally delivered it to the president. On weekends, at Camp David, and on vacations, the military aide was responsible for delivering and retrieving the brief.

"One late-summer Saturday morning, the president asked me to pick up a few days’ worth of PDBs that had accumulated in the Oval Office. He gave them to me with handwritten notes stuffed inside the folders and asked that I deliver them back to the NSC.

"I opened the PDB to rearrange the notes and noticed the heading "Operation Bojinka." I keyed on a reference to a plot to use commercial airliners as weapons and another plot to put bombs on U.S. airliners. Because I was a pilot, this naturally grabbed my attention. I can state for a fact that this information was circulated within the U.S. intelligence community, and that in late 1996 the president was aware of it."


What happened as a result of this shocking PDB?

Col. Patterson recently told me that the information was relayed to the intelligence community and Clinton formed a White House Commission on Aviation Safety & Security, chaired by Vice President Gore. In the spring of 1998, the group made several recommendations, among them improving airport security and establishing a system for profiling passengers. The FAA chose not to comply because they feared profiling on the basis of ethnicity would violate civil liberties. Another recommendation involved interagency cooperation between the FBI, the CIA and the FAA on suspected terrorists.

The findings were never implemented by the agencies involved. Had the Gore recommendations been followed in 1998, September 11 might never have occurred.

Why isn’t the Commission asking Al Gore and the FAA why they never acted?

Why haven’t they called Col. Patterson?


----------------------------------

Mike Reagan, the eldest son of President Ronald Reagan, is heard on more than 200 talk radio stations nationally as part of the Premiere Radio Network.

[Jolie Rouge]

How Chinagate Led to 9/11
By Jean Pearce
FrontPageMagazine.com | May 25, 2004

www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=13516

As the 9/11 Commission tries to uncover what kept intelligence agencies from preventing September 11, it has overlooked two vital factors: Jamie Gorelick and Bill Clinton. Gorelick, who has browbeaten the current administration, helped erect the walls between the FBI, CIA and local investigators that made 9/11 inevitable. However, she was merely expanding the policy Bill Clinton established with Presidential Decision Directive 24. What has been underreported is why the policy came about: to thwart investigations into the Chinese funding of Clinton’s re-election campaign, and the favors he bestowed on them in return.

In April, CNSNews.com staff writer Scott Wheeler reported that a senior U.S. government official and three other sources claimed that the 1995 memo written by Jamie Gorelick, who served as the Clinton Justice Department’s deputy attorney general from 1994 to 1997, created "a roadblock" to the investigation of illegal Chinese donations to the Democratic National Committee. But the picture is much bigger than that. The Gorelick memo, which blocked intelligence agents from sharing information that could have halted the September 11 hijacking plot, was only the mortar in a much larger maze of bureaucratic walls whose creation Gorelick personally oversaw.

It’s a story the 9/11 Commission may not want to hear, and one that Gorelick – now incredibly a member of that commission – has so far refused to tell. But it is perhaps the most crucial one to understanding the intentional breakdown of intelligence that led to the September 11 disaster.

Nearly from the moment Gorelick took office in the Clinton Justice Department, she began acting as the point woman for a large-scale bureaucratic reorganization of intelligence agencies that ultimately placed the gathering of intelligence, and decisions about what – if anything – would be done with it under near-direct control of the White House. In the process, more than a dozen CIA and FBI investigations underway at the time got caught beneath the heel of the presidential boot, investigations that would ultimately reveal massive Chinese espionage as millions in illegal Chinese donations filled Democratic Party campaign coffers.

When Gorelick took office in 1994, the CIA was reeling from the news that a Russian spy had been found in CIA ranks, and Congress was hungry for a quick fix. A month after Gorelick was sworn in, Bill Clinton issued Presidential Decision Directive 24. PDD 24 put intelligence gathering under the direct control of the president’s National Security Council, and ultimately the White House, through a four-level, top-down chain of command set up to govern (that is, stifle) intelligence sharing and cooperation between intelligence agencies. From the moment the directive was implemented, intelligence sharing became a bureaucratic nightmare that required negotiating a befuddling bureaucracy that stopped directly at the President’s office.


First, the directive effectively neutered the CIA by creating a National Counterintelligence Center (NCI) to oversee the Agency. NCI was staffed by an FBI agent appointed by the Clinton administration. It also brought multiple international investigations underway at the time under direct administrative control. The job of the NCI was to “implement counterintelligence activities,” which meant that virtually everything the CIA did, from a foreign intelligence agent’s report to polygraph test results, now passed through the intelligence center that PDD 24 created.

NCI reported to an administration-appointed National Counterintelligence Operations Board (NCOB) charged with “discussing counterintelligence matters.” The NCOB in turn reported to a National Intelligence Policy Board, which coordinated activities between intelligence agencies attempting to work together. The policy board reported “directly” to the president through the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs.

The result was a massive bureaucratic roadblock for the CIA – which at the time had a vast lead on the FBI in foreign intelligence – and for the FBI itself, which was also forced to report to the NCOB. This hampered cooperation between the two entities. All this occurred at a time when both agencies were working separate ends of investigations that would eventually implicate China in technology transfers and the Democratic Party in a Chinese campaign cash grab.

And the woman charged with selling this plan to Congress, convincing the media and ultimately implementing much of it? Jamie Gorelick.


Many in Congress, including some Democrats, found the changes PDD 24 put in place baffling: they seemed to do nothing to insulate the CIA from infiltration while devastating the agency’s ability to collect information. At the time, Democrat House Intelligence Chairman Dan Glickman referred to the plan as “regulatory gobbledygook." Others questioned how FBI control of CIA intelligence would foster greater communication between the lower levels of the CIA and FBI, now that all information would have to be run through a multi-tier bureaucratic maze that only went upward.

Despite their doubts, Gorelick helped the administration sell the plan on Capitol Hill. The Directive stood.

But that wasn’t good enough for the Clinton administration, which wanted control over every criminal and intelligence investigation, domestic and foreign, for reasons that would become apparent in a few years. For the first time in Justice Department history, a political appointee, Richard Scruggs – an old crony or Attorney General Janet Reno’s from Florida – was put in charge of the Office of Intelligence and Policy Review (OIPR). OIPR is the Justice Department agency in charge of requesting wiretap and surveillance authority for criminal and intelligence investigations on behalf of investigative agencies from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court. The court’s activities are kept secret from the public.

A year after PDD 24, with the new bureaucratic structure loaded with administration appointees, Gorelick drafted the 1995 memo Attorney General John Ashcroft mentioned while testifying before the 9/11 Commission. The Gorelick memo, and other supporting memos released in recent weeks, not only created walls within the intelligence agencies that prevented information sharing among their own agents, but effectively walled these agencies off from each other and from outside contact with the U.S. prosecutors instrumental in helping them gather the evidence needed to make the case for criminal charges.

The only place left to go with intelligence information – particularly for efforts to share intelligence information or obtain search warrants – was straight up Clinton and Gorelick’s multi-tiered chain of command. Instead, information lethal to the Democratic Party languished inside the Justice Department, trapped behind Gorelick’s walls.


The implications were enormous. In her letter of protest to Attorney General Reno over Gorelick’s memo, United States Attorney Mary Jo White spelled them out: “These instructions leave entirely to OIPR and the (Justice Department) Criminal Division when, if ever, to contact affected U.S. attorneys on investigations including terrorism and espionage,” White wrote. (Like OIPR, the Criminal Division is also part of the Justice Department.)

Without an enforcer, the walls Gorelick’s memo put in place might not have held. But Scruggs acted as that enforcer, and he excelled at it. Scruggs maintained Gorelick’s walls between the FBI and Justice's Criminal Division by threatening to automatically reject any FBI request for a wiretap or search warrant if the Bureau contacted the Justice Department's Criminal Division without permission. This deprived the FBI, and ultimately the CIA, of gathering advice and assistance from the Criminal Division that was critical in espionage and terrorist cases.

[Jolie Rouge]

It is no coincidence that this occurred at the same time both the FBI and the CIA were churning up evidence damaging to the Democratic Party, its fundraisers, the Chinese and ultimately the Clinton administration itself. Between 1994 and the 1996 election, as Chinese dollars poured into Democratic coffers, Clinton struggled to reopen high-tech trade to China. Had agents confirmed Chinese theft of weapons technology or its transfer of weapons technology to nations like Pakistan, Iran and Syria, Clinton would have been forced by law and international treaty to react.

Gorelick’s appointment to the job at Justice in 1994 occurred during a period in which the FBI had begun to systematically investigate technology theft by foreign powers. For the first time, these investigations singled out the U.S. chemical, telecommunications, aircraft and aerospace industries for intelligence collection.

By the time Gorelick wrote the March 1995 memo that sealed off American intelligence agencies from each other and the outside world, all of the most critical Chinagate investigations by American intelligence agencies were already underway. Some of their findings were damning:

In an investigation originally instigated by the CIA, the FBI was beginning its search for the source of the leak of W-88 nuclear warhead technology to China among the more than 1,000 people who had access to the secrets. Despite Justice Department stonewalling and the Department’s refusal to seek wiretap authority in 1997, the investigation eventually led to Wen Ho Lee and the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The FBI first collected extensive evidence in 1995 linking illegal Democratic Party donations to China, according to the Congressional Record. But Congress and the Director of the CIA didn’t find out about the Justice Department’s failure to act upon that evidence until 1997, safely after the 1996 election.

According to classified CIA documents leaked to the Washington Times, between 1994 and 1997, the CIA learned that China sold Iran missile technology, a nuclear fission reactor, advanced air-defense radar and chemical agents. The Chinese also provided 5,000 ring magnets to Pakistan, used in producing weapons-grade uranium. The Chinese also provided uranium fuel for India's reactors.

In many cases the CIA resorted to leaking classified information to the media, in an effort to bypass the administration’s blackout.

Gorelick knew these facts well. While Clinton may have refused to meet with top CIA officials, Gorelick didn’t. According to a 1996 report by the legal news service American Lawyer Media, Gorelick and then-Deputy Director of the CIA George Tenet met every other week to discuss intelligence and intelligence sharing.

But those in the Clinton administration weren’t the only ones to gain from the secrecy. In 1994, the McDonnell Douglas Corporation transferred military-use machine tools to the China National Aero-Technology Import and Export Corporation that ended up in the hands of the Chinese army. The sale occurred despite Defense Department objections. McDonnell Douglas was a client of the Miller Cassidy Larroca & Lewin, L.L.P. (now called Baker Botts), the Washington, D.C., law firm where Gorelick worked for 17 years and was a partner. Ray Larroca, another partner in the firm, represented McDonnell in the Justice Department’s investigation of the technology transfer.

In 1995, General Electric, a former client of Gorelick’s, also had much to lose if the damaging information the CIA and the FBI had reached Congress. At the time, GE was publicly lobbying for a lucrative permit to assist the Chinese in replacing coal-fired power stations with nuclear plants. A 1990 law required that the president certify to Congress that China was not aiding in nuclear proliferation before U.S. companies could execute the business agreement.

Moreover, in 1995, Michael Armstrong, then the CEO of Hughes Electronics – a division of General Electric and another client of Miller Cassidy Larroca & Lewin – was publicly lobbying Clinton to switch satellite export controls from the State Department to the Commerce Department. After the controls were lifted, Hughes and another company gave sensitive data to the Chinese, equipment a Pentagon study later concluded would allow China to develop intercontinental and submarine-launched ballistic missiles aimed at American targets. Miller Cassidy Larroca & Lewin partner Randall Turk represented Hughes in the Congressional, State Department, and Justice Department investigations that resulted.

The Cox Report, which detailed Chinese espionage for Congress during the period, revealed that FBI surveillance caught Chinese officials frantically trying to keep Democratic donor Johnny Chung from divulging any information that would be damaging to Hughes Electronics. Chung funneled $300,000 in illegal contributions from the Chinese military to the DNC between 1994 and 1996.

It was this web of investigations that led Gorelick and Bill Clinton to erect the wall between intelligence agencies that resulted in the toppling of the Twin Towers. The connections go on and on, but they all lead back to Gorelick, the one person who could best explain how the Clinton administration neutered the American intelligence agencies that could have stopped the September 11 plot. Yet another high crime will have been committed if the September 11 Commission doesn’t demand testimony from her.

[Jolie Rouge]

Justice Dept. Details Patriot Act Cases
By CURT ANDERSON

http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/story.jsp?flok=FF-APO-1152&idq=/ff/story/0001%2F20040713%2F1447292574.htm&sc=1152

WASHINGTON (AP) - Seeking to bolster support for the Patriot Act, the Justice Department provided Congress on Tuesday with details of numerous cases in which the anti-terrorism law has been used.

The 29-page report is part of a Bush administration effort to discourage Congress from weakening a law that critics say threatens civil liberties by giving authorities more latitude to spy on people. Key sections of the law expire at the end of 2005.

Release of the document comes less than a week after House Republican leaders barely turned back an amendment that would have prevented the FBI from using Patriot Act authority to obtain library and bookstore records.

The report says that in the period starting with the Sept. 11 attacks and ending May 5, Justice Department terrorism investigations resulted in charges against 310 people, with 179 convictions or guilty pleas. The Patriot Act, it says, was instrumental in these cases.


Attorney General John Ashcroft, appearing at a news conference with House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., said the report provides ``a mountain of evidence that the Patriot Act continues to save lives.' The Patriot Act is al-Qaida's worst nightmare,'' Ashcroft said.


Among the specific examples:

It allowed intelligence agents to share with FBI criminal investigators evidence that an anonymous letter sent to the FBI had come from an individual with al-Qaida ties. That letter began the investigation into an alleged terror cell in Lackawanna, N.Y., that has resulted in six guilty pleas.


That same information-sharing authority was used against members of an alleged terror cell in Portland, Ore., that an undercover informant said was preparing for possible attacks against Jewish schools or synagogues. Continued surveillance under the Patriot Act of one suspect led to six others, who likely would have scattered or fled if the first suspect had been arrested right away.


Terror financing provisions of the law were used in numerous cases, including charges against a member of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, on charges of being an unlicensed money transmitter. The same authority has been used to prosecute people illegally sending money to Iraq, Yemen, the United Arab Emirates and India.


Powers permitted under the Patriot Act have also been used in investigations involving potential school bomb attacks, computer hackers, child pornography, violent fugitives and illegal weapons sales. In one case, Patriot Act electronic communications authorities allowed law enforcement agencies to identify a person who had sent 200 threatening letters laced with white powder in Lafayette, La., the department said.


The report did not say whether the FBI had used its authority to obtain library or bookstore records. That information is classified, but Ashcroft last year issued a declassified statement saying that, up to that point, the power had not been used.


Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, accused the department of selectively releasing information about the Patriot Act and refusing to address civil liberties concerns. "Coupled with the department's consistent record of exaggerating their record about terrorism, this entire report is suspect,'' Conyers said.


Sensenbrenner said opponents were also guilty of being selective in information they use to undermine the law. ``The people who criticize the Patriot Act cherry-pick their contentions the same way,'' he said.


On the Net:

Justice Department: www.usdoj.gov



07/13/04 14:47

[Jolie Rouge]

9/11 report to propose big changes, panel members say[i]
From Kelli Arena and Kevin Bohn -- CNN Washington Bureau
Friday, July 16, 2004 Posted: 8:51 AM EDT (1251 GMT)

www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/07/16/911.commission/index.html

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The 9/11 commission's final report, scheduled to be made public next week, is expected to propose significant changes in how the U.S. government organizes intelligence agencies and how they interact, according to two panel members. They told CNN on Thursday that the nearly 600-page report will be "compelling and authoritative."

Neither one would comment on whether the votes by the bipartisan, independent panel on recommendations were unanimous. One member said there was "healthy debate" in the crafting of the final report.

An official said commissioners have voted to approve most of the report, barring one section. The White House already is going through the rest to ensure nothing is published that it deems too sensitive. The commission hopes only a small amount of information will have to be redacted for national security reasons, as compared with last year's report by the joint congressional inquiry, which was barred from releasing many details.

Commissioners said key recommendations will include a complete overhaul of the intelligence community, but they declined to give details.

For example, it is unclear whether the panel will endorse a new national intelligence director to oversee all the various agencies or the creation of a new domestic intelligence agency. The FBI and CIA oppose such a new entity.

"Our approach is pretty nuanced and not subject to easy labeling," one commissioner said. "We tried to carefully deal with the divide between domestic and foreign intelligence. Our recommendation is pretty creative."

Another panel member said reform recommendations will be "organizational and institutional, not only concerning the intelligence community but also regarding first responders and broader domestic security personnel, including border patrol and immigration."

He said the report will provide "significant detail and rationale" for proposed changes. "The intelligence establishment is clearly broken and dysfunctional," the commissioner said. "It requires a number of significant things to be done, a systematic approach, not a collection of discreet things to do."

As for the 9/11 plot, he said, "some gaps will be filled in," but most of the major issues have been outlined in previously released staff reports.

Several commissioners have said they believe the United States is safer today than it was before the September 11 attacks but that more remains to be done. They said they believe lawmakers will respect the conclusions of the report and will support many of the proposed changes.

Members of victims' families are expected to be in Washington to receive a briefing from the commission before the report's release to the public.

[Jolie Rouge]

[i]The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United States was created by congress in late 2002 and the legislation was signed by President Bush. It has become informally known as the "9/11 Commission" and it was created to look into the circumstances surrounding the Attack on America on September 11, 2001 and to generate a report about its findings.

In a presidential election season, the war in Iraq has become a key political issue and one of the tensions surrounding the creating and function of the commission has been to what extent Democrats could use the war to defeat the president at the polls.

Senator Zell Miller is a Democrat representing the state of Georgia.


ZELL MILLERS SPEECH

After watching the harsh acrimony generated by the September 11 Commission--which, let me say at the outset, is made up of good and able members--I have come to seriously question this panel's usefulness. I believe it will ultimately play a role in doing great harm to this country, for its unintended consequences, I fear, will be to energize our enemies and demoralize our troops.

After being drowned in a tidal wave of all who didn't do enough before 9/11, I have come to believe that the Commission should issue a report that says: No one did enough. In the past, no one did near enough. And then thank everybody for serving, send them home, and let's get on with the job of protecting this country in the future.

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? Can you imagine Congress, the media, and the public standing for this kind of political gamesmanship and finger-pointing after that day of infamy in 1941?

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. That is what made them the greatest generation.

I realize that many well-meaning Americans see the hearings as democracy in action. Years ago when I was teaching political science, I probably would have had my class watching it live on television and using that very same phrase with them.

There are also the not-so-well-meaning political operatives who see these hearings as an opportunity to score cheap points. And then there are the media meddlers who see this as great theater that can be played out on the evening news and on endless talk shows for a week or more.

Congressional hearings have long been one of Washington's most entertaining pastimes. Joe McCarthy, Watergate, Iran-Contra--they all kept us glued to the TV and made for conversations around the water coolers or arguments over a beer at the corner pub.

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 This latter crowd can get excited and divided over just about anything, whether it is some off-key wannabe dreaming of being the American idol, or what brainless bimbo ``The Bachelor'' or ``Average Joe'' will choose, or who Donald Trump will fire next week. 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.

They see this as a major split within the great Satan, America . They see anger. They see division, instability, bickering, peevishness, and dissension. They see the President of the United States hammered unmercifully. They see all this, and they are greatly encouraged.

We should not be doing anything to encourage our enemies in this battle between good and evil. Yet these hearings, in my opinion, are doing just that. We are playing with fire. We are playing directly into the hands of our enemy by allowing these hearings to become the great divider they have become.

Dick Clarke's book and its release coinciding with these hearings have done this country a tremendous disservice and some day we will reap its whirlwind.

Long ago, Sir Walter Scott observed that revenge is``the sweetest morsel that ever was cooked in Hades.''

The vindictive Clarke has now had his revenge, but what kind of :eek: has he, his CBS publisher, and his axe-to-grind advocates unleashed?

These hearings, coming on the heels of the election the terrorists influenced in Spain , bolster and energize our evil enemies as they have not been energized since 9/11.

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.

Every administration, from Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush, bears some of the blame. Dick Clarke bears a big heap of it, because it was he who was in the catbird's seat to do something about it for more than a decade. Tragically, it was the decade in which we did the least.

We did nothing after terrorists attacked the World Trade Center in 1993, killing six and injuring more than a thousand Americans.

We did nothing in 1996 when 16 U.S. servicemen were killed in the bombing of the Khobar Towers .

When our embassies were attacked in 1998, killing 263 people, our only response was to fire a few missiles on an empty tent.

Is it any wonder that after that decade of weak-willed responses to that murderous terror, our enemies thought we would never fight back?

In the 1990s is when Dick Clarke should have resigned. In the 1990s is when he should have apologized. That is when he should have written his book--that is, if he really had America 's best interests at heart.

Now, I know some will say we owe it to the families to get more information about what happened in the past, and I can understand that. But no amount of finger-pointing will bring our victims back

So now we owe it to the future families and all of America now in jeopardy not to encourage more terrorists, resulting in even more grieving families--perhaps many times over the ones of 9/11.

It is obvious to me that this country is rapidly dividing itself into two camps--the wimps and the warriors : the ones who want to argue and assess and appease, and the ones who want to carry this fight to our enemies and kill them before they kill us. In case you have not figured it out, I proudly belong to the latter.

This is a time like no other time in the history of this country. This country is being crippled with petty partisan politics of the worst possible kind. In time of war, it is not just unpatriotic; it is stupid; it is criminal.

So I pray that all this time, all this energy, all this talk, and all of the attention could be focused on the future instead of the past.

I pray we would stop pointing fingers and assigning blame and wringing our hands about what happened on that day David AcUology has called ``the worst day in all our history'' more than 2 years ago, and instead, pour all our energy into how we can kill these terrorists before they kill us--again.

Make no mistake about it: They are watching these hearings and they are scheming and smiling about the distraction and the divisiveness that they see in America . And while they might not know who said it years ago in America , they know instinctively that a house divided cannot stand.

There is one other group that we should remember is listening to all of this--our troops.

I was in Iraq in January. One day, when I was meeting with the 1st Armored Division, a unit with a proud history, known as Old Ironsides, we were discussing troop morale, and the commanding general said it was top notch.

I turned to the division's sergeant major, the top enlisted man in the division, a big, burly 6-foot-3, 240 pound African American, and I said: ``That's good, but how do you sustain that kind of morale?''

Without hesitation, he narrowed his eyes, and he looked at me and said: ``The morale will stay high just as long as these troops know the people back home support us.''

Just as long as the people back home support us. What kind of message are these hearings and the outrageously political speeches on the floor of the Senate yesterday sending to the marvelous young Americans in the uniform of our country?

I say: Unite America before it is too late. Put aside these petty partisan differences when it comes to the protection of our people. Argue and argue and argue, debate and debate and debate over all the other things, such as jobs, education, the deficit, and the environment; but please, please do not use the lives of Americans and the security of this country as a cheap-shot political talking point.

I yield the floor.

[Jolie Rouge]

House panel opens own Berger probe
Democrats seek Justice Dept. records on White House contacts
Wednesday, July 21, 2004 Posted: 11:03 PM EDT (0303 GMT)




Berger says he made "an honest mistake."

www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/07/21/berger.probe/index.html

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The House Government Reform Committee launched an investigation Wednesday into reports that former Clinton administration aide Samuel "Sandy" Berger removed classified documents from the National Archives while reviewing materials for the 9/11 commission.

It was reported Monday that Berger, who was national security adviser during President Clinton's second term, has been under criminal investigation by the Justice Department over the allegations since October.

Earlier Wednesday, Democrats filed papers asking the Justice Department to disclose all contacts with the White House in the investigation, citing the "questionable timing" of the probe's disclosure -- the same week the 9/11 commission issues its final report and a week before the Democratic National Convention in Boston, Massachusetts.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan said Wednesday the Justice Department notified White House counsel Alberto Gonzales' office about the investigation because Berger was reviewing documents for the independent commission investigating the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

"The counsel's office is the one that is coordinating with the September 11 commission the production of documents," McClellan said. "And since this relates to some documents, the counsel's office was contacted as part of that investigation."

The Government Reform Committee is House's primary investigative panel and has jurisdiction over the National Archives.

"These allegations are deeply troubling, and it's our constitutional responsibility to find out what happened and why," said Republican Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia, the committee's chairman, in a statement.

"It boggles the mind to imagine how a former national security adviser walked off with this kind of material in his pants, or wherever on his body he carried it."

Davis' committee has been less active in opening investigations during the Bush administration than it was during the Clinton years, when it was chaired by Republican Rep. Dan Burton of Indiana.

Berger called his removal of classified documents from the archives an "honest mistake" and quit his post as an unpaid foreign policy adviser to presumptive Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry's campaign. A government source said Tuesday that while the 9/11 commission was briefed on the Berger investigation, the White House was not.

President Bush declined comment on the investigation Wednesday, telling reporters it was "a serious matter and it will be fully investigated by the Justice Department."

Rep. Dennis Hastert of Illinois, the Republican speaker of the House, said Tuesday the Berger investigation could leave a "cloud" over the 9/11 commission's report, which is scheduled to be released Thursday. (Full story)

"If it does cloud it, it's a shame, because we spent a lot of money to ask these people to bring forward a report that best served the American interest," Hastert said.

Some Democrats say the leak could have been intended by Republicans to cast just that type of cloud.

"The criminal investigation only came to light three days prior to the release of a report expected to be critical of the Bush administration's lack of focus on the events leading up to the 9/11 attacks," Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe wrote in a Freedom of Information Act request released Wednesday.

"As conservative scholar Norm Ornstein stated, 'You can't look at the timing of this with anything but an enormous amount of skepticism.' "

McAuliffe's request, filed with the Justice Department, seeks the release of any communications between justice employees and the White House, Bush's re-election campaign or the Republican National Committee.

Al Felzenberg, a spokesman for the 9/11 commission, said Tuesday there was no reason to believe the Berger investigation would affect "the substance or integrity" of its final report.

Berger admitted that during visits to the archives last year to review materials for the 9/11 commission, he "inadvertently" removed some documents.

His lawyer, Lanny Breuer, told CNN the documents were mixed in with other personal papers and accidentally put in his leather portfolio.

Breuer said Berger returned the materials last October after being contacted by archives officials and has been cooperating since then with the Justice Department's investigation into the incident.

Berger, well-respected in Washington circles and close confidant of former President Bill Clinton, was designated as the official from the Clinton administration who would review documents relevant to the 9/11 commission's probe. He also testified before the commission.

Archives officials told investigators that one document is still missing -- an analysis of the effectiveness of counterterrorism efforts against threats tied to the turn of the millennium.

A government source told CNN that some of the documents at issue were classified as "code word" materials -- the highest level of security, making them more closely held than nuclear secrets.

Breuer conceded Berger took away handwritten notes he made about other documents from the archives, knowing that policy required that those notes had to first be reviewed.

He said Berger considered "the hard work of the 9/11 commission" more important than the archives' policy.

[Jolie Rouge]

Report slams 'deep' failings in government
Sept. 11 panel recommends intelligence czar

NBC, MSNBC and news services
Updated: 12:43 p.m. ET July 22, 2004

Link -- Related documents -- Download the report summary and full report :

www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5485889/?GT1=4244


http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/msnbc/Components/Photos/040722/040722_bush_report_740a.h2.jpg
by Mannie Garcia / Reuters[b]
President Bush receives the Sept. 11 report from commission Chairman Thomas Kean, left, and Vice Chairman Lee Hamilton at the White House Thursday.


In its final report released Thursday, the bipartisan commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks criticized "deep institutional failings within our government" — from a Congress with too many committees dealing with intelligence issues, to Clinton and Bush administrations that missed opportunities.

The “most important failure” leading to the Sept. 11 attacks, the report concluded, “was one of imagination. We do not believe leaders understood the gravity of the threat.”

The commission identified nine “specific points of vulnerability” in the Sept. 11 plot that might have led to its disruption had the government been better organized and more watchful. Yet the report concludes that despite these opportunities, “we cannot know whether any single step or series of steps would have defeated” the 19 hijackers.

"What we can say with confidence," the commissioners added, "is that none of the measures adopted by the U.S. government from 1998 to 2001 disturbed or even delayed the progress" of the plot by the al-Qaida network.

The report, as expected, called for the appointment of an overall director of U.S. intelligence operations. Overseeing the operations would be a new Senate-confirmed national intelligence director, reporting directly to the president at just below full Cabinet rank, who “would be able to influence the budget and leadership” of the CIA, FBI, Homeland Security Department and Defense Department.

Cool reaction to intelligence czar

So far the Bush administration has reacted coolly toward the idea of an overall director, which had been suggested earlier. “I don’t think you need a czar," Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said Wednesday.

The commission did not recommend creation of a new domestic intelligence agency similar to Britain’s MI5, as proposed by some in Congress. Instead, the report endorsed steps already being taken by FBI Director Robert Mueller to create a specialized intelligence service within the FBI.

The commission also says the U.S. government must do more at home to guard against future terror attacks, including such things as setting national standards for issuance of drivers’ licenses and other identification, improving “no-fly” and other terrorist watch lists and using more biometric identifiers to screen travelers at ports and borders.

The commission’s chairman, former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean, and its vice chairman, former Rep. Lee Hamilton of Indiana, personally presented President Bush with a copy of the report Thursday at the White House.

Bush said he told the commissioners "that where the government needs to act we will.” He welcomed the "very constructive recommendations" that he said offered a "common sense approach” on how to move forward in the fight against terrorism.

Kean, Hamilton and other commissioners later held a press conference to summarize the findings.

Kean said none of the government's efforts to thwart a known threat from al-Qaida had "disturbed or even delayed" Osama bin Laden's plot.

"(They) penetrated the defenses of the most powerful nation in the world," Kean said. "They inflicted unbearable trauma on our people, and at the same time they turned international order upside down."

Iraq, Afghan connections cited

The highly anticipated, 567-page report provided new details on contacts between Iraq and al-Qaida, noting that bin Laden began exploring a possible alliance in the early 1990s. In one new disclosure, the report says that an Iraqi delegation traveled to Afghanistan in July 1998 to meet with the ruling Taliban and with bin Laden.

Intelligence indicates that Iraq may have offered bin Laden safe haven, but he declined after apparently deciding that Afghanistan was a better location. The report says although there were some “friendly contacts” between Iraq and al-Qaida and a common hatred of the United States, none of these contacts “ever developed into a collaborative relationship” and that Iraq was not involved in the Sept. 11 attacks.

That question has been the subject of intense political debate, as critics say Bush exaggerated the contacts between al-Qaida and Iraq to justify the war. Bush, and especially Vice President Dick Cheney, insist those links were real and dangerous.

Congress gets its share of blame

The commission criticized the FBI and the CIA for failing to share information and for inaccurately analyzing intelligence, which contributed to the hijackers’ ability to carry out their plot.

The report also criticized Congress for poor oversight of intelligence gathering. Blaming institutional failures dating to the 1970s, it recommends combining the House and Senate intelligence committees and removing limits on the numbers of term members may serve on the panels.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., earlier welcomed the commission’s call for reform of the congressional oversight system. “Right now, a lot of positions in the United States Senate have not evolved with the times,” Frist told reporters Wednesday, noting that there were multiple committees in charge of overseeing and funding the sprawling intelligence community.

But House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., said this week that any legislative action on the panel’s recommendations probably would not occur until after the next president was inaugurated in January, given the limited time Congress has left this year. “It’s a very difficult time to squeeze out and have the oversight and the testimony to put new legislation in place,” Hastert said.


Less bureaucracy for Ridge

Among its other recommendations, the commission called for more centralized oversight of the new Department of Homeland Security, proposing that Secretary Ridge be required to report to only one committee each in the House and the Senate. Ridge currently must report to several committees and subcommittees in both bodies.


The report also debunks what commissioners called “myths” that have built up around the terrorist strikes that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York City, Washington and Pennsylvania, the officials said. Those include these findings:

The Saudi government did not fund the 19 hijackers.

Relatives of bin Laden were not allowed to fly out of the country until after air traffic was allowed to move freely after it was grounded following the attacks. Moreover, those family members had no connection to the terrorist plot.

Bush did not know about the specific threat beforehand, and there was little more that he could to prevent it.

The last conclusion echoed comments made Wednesday by White House press secretary Scott McClellan, who said, “Nothing has come to our attention to suggest we could have prevented that horrible attack from happening.”


Aggressive lobbying effort planned

Commissioners plan an aggressive lobbying effort this summer and fall to push their recommendations. The panel will split into bipartisan pairs and travel nationwide for speaking engagements and media appearances. “Commissioners have all said they hoped the report would not just go on a shelf as so many others have,” said Al Felzenberg, a spokesman for the commission. “They said they hoped both presidential campaigns would endorse the recommendations and Congress would act.”

Still, the report is expected to provide fodder for arguments in the presidential campaign.

Advisers to the Democratic candidate, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, have said they hope to use the report to show that the Bush administration was inattentive in the summer of 2001 to threats of a possible attack. “I'm not looking to cast blame,” Kerry said Wednesday in an interview with NBC News. “I’m looking to take America to a safer place.” But, he said, “I believe there are things we could’ve done in the last three years since 9/11 — in the last two years — we haven’t done.” He did not elaborate.


The Clinton administration, meanwhile, was under fresh scrutiny after federal authorities said they were investigating former national security adviser Sandy Berger in connection with the disappearance of highly classified terrorism documents.

Berger said he inadvertently took copies of some documents from the National Archives and later returned them but could not find two or three copies of a highly classified report that concerned al-Qaida threats during the December 1999 millennium celebration.

Felzenberg, the commission spokesman, said the Berger probe did not affect the panel’s final report.

Reuters, The Associated Press and NBC’s Keith Strickland and Les Kretman contributed to this report.

[Crick]

"Iraq, Afghan connections cited

The highly anticipated, 567-page report provided new details on contacts between Iraq and al-Qaida, noting that bin Laden began exploring a possible alliance in the early 1990s. In one new disclosure, the report says that an Iraqi delegation traveled to Afghanistan in July 1998 to meet with the ruling Taliban and with bin Laden.

Intelligence indicates that Iraq may have offered bin Laden safe haven, but he declined after apparently deciding that Afghanistan was a better location. The report says although there were some “friendly contacts” between Iraq and al-Qaida and a common hatred of the United States, none of these contacts “ever developed into a collaborative relationship” and that Iraq was not involved in the Sept. 11 attacks.

That question has been the subject of intense political debate, as critics say Bush exaggerated the contacts between al-Qaida and Iraq to justify the war. Bush, and especially Vice President Dick Cheney, insist those links were real and dangerous." Jolie

So if I understand this, a bi-partisan panel ruled that Iraq was not involved in the Sept. 11 attacks, yet Bush and Cheney insist those links were real and dangerous?

My point is when those of us who stated that there was no connection between Iraq and Sept. 11, people came back and insisted there was because Bush and Chaney said so. Now, a bi-partisan panel has said that there wasn't any connection will those same people admit that Bush and Chaney were wrong? (I'm trying to soften my stance and not be to harsh)! ;)

[Jolie Rouge]

The highly anticipated, 567-page report provided new details on contacts between Iraq and al-Qaida, noting that bin Laden began exploring a possible alliance in the early 1990s. In one new disclosure, the report says that an Iraqi delegation traveled to Afghanistan in July 1998 to meet with the ruling Taliban and with bin Laden.

Intelligence indicates that Iraq may have offered bin Laden safe haven, but he declined after apparently deciding that Afghanistan was a better location. The report says although there were some “friendly contacts” between Iraq and al-Qaida and a common hatred of the United States, none of these contacts “ever developed into a collaborative relationship” and that Iraq was not involved in the Sept. 11 attacks.



I posted the report, Crick - I did not write it ;)

As I read it I take it to mean that since there were "friendly contacts" it is the International version of "aiding and abetting" even if Saddamn was not directly involved in the planning or execution of the 9-11 attacks.

It is well known that Saddamn was in the practice of paying the families of Palestinian suicide bombers thousands of dollars following successful attacks. Is it possiable he was prepared to do the same for the members of Al-Qaida ?

[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)

www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/07/22/911.report/index.html

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The chairman of the panel investigating the attacks of September 11, 2001, said his commission found that the "United States government was simply not active enough in combating the terrorist threat before 9/11."

Thomas Kean and his fellow panelists are citing a a "failure of imagination" that they say kept U.S. officials from understanding the al Qaeda threat before the attacks on New York and Washington.

The independent National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States released its findings on Thursday in a 570-page report, which also offers recommendations for reforming U.S. security agencies.

In a news conference Thursday, Kean said that the United States is "faced with one of the greatest security challenges in our long history."

"Every expert with whom we spoke told us an attack of even greater magnitude is now possible and even probable. We do not have the luxury of time," Kean said.

"We must prepare and we must act. The al Qaeda network and its affiliates are sophisticated, patient, disciplined and lethal."

Commission member James Thompson said the proposed reforms were urgent and said Congress and the president have a duty to act quickly.

"If these reforms are not the best that can be done for the American people, then the Congress and the president need to tell us what's better," the former Illinois governor said.

"But if there is nothing better, they need to be enacted and enacted speedily because if something bad happens while these recommendations are sitting there, the American people will quickly fix political responsibility for failure and that responsibility may last for generations and they will be entitled to do that."

Commission member Jamie Gorelick said the panel has made a strong effort to show the factual basis behind the recommendations.

She warned that "policymakers ignore that at their peril.

"There are bad consequences to being in the middle of a political season and there are also good ones," she said, "because everyone who is running for office can be asked, 'Do you support these recommendations?'"

Earlier, Kean and Vice Chairman Lee Hamilton briefed President Bush on the report Thursday morning and presented a copy to him in the White House Rose Garden.

Bush told reporters that the report contained "some very constructive recommendations" about changing U.S. intelligence and domestic security agencies.

"I look forward to studying their recommendations and look forward to working with responsible parties within my administration to move forward on those recommendations," Bush said.

As expected, the report calls for a national intelligence chief and a counterterrorism center modeled on the military's unified commands.

It also proposes that a joint congressional committee be created to oversee homeland security.

Bush said he would study its recommendations and "where the government needs to act, we will."

The report concluded that the emergence of al Qaeda in the late 1990s "presented challenges to U.S. governmental institutions that they were not well-designed to meet."

"The most important failure was one of imagination," commissioners wrote. "We do not believe leaders understood the gravity of the threat."

The report concluded that although "imagination is not usually a gift associated with bureaucracies," because previous al Qaeda attacks used vehicles to deliver explosives, "the leap to the use of other vehicles such as boats ... or planes is not far-fetched."

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.

Missed opportunities

The report lists missed "operational opportunities" it said could have hindered or broken up the plot, blamed largely on lack of communication between the CIA and FBI. "Information was not shared, sometimes inadvertently or because of legal misunderstandings," commissioners found.

"Analysis was not pooled. Effective operations were not launched. Often, the hand-offs of information were lost across the divide separating the foreign and domestic agencies of the government."

It says the CIA did not put 9/11 hijacker Khalid Almihdhar on a "watch list" or notify the FBI when it learned he had a U.S. visa in January 2000.

Nor did it develop plans to track Almihdhar or hijacker Nawaf Alhazmi when they learned he had obtained a U.S. visa and flown to Los Angeles, or notify the FBI when it learned in January 2001 that Almihdhar had met with a major figure in the plot to bomb the USS Cole in Yemen.

For its part, the report found the FBI failed to recognize the significance of Almihdhar and Alhazmi's arrival in the United States or the significance of al Qaeda member Zacarias Moussaoui's training and beliefs after his arrest in Minnesota in August 2001. Nor did it tie information about those three men "to the general threat reporting about imminent attacks."

"Since the plotters were flexible and resourceful, we cannot know whether any single step or series of steps would have defeated them. What we can say with a good deal of confidence is that none of the measures adopted by the United States government before 9/11 disturbed or even delayed the progress of the al Qaeda plot," Kean said.

The document will be on sale in bookstores for $10. It will also be available online and through the Government Printing Office.

The bipartisan panel was established by Congress to investigate the events before, during and immediately after the attacks of September 11, 2001.



John King and Elaine Quijano contributed to this report.


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.


KEY RECOMMENDATIONS

Establish a Cabinet-level intelligence director

Establish a single counterterrorism center

Create a single, joint congressional committee to oversee homeland security


MISSED OPPORTUNITIES

Two hijackers weren't put on watch lists before arriving in the United States.

Hijackers weren't trailed once here.

Information linking known terrorists to a hijacker wasn't shared.

Zacarias Moussaoui's arrest wasn't linked to a heightened threat.

False statements on visa applications weren't discovered.

Manipulated passports weren't recognized.

No-fly lists weren't updated with names from terrorist watch lists.

Airline passengers weren't thoroughly screened.

Planes weren't prepared for the possibility of suicide hijackings.

[Jolie Rouge]

The document will be on sale in bookstores for $10. It will also be available online and through the Government Printing Office.


$10.00 in a bookstore ??

HA !

This is a FREEBIES site --

Chapter by chapter: The 9/11 commission report

www.cnn.com/2004/US/07/22/9.11.full.report/index.html

Full text of 9/11 commission report. All files are PDF.

Executive Summary (5.9 MB)

Contents, List of Illustrations and Tables, Members, and Staff (233 KB)

Preface (67 KB)

Chapter 1: "We Have Some Planes" (952 KB)

Chapter 2: The Foundation of the New Terrorism (1.44 MB)

Chapter 3: Counterterrorism Evolves (188 KB)

Chapter 4: Responses to al Qaeda's Initial Assaults (185 KB)

Chapter 5: Al Qaeda Aims at the American Homeland (312 KB)

Chapter 6: From Threat to Threat (209 KB)

Chapter 7: The Attack Looms (949 KB)

Chapter 8: "The System Was Blinking Red" (146 KB)

Chapter 9: Heroism and Horror (2.3 MB)

Chapter 10: Wartime (109 KB)

Chapter 11: Foresight--and Hindsight (133 KB)

Chapter 12: What to do? A Global Strategy (184 KB)

Chapter 13: How to do it? A Different Way of Organizing the Government (158 KB)

Appendices (109 KB)

Notes (669 KB)

Full report (7.4 MB)

[Crick]

The highly anticipated, 567-page report provided new details on contacts between Iraq and al-Qaida, noting that bin Laden began exploring a possible alliance in the early 1990s. In one new disclosure, the report says that an Iraqi delegation traveled to Afghanistan in July 1998 to meet with the ruling Taliban and with bin Laden.

Intelligence indicates that Iraq may have offered bin Laden safe haven, but he declined after apparently deciding that Afghanistan was a better location. The report says although there were some “friendly contacts” between Iraq and al-Qaida and a common hatred of the United States, none of these contacts “ever developed into a collaborative relationship” and that Iraq was not involved in the Sept. 11 attacks.



I posted the report, Crick - I did not write it ;)

As I read it I take it to mean that since there were "friendly contacts" it is the International version of "aiding and abetting" even if Saddamn was not directly involved in the planning or execution of the 9-11 attacks.

It is well known that Saddamn was in the practice of paying the families of Palestinian suicide bombers thousands of dollars following successful attacks. Is it possiable he was prepared to do the same for the members of Al-Qaida ?

Again the report states "none of these contacts ever developed into a collaborative relationship. And that Iraq was not involved in the Sept. 11 attacks." Therefore the panel concluded that the ties Bush and Chaney pushed were unfounded. I appreciate you posting this so people can see the conclusion (and the truth) that the bi-partisian panel came to. ;) I appreciate you posting that particular passage out of a 567 page report! :D

[Jolie Rouge]

Bush Agrees With 9/11 Panel's Conclusion
By DEB RIECHMANN

http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/story.jsp?flok=FF-APO-1151&idq=/ff/story/0001%2F20040722%2F2311817625.htm&sc=1151

GLENVIEW, Ill. (AP) - President Bush on Thursday acknowledged ``deep institutional failures'' in the nation's defense that led to the 2001 terrorist attacks, and he said he would seriously consider the Sept. 11 commission's recommendations to better anticipate threats. ``The job's not done, and this report will help our country identify even more steps to better defend America,'' Bush said.

He was silent, however, on one of the panel's key recommendations - to create a Cabinet-level national intelligence director, who would oversee the 15-agency intelligence community. The idea got a cool response on Wednesday from Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, who said, ``I don't think you need a czar.''

Bush said the panel's report was ``serious and comprehensive.'' He called for better coordination among intelligence agencies, increased collection of intelligence by humans and better technology to track enemies anywhere in the world. ``I agree with their conclusion that the terrorists were able to exploit `deep institutional failings' in our nation's defenses that developed over more than a decade,'' Bush said.


``We will give serious consideration to every idea because we share a common goal - to do everything in our power to prepare for and to stop any terrorist attack.''


Bracing Americans for the possibility of another terrorist attack, Bush said: ``They intend to strike the United States again. They're seeking increasingly powerful weapons that would allow them to kill our citizens on an unprecedented scale. That's the reality of the world we live in today.''



Bush spoke at Northeastern Illinois Public Safety Training Academy here just hours after the independent panel released its 575-page tome in Washington. While the panel's report focused Americans on the nation's vulnerability to attack, Bush highlighted steps he says he's taken to better safeguard the nation.


He said the administration has:

Melded more than 20 agencies with 180,000 personnel into a single Department of Homeland Security.

Spent millions of dollars to equip first-responders and help them communicate.

Made improvements at ports.

Helped develop and stockpile vaccines and antidotes for chemical and germ weapons.

Found faster ways to send local officials information on evolving threats.

Refocused the FBI on homeland defense, and improved the way investigators share information.


``We will work tirelessly to disrupt and prevent terrorist attacks, and if an attack should come, America will be prepared,'' Bush said.


His words seemed a direct response to a four-word conclusion in the executive summary of the report: ``The nation was unprepared.''


Bush fought the creation of the panel, resisted the release of documents and battled against letting national security adviser Condoleezza Rice address the panel. At a Rose Garden ceremony earlier in the day, however, Commission Chairman Thomas Kean praised the president for allowing ``unprecedented access to documents.''


The panel faulted long-running intelligence lapses that gave the hijackers an opening to attack. It described shortcomings of both the Bush and Clinton administrations, but did not affix blame to either president.

Asked whether Bush believed his administration could have done anything differently in the months leading up to the attacks, White House press secretary Scott McClellan said the blame blankets several presidencies. ``You're sitting here trying to play a blame-casting game,'' he said. ``That's not the purpose of the report. The report points out that the blame lies squarely, lies squarely with al-Qaida.''

In his response to the report, Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry said he would restore alliances to share the burden of fighting terrorism, better coordinate intelligence agencies and strengthen homeland defenses. He supports the panel's recommendation for a national intelligence director.

Kerry said the challenge ranges ``From better protecting our transportation systems, to safeguarding our ports and infrastructure, to improving our emergency communications systems and integrating our watch lists, to providing our first responders with the resources they need to do their jobs.''


Bush on Thursday also signed an executive order instructing government agencies to consider the needs of people with disabilities when preparing responses to emergencies, such as natural disasters and terrorist attacks.


07/22/04 23:10

[Jolie Rouge]

Flight 93 Saved U.S. From Greater Horror
By MARK SHERMAN

http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/story.jsp?flok=FF-APO-1110&idq=/ff/story/0001%2F20040723%2F2208869941.htm&sc=1110

http://channels.netscape.com/fotosrch/2/20020907WX104.jpg

WASHINGTON (AP) - America would have been even more devastated that sunny September morning - the Capitol aflame or the White House destroyed - if not for a few dozen strangers on an airplane who took the kind of quick, decisive action their government was incapable of on Sept. 11.

Nearly three years on, the passenger revolt against the hijackers on United Flight 93 stands out as a moment of honor and as a success story - if that term can be used to describe the deaths of 44 people - among the glaring government failures.

There were, of course, many heroes that day: the police, firefighters and rescue workers who risked and lost their own lives to help others. It does not diminish those feats to point out that emergency workers train for those moments. In some sense, their heroism is expected, part of a shared culture of valor.

The people aboard Flight 93 shared only a common destination, San Francisco, and no expectation of doing anything that morning other than sitting back and enjoying the flight.


Instead, aboard the hijacked Boeing 757, passengers took pre-emptive action that spared the nation even more destruction and death at a pillar of U.S. democracy. Their action also gave Americans conviction that they, too, could fight back against terrorists.


And, as the final report of the Sept. 11 commission makes clear, the passengers' actions displayed a small group's ability to quickly grasp something brand-new, figure out what it meant and dream up and execute a plan at a moment of extreme stress and unimaginable fear.


The report, released Thursday by the 10-member bipartisan panel after a 20-month investigation, cited multiple intelligence failures that contributed to the deadliest terror attack in U.S. history and caught citizens and government officials alike off guard.


Nearly 3,000 people were killed when 19 hijackers flew airliners into New York's Twin Towers, the Pentagon and the Pennsylvania countryside.


The report shows that on at least one other plane, United Flight 175, some passengers correctly surmised what was happening and what had to be done.


Minutes before that plane struck the World Trade Center, passenger Brian David Sweeney told his mother that the passengers were thinking about storming the cockpit to take control of the plane away from the hijackers, the Sept. 11 report says.


During Peter Hanson's haunting last telephone conversation with his father, he said, ``I think they intend to go to Chicago or someplace and fly into a building. Don't worry, Dad. If it happens, it'll be very fast - my God, my God.''


Moments later, Flight 175 became the second plane to crash into a World Trade Center tower.


Flight 93 was the last of the four planes to be commandeered by al-Qaida terrorists. In the passengers' final, heartrending telephone conversations with family members, information was flowing both ways. The Twin Towers were already on fire and the passengers learned of that.


In deciding to rush the cockpit, the passengers, thinking quickly, knew or could guess that these hijackers, too, intended to turn the plane into a missile. They also could have reasoned that they were not altering their own fates. They probably were going to die in a fiery crash.


And what did they do first? They took a vote before they took on the hijackers.


Their actions caused the hijackers to give up on their plan to fly to Washington and deliberately slam the plane into a Pennsylvania field.


No one knows how many lives they saved. But at the intended target, confusion reigned.


Hundreds of people were at the White House and Capitol on Sept. 11, trying to make sense of what they were watching on television from New York and the black smoke they could see rising from the Pentagon.


Police ordered the evacuation of the Capitol after the Pentagon was hit, but it was chaotic.


The Air Force has maintained that fighter jets that had belatedly been sent aloft to intercept the hijacked planes would have shot down Flight 93 before it reached Washington.


``We are not so sure,'' the Sept. 11 commission said. ``We are sure that the nation owes a debt to the passengers of United 93. Their actions saved the lives of countless others, and may have saved either the Capitol or the White House from destruction.''



07/23/04 22:08

[Jolie Rouge]

Sept. 11 Panel Addresses Lewinsky Scandal
By DEB RIECHMANN

http://channels.netscape.com/fotosrch/2/19990202NY112.jpg

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Sept. 11 commission's final report says there's no evidence suggesting President Bill Clinton ordered airstrikes on Osama bin Laden targets to distract attention from his affair with Monica Lewinsky.

But the report says the affair, coupled with other issues, likely affected later discussions about using force against the terrorist leader.

Following U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, the Clinton administration planned and launched cruise missile strikes on alleged terrorist assets of bin Laden in Sudan and Afghanistan. The report said reaction to the Aug. 20, 1998, strikes included ``scalding criticism'' that the action was ``too aggressive.''

``At the time, President Clinton was embroiled in the Lewinsky scandal, which continued to consume public attention for the rest of that year and the first months of 1999,'' the report said. ``As it happened, a popular 1997 movie, 'Wag the Dog,' features a president who fakes a war to distract public attention from a domestic scandal. Some Republicans in Congress raised questions about the timing of the strikes.''


In testimony, Clinton aides told the commissioners that their advice to Clinton about the airstrikes was based solely on national security considerations. ``We have found no reason to question their statements,'' the commissioners said.


The commission's final report treads lightly on Clinton's affair with the one-time White House intern, which led to his impeachment and later acquittal by the Senate. Although only tiny sections of the report refer to the affair, the commissioners spent a lot of time discussing how and whether to discuss it in the report, deciding, in the end, that it was important to do so.


``The language was carefully chosen,'' Philip Zelikow, the commission's executive director, said Friday. ``We wanted to flag it and note its significance.''


In a chapter cataloguing initial U.S. responses to al-Qaida assaults, the report said that by the early morning hours of Aug. 20, 1998, Clinton and all his principal advisers were agreed to strike the bin Laden camps in Afghanistan near Khowst, as well as al Shifa, a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan.


Intelligence reports said the plant was ``manufacturing a precursor ingredient for nerve gas with bin Laden's financial support,'' although the commission said no independent evidence has emerged to corroborate this assessment.


``The air strikes marked the climax of an intense 48-hour period in which (former national security adviser Sandy) Berger notified congressional leaders, the principals called their foreign counterparts, and President Clinton flew back from his vacation on Martha's Vineyard to address the nation from the Oval Office,'' the report said.


The report said everyone involved in the decision to strike were aware of Clinton's problems.


``He told them to ignore them,'' the report said. Berger recalled the president saying to him ``that they were going to get crap either way, so they should do the right thing.''


While the commission said it found no reason to doubt the motivation of Clinton and his advisers, their report stated: ``The failure of the strikes, the 'wag the dog' slur, the intense partisanship of the period and the nature of the al Shifa evidence likely had a cumulative effect on future decisions about the use of force against bin Laden. Berger told us that he did not feel any sense of constraint.''



07/24/04 02:29

[kvmj]

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Honorable Commission, Toothless Report
By RICHARD A. CLARKE

Published: July 25, 2004

Americans owe the 9/11 commission a deep debt for its extensive exposition of the facts surrounding the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. Yet, because the commission had a goal of creating a unanimous report from a bipartisan group, it softened the edges and left it to the public to draw many conclusions.

Among the obvious truths that were documented but unarticulated were the facts that the Bush administration did little on terrorism before 9/11, and that by invading Iraq the administration has left us less safe as a nation. (Fortunately, opinion polls show that the majority of Americans have already come to these conclusions on their own. )

What the commissioners did clearly state was that Iraq had no collaborative relationship with Al Qaeda and no hand in 9/11. They also disclosed that Iran provided support to Al Qaeda, including to some 9/11 hijackers. These two facts may cause many people to conclude that the Bush administration focused on the wrong country. They would be right to think that.

So what now? News coverage of the commission's recommendations has focused on the organizational improvements: a new cabinet-level national intelligence director and a new National Counterterrorism Center to ensure that our 15 or so intelligence agencies play well together. Both are good ideas, but they are purely incremental. Had these changes been made six years ago, they would not have significantly altered the way we dealt with Al Qaeda; they certainly would not have prevented 9/11. Putting these recommendations in place will marginally improve our ability to crush the new, decentralized Al Qaeda, but there are other changes that would help more.

First, we need not only a more powerful person at the top of the intelligence community, but also more capable people throughout the agencies - especially the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency. In other branches of the government, employees can and do join on as mid- and senior-level managers after beginning their careers and gaining experience elsewhere. But at the F.B.I. and C.I.A., the key posts are held almost exclusively by those who joined young and worked their way up. This has created uniformity, insularity, risk-aversion, torpidity and often mediocrity.

The only way to infuse these key agencies with creative new blood is to overhaul their hiring and promotion practices to attract workers who don't suffer the "failures of imagination" that the 9/11 commissioners repeatedly blame for past failures.

Second, in addition to separating the job of C.I.A. director from the overall head of American intelligence, we must also place the C.I.A.'s analysts in an agency that is independent from the one that collects the intelligence. This is the only way to avoid the "groupthink" that hampered the agency's ability to report accurately on Iraq. It is no accident that the only intelligence agency that got it right on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the State Department - a small, elite group of analysts encouraged to be independent thinkers rather than spies or policy makers.

Analysts aren't the only ones who should be reconstituted in small, elite groups. Either the C.I.A. or the military must create a larger and more capable commando force for covert antiterrorism work, along with a network of agents and front companies working under "nonofficial cover'' - that is, without diplomatic protection - to support the commandos.

Even more important than any bureaucratic suggestions is the report's cogent discussion of who the enemy is and what strategies we need in the fight. The commission properly identified the threat not as terrorism (which is a tactic, not an enemy), but as Islamic jihadism, which must be defeated in a battle of ideas as well as in armed conflict.

We need to expose the Islamic world to values that are more attractive than those of the jihadists. This means aiding economic development and political openness in Muslim countries, and efforts to stabilize places like Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Restarting the Israel-Palestinian peace process is also vital.

Also, we can't do this alone. In addition to "hearts and minds" television and radio programming by the American government, we would be greatly helped by a pan-Islamic council of respected spiritual and secular leaders to coordinate (without United States involvement) the Islamic world's own ideological effort against the new Al Qaeda.

Unfortunately, because of America's low standing in the Islamic world, we are now at a great disadvantage in the battle of ideas. This is primarily because of the unnecessary and counterproductive invasion of Iraq. In pulling its bipartisan punches, the commission failed to admit the obvious: we are less capable of defeating the jihadists because of the Iraq war.

Unanimity has its value, but so do debate and dissent in a democracy facing a crisis. To fully realize the potential of the commission's report, we must see it not as the end of the discussion but as a partial blueprint for victory. The jihadist enemy has learned how to spread hate and how to kill - and it is still doing both very effectively three years after 9/11.


Richard A. Clarke, former head of counterterrorism at the National Security Council, is the author of "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror."

[Jolie Rouge]

Berger: Incident Was 'Honest Mistake'
By CURT ANDERSON

http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/ns/news/story.jsp?flok=FF-APO-1131&idq=/ff/st ory/0001%2F20040721%2F1253728608.htm&sc=1131&photoid=19980222WX104

WASHINGTON (AP) - Former national security adviser Sandy Berger says he regrets the way he handled classified terrorism documents, calling the whole thing ``an honest mistake.'' Republicans say the matter raises questions about whether the former Clinton administration official sought to hide embarrassing materials.

``What information could be so embarrassing that a man with decades of experience in handling classified documents would risk being caught pilfering our nation's most sensitive secrets?'' House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., said. ``Mr. Berger has a lot of explaining to do.''

The Justice Department is investigating whether Berger committed a crime by removing from the National Archives copies of documents about the government's anti-terror efforts and notes that he took on those documents. Berger was reviewing the materials to help determine which Clinton administration documents to provide to the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

When news of the investigation surfaced, Berger on Tuesday quit as an informal adviser to John Kerry's presidential campaign to limit the political fallout.


Kerry said later, ``Sandy Berger is my friend, and he has tirelessly served this nation with honor and distinction. I respect his decision to step aside as an adviser to this campaign until this matter is resolved objectively and fairly.''


Berger told reporters he was not guilty of criminal wrongdoing.


``Last year, when I was in the Archives reviewing documents, I made an honest mistake. It's one that I deeply regret,'' Berger said. ``I dealt with this issue in October 2003 fully and completely. Everything that I have done all along in this process has been for the purpose of aiding and supporting the work of the 9/11 commission, and any suggestion to the contrary is simply, absolutely wrong.''


Many Democrats, including former President Clinton himself, suggested that politics were behind disclosure of the probe only days before Thursday's scheduled release of the Sept. 11 commission report. That report is expected to be highly critical of the government's response to the growing al-Qaida threat, a potential blow to President Bush's re-election campaign.


``It's interesting timing,'' Clinton said at a Denver autograph session for his book, ``My Life.'' Berger served as national security adviser for all of Clinton's second term.


Berger and his lawyer, Lanny Breuer, said the former Clinton adviser knowingly removed the handwritten notes by placing them in his jacket and pants and inadvertently took copies of actual classified documents in a leather portfolio. He returned most of the documents, but some still are missing.


House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, told reporters the case was about theft and questioned a statement by Berger issued Monday attributing the removal of the documents and notes to sloppiness.


``I think it's gravely, gravely serious what he did, if he did it. It could be a national security crisis,'' DeLay said.


Asked to comment on that Wednesday, Breuer said he was ``very disappointed with this reaction.''


``This matter is a year old,'' he said on NBC's ``Today'' show.


``Never once, in all my discussions with the Justice Department has there been any assertion like that,'' Breuer said. ``It was an advertent mistake ... All I can tell you is that when this matter started a year ago, I said to the Department of Justice that we were going to deal with this in good faith, that we wouldn't go to the press and that we wouldn't make this political .... and then suddenly, days before the 9/11 commission report comes out, this is leaked.''


The documents involved have been a key point of contention between the Clinton and Bush administrations on the question of who responded more forcefully to the threat of al-Qaida terrorism. Written by former National Security Council aide Richard Clarke, they discuss the 1999 plot to attack U.S. millennium celebrations and offer more than two dozen recommendations for improving the response to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network.


In his April 13 testimony to the Sept. 11 commission, Attorney General John Ashcroft said the review ``warns the prior administration of a substantial al-Qaida network'' in the United States. Ashcroft said it also recommends such things as using tougher visa and border controls and prosecutions of immigration violations and minor criminal charges to disrupt terror cells.


``These are the same aggressive, often-criticized law enforcement tactics that we have unleashed for 31 months to stop another al-Qaida attack,'' Ashcroft told the panel. He added that he never saw the documents before the Sept. 11 attacks.


Berger said in his March 23 testimony to the commission that Clinton submitted a $300 million supplemental budget to Congress to pay for implementing many of the documents' recommendations. Berger acknowledged, however, that not all of them were accomplished.


In his statement Monday, Berger said that every Clinton administration document requested by the Sept. 11 commission was provided to the panel. Berger also said he returned some classified documents and all his handwritten notes when he was asked about them, except for two or three copies of the millennium report that may have been thrown away.


Al Felzenberg, spokesman for the Sept. 11 commission, said the Berger investigation will have no bearing on the panel's report.


On the Net:

Justice Department: http://www.usdoj.gov

Sept. 11 commission: http://www.9-11commission.gov



07/21/04 12:53

[Jolie Rouge]

White House moves on 9/11 report
Aides drafting executive orders
Thursday, July 29, 2004 Posted: 2:14 PM EDT (1814 GMT)

http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/07/29/bush.911.ap/index.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Wrapping up a weeklong vacation on his Texas ranch, President Bush on Thursday led a videoconference meeting of his working group on the September 11 commission's recommendations.

Spokesman Trent Duffy said the group was making "great progress," but he would not elaborate on how close Bush was to receiving or approving executive orders implementing some recommendations.

Administration officials have said that presidential approval of some of the changes suggested by the commission could come by early next week.

The White House, pressed by victims' families and by Democrat John Kerry, is eager to show it is moving on the politically sensitive issue. A working group created by Bush to study the commission's recommendations met by videoconference twice Wednesday, once with Bush participating.

Any orders signed by Bush would immediately put into place some proposals made by the September 11 commission. A senior administration official said aides were finishing draft versions to present to Bush, who would adopt some or all of them soon.

Kerry, Bush's opponent in the presidential campaign, says Bush should implement the commission's proposals immediately. Kerry also wants the panel's life extended 18 months to ensure reforms are adopted. (Kerry wants to expand commission)

The Family Steering Committee, activist families who lobbied successfully for an independent commission to investigate the attacks, stepped up pressure on lawmakers to take action on recommendations that need congressional approval. They said they would draw up a watch list of Congress members who oppose legislation to implement September 11 commission recommendations.

"We're going to watch events unfold in Congress, and we want America to watch as well," said Lorie Van Auken, who lost her husband at the World Trade Center. "We need to have a list of the lawmakers. ... We need to follow who's opposing and disagreeing and why."

Talk of keeping public track of congressional opponents comes even before legislation has been offered to implement the recommendations, a sign of how intent some September 11 families are to maintain the momentum of public opinion for quick changes.

"This watchdog list, this report card, it's a shame that it's come to this, but we want to work with everyone to ensure that people aren't just feigning cooperation," said Kristen Breitweiser, one of the most outspoken advocates among September 11 families.

Already, pressure from the families has produced results.

When the commission released its 567-page report last week, Congress had planned to be away for all of August. But several committees quickly scheduled a return to Washington to hold hearings on the panel's findings.

House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Illinois, announced even more Wednesday. He said at least six committees will hold at least 15 hearings in August on such issues as information sharing, terror financing, intelligence analysis and government reorganization. In a statement, he anticipated congressional action on legislative recommendations in September and October.

The commission's final report urges rapid fundamental changes in how the legislative and executive branches oversee the nation's intelligence apparatus, asking that oversight be consolidated into one group of lawmakers, with one person in the White House who answers directly to the president.

Bush, vacationing in Crawford, Texas, has said he will study the proposals but has stopped short of endorsing them.

Several of the working group members, including acting CIA Director John McLaughlin, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, FBI Director Robert Mueller and Attorney General John Ashcroft, had met Wednesday at the White House. (Bush, advisers review 9/11 report proposals)

They were linked by videoconference to several top officials who were outside the White House, including the head of the working group, White House chief of staff Andy Card; Secretary of State Colin Powell, traveling overseas; and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, who was with Bush on his Texas ranch.

[Jolie Rouge]

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

http://i.a.cnn.net/cnn/2004/US/07/29/franks.interview/story.franks.pool.jpg

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

www.cnn.com/2004/US/07/29/franks.interview/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]

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:


“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]

Stratfor.com continues:


“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]

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:


“…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/editorial/feature.html?id=110005483

A Central banker's nightmare.
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/0,,SB109260622463991800,00.html?mod=todays%5Ffree% 5Ffeature

Why governors make better presidents.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pdupont/?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]

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]

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

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

[Jolie Rouge]

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)

www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/08/22/911.commission/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]

Probe: Intense Flames Sped WTC Collapse
By DEVLIN BARRETT

http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/story.jsp?flok=FF-APO-1110&idq=/ff/story/0001%2F20041019%2F2200391360.htm&sc=1110&photoid=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.


http://channels.netscape.com/fotosrch/2/20010911NY118.jpg


On the Net:


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



10/19/04 21:59

[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)

www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/07/22/911.report/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]

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]

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/story.jsp?floc=ne-main-9-l1&flok=FF-APO-1110&idq=/ff/story/0001%2F20050210%2F0939591469.htm&sc=1110

[Jolie Rouge]

Report Said to Find 9/11 Evacuation Slow
By DEVLIN BARRETT

WASHINGTON (AP) - A federal report on the collapse of the World Trade Center towers highlights flaws in the emergency response and incorrect assumptions about how quickly people can evacuate a skyscraper in crisis, two individuals who worked on the study said Monday.

A team of engineers who have spent more than two years investigating the collapse of the twin towers are to issue three reports Tuesday in New York analyzing the Sept. 11, 2001, building collapses and the response by rescue workers and building occupants.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology will also detail how early decisions played a key role in determining who lived and who died. The attacks killed some 2,749 at the towers, including those who died on the two jetliners that hijackers crashed into the buildings.

The findings represent NIST's last step before issuing its final recommendations in June, the culmination of exhaustive research and testing that produced 10,000 pages of data.

The centerpiece of Tuesday's findings will be the engineers' final conclusions about to the exact sequence of each tower's collapse.

The probe was ordered more than two years ago by Congress to answer lingering questions about the unique design of the World Trade Center buildings, the quality of the buildings' steel, and the ability of the floors and fireproofing to keep them upright.

NIST has already issued preliminary findings that there were no significant problems with the steel.

The two collapses, though different in each building, resulted largely from the way each plane's impact stripped away fireproofing, dislodged key columns, and ignited tons of office material that burned long after the jet fuel had burned away, NIST has concluded.

David Collins, a member of the advisory committee that offered suggestions and questions to NIST investigators, said the research showed design and construction of the building were not major contributors to the collapse. ``I think everyone took deliberate steps to try to do what was necessary to make the buildings as safe as possible,'' said Collins, a Cincinnati-based architect.


The other findings - about the emergency response and the behavior of those who were in the building - are likely to fuel an ongoing debate over skyscraper safety.

Investigators have determined that previous expectations about how long people would take to evacuate buildings were not borne out by events at the World Trade Center, according to two individuals who worked on the study and have seen the latest drafts of the reports. They spoke to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity before publication of the data.


The pair who discussed the findings would not specify how much of a time difference the investigators found between evacuation predictions and the actual behavior at the World Trade Center but said the discrepancy often stemmed from individuals' lingering in offices before going to stairwells. That behavior that had not been contemplated in previous models.

The evacuation models are important because architects use them to calculate the capacity needed in stairwells, elevators, and other means of exiting a building.

The report also emphasizes the limited ability of rescue personnel to reach higher floors quickly to battle fires and rescue trapped civilians, the two individuals said. That proved critical for firefighters who climbed 70 flights of stairs carrying up to 100 pounds of gear - and then tried to battle flames or clear debris once there.

Those concerns are spurring a debate both within the NIST group and among the larger fire rescue and construction fields about stairwell and elevator design.

The debate centers around whether ``fireproof'' elevators, designed to resist flames and smoke, should be installed in new buildings, particularly those that rise above 40 or 50 stories, and the best width and location of stairwells.

Elevators played a critical, but contradictory, role. In some cases, they helped significant numbers of people get out quickly. For others, they became sealed containers trapping them inside a doomed building.

NIST's ultimate goal is to improve building codes.


http://channels.netscape.com/ns/news/story.jsp?idq=/ff/story/0001%2F20050404%2F1958848798.htm&photoid=20050301WHI01D



On the Net:

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

International Code Council: http://www.iccsafe.org


04/04/05 19:58

[Jolie Rouge]

Bumping for Mesue ;)

[Jolie Rouge]

bumping for Jaidness

[mesue]

Bumping for Mesue ;)

Thanks for thinking of me. :) The 911 commission went with the official story and never looked beyond it, they did not ask the really tough questions like why
http://www.standdown.net/ Almost one hundred and thirteen minutes elapsed between the time American Airlines Flight 11 lost contact and was hijacked at 8:13:31 till the time United Airlines Flight 93 crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania at 10:06:05. One hour and fifty-three minutes went by and the USAF did not intercept any one of these four "hijacked" airlines. To understand all the rules, regulation and procedures that make this totally impossible to happen, please read:

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Standard Intercept Procedures http://www.StandDown.net/FAAStandardInterceptProcedures.htm

http://www.standdown.net/
On Oct. 23, 1999, golfer Payne Stewart's incapacitated Learjet going from Orlando to Dallas made a wrong turn. Within 19 minutes after the flight appeared to be off course, an Air Force F-16 was dispatched and ready to intercept the plane.

The thing is Jolie the 911 commission was formed only after the poor families of the victims lobbied for it, Bush fought forming it from the begginning but it still did a really bad job of answering some of the most important questions if you want to know how bad a job go to this website and others like it and see for yourself. http://www.standdown.net/
You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to see something was terribly wrong that day for instance in the report there is a mention of NORAD having some sort of training going on that day practicing what to do in case of hi-jackings. There is even a tape of where the controllers at one airport calls and asks them to check out one of the planes and says its a hi-jacking and the guy asks at NORAD if this one is for real and the controller responds that yes it is. There were practices going on that with as many as 32 fake hi-jacking being shown. So was it a fluke if this thing happened as they say that they the terrorists picked the same day that the training was going on? Did they have inside info? Why use the real instruments why not train part of the personnel at one time on simulators, while having the rest minding the store so to speak? If they indeed were using the whole program for training who came up with that idiotic idea leaving the skies and security vulnerable for those hours?

[Eddie]

9/11 has been one of the biggest events in recent history that sparked a mass awakening across the world.

There has been much debate as to how it happened, who is responsible and why.

To this day about 1/3 of americans do not believe the official story.

In other areas of the world as much as 90% of the country does not believe the official story.

Here is a list of 24 facts that cannot be debunked about 9/11.

1) Nano Thermite was found in the dust at Ground Zero. Peer reviewed in the Bentham Open Chemical Physics Journal. ‘Niels Harrit’, ‘Thermite Bentham’, “The great thermate debate” Jon Cole, ‘Iron rich spheres’ Steven Jones, ‘Limited Metallurgical Examination (FEMA C-13, Appendix C-6)’. ‘Nano Tubes’

2) 1700+ Engineers and Architects support a real independent 9/11 investigation. Richard Gage, Founder. ‘Explosive Evidence’, ‘Blueprint for Truth’, ‘AE911′, ‘Toronto Hearings’, ‘Kevin Ryan’.

3) The total collapse of WTC 7 in 6.5 seconds at free fall acceleration (NIST admits 2.25 seconds). Larry Silverstein used the term “Pull it”. Steel framed high rise buildings have NEVER totally collapsed from fire or structural damage. Builidng 7 was not hit by a plane. ‘Building 7′, ‘WTC 7′.

4) Dick Cheney was in command of NORAD on 9/11 while running war games. ‘Stand down order’. “Of course the orders still stand, have you heard anything to the contrary?”. Norman Minetta testimony. “Gave order to shootdown Flight 93.”, ‘NORAD Drills’.

5) 6 out of the 10 Commissioners believe the 9/11 Commission report was “Setup to fail” Co-Chairs Hamilton and Kean, “It was a 30 year conspiracy”, “The whitehouse has played cover up”, ‘Max Cleland resigned’, ‘John Farmer’.

6) FBI confiscated 84/85 Videos from the Pentagon. ‘Moussaoui trial’ revealed these videos. Released Pentagon Security Camera (FOIA) does not show a 757 and is clearly Missing a frame. ‘Sheraton Hotel’, “Double tree’, ‘Citgo”.

7) Osama Bin Laden was NOT wanted by the FBI for the 9/11 attacks. “No hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11.” CIA created, trained and funded “Al Qaeda/Taliban” during the Mujahideen. OBL was a CIA asset named ‘Tim Osman’. OBL Reported dead in Dec 2001 (FOX).

8) 100′s of Firefighters and witness testimony to BOMBS/EXPLOSIONS ignored by the 9/11 Commission Report. 9/11 Commission Report bars 503 1st responder eyewitnesses. “Explosions in the lobby and sub levels”, ‘Firefighter explosions’, ‘Barry Jennings’, ‘William Rodriguez’.

9) 100′s of firefighters and witness testimony to MOLTEN METAL ignored by the Commission report. “Like you’re in a foundry”, “NIST’s John Gross denies the existence of Molten Metal”, ‘Swiss Cheese’, “As of 21 days after the attack, the fires were still burning and molten steel was still running.” Leslie Robertson’.

10) ’5 Dancing Israeli’s’ arrested in ‘Mossad Truck Bombs’ on 9/11 that stated “We were there to document the event.” ‘Urban Moving Systems’ front company, ‘Dominic Suter’. “$498,750 Business loan (June 2001)”. “Officer DeCarlo’, ‘Art Students’, ‘Israeli Spying’.

11) On September 10th, 2001. Rumsfeld reported $2.3 TRILLION missing from the Pentagon. ‘Dov Zakheim’ Pentagon Comptroller. Former VP of ‘Systems Planning Corporation’ (Flight Termination System). Signatore of PNAC document.

12) 220+ Senior Military, Intelligence Service, Law Enforcement, and Government Officials question the official story. ’9/11 Whistleblowers’, ‘Patriots for 9/11′. ‘Robert Bowman’, ‘Sibel Edmonds’, ‘Albert Stubblebine’, ‘Wesley Clark’, ‘Mark Dayton’, ‘Alan Sabrosky’, ‘Cyntha McKinney’, ‘Jesse Ventura’, ‘Kurt Sonnenfeld’. “patriotsquestion911.com”


13) Towers were built to withstand a Boeing jet(s). “I designed it for a 707 to hit it”, Leslie Robertson, WTC structural engineer. “Could probably sustain multiple impacts of jetliners”, “like a pencil puncturing screen netting” Frank De Martini, deceased Manager of WTC Construction & Project Management. “As far as a plane knocking a building over, that would not happen.” Charlie Thornton, Structural Engineer.

14) History of American False Flag attacks. ‘USS Liberty’, ‘Gulf of Tonkin’, ‘Operation Northwoods’, ‘OKC Bombing (Murrah Building)’, ’1993 WTC attacks’. ‘Patrick Clawson’. Project for the New American Century (PNAC) needed “a New Pearl Harbor”, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses”. 9/11 Achieved those goals.

15) BBC correspondent Jane Standley reported the collapse of WTC 7 (Soloman Brothers building) 20 minutes before it happened. CNN/FOX/MSNBC also had early reports. ‘BBC wtc 7′, ‘Jane Standley’, Ashleigh Banfield’.

16) “Flight 93″ debris was spread out over many miles. Cheney admits to giving the order to shootdown 93. “shot down the plane over Pennsylvania” Rumsfeld, “nothing that you could distinguish that a plane had crashed there” ‘Chris Konicki. “Not a drop of blood” Coroner Wallace Miller. “there was no plane.” Mayor Ernie Stull.

17) Bush hesitated for 441 days before starting the 911 Commission. ‘Jersey Girls’. ‘Phil Zelikow’ already wrote the outline before the commission began. Steel shipped over seas. Obstruction of justice. JFK and Pearl Harbor commissions were started within 7 days.

18) The 911 commission was given extremely limited funds. $15 million was given to investigate 9/11. (Over $60 Million was spent investigating Clintons’ affairs with Monica).

19) Bush said he watched the first plane crash into the North tower on TV before entering the classroom. “The TV was obviously on.” Was informed about the second impact while reading ‘My Pet Goat’ to the children. Remained for at least 8 more minutes while America was under “attack”.

20) The PATRIOT ACT was written before 9/11. Signed into law October 26th, 2001.

21) Marvin Bush was director of Stratasec (Securacom, ‘KuAm’) which was in charge of security of the WTC, United Airlines and Dulles International Airport. All three were breached on 9/11. ICTS was another company that provided security at the airports. ‘Wirt Walker’, ‘Ezra Harel’, ‘ICTS”, ‘WTC power downs’.

22) “Who killed John O’Neil?”. Former FBI task force agent investigating Al Qaeda/Bin Laden. Transferred by Kroll Corporation to head the security just before 9/11. John O’Neil died in the Towers. ‘Jerome Hauer’ ‘Jules Kroll’.

23) Insider trading based upon foreknowledge. ‘Put Options.’ Never identified insiders made millions. ‘United and American Airlines’ ‘Raytheon.’

24) At least 7 of the 19 listed highjackers are still alive (BBC). No video footage of 19 highjackers or passengers boarding the 4 planes. Pilots of the 4 planes never squawked the highjacking code. ‘Alive highjackers’, ‘ACARS’, ‘Pilots for 9/11 Truth’.


WTC 7 (The Smoking Gun)

http://rememberbuilding7.org/

Building 7 was a 47-story skyscraper and was part of the World Trade Center complex.

Built in 1984, it would have been the tallest high-rise in 33 states in the United States.

It collapsed at 5:20 pm on September 11, 2001 in 6.5 Seconds at free fall acceleration.

It was not hit by an airplane and suffered minimal damage compared to other buildings much closer to the Twin Towers.

http://www.hangthebankers.com/24-hard-facts-about-911-that-cannot-be-debunked/

[Jolie Rouge]

Florida Ex-Senator Pursues Claims of Saudi Ties to Sept. 11 Attacks
By CARL HULSE - APRIL 13, 2015

MIAMI LAKES, Fla. — The episode could have been a chapter from the thriller written by former Senator Bob Graham of Florida about a shadowy Saudi role in the Sept. 11 attacks.

A top F.B.I. official unexpectedly arranges a meeting at Dulles International Airport outside Washington with Mr. Graham, the former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, after he has pressed for information on a bureau terrorism inquiry. Mr. Graham, a Democrat, is then hustled off to a clandestine location, where he hopes for a breakthrough in his long pursuit of ties between leading Saudis and the Sept. 11 hijackers.

This real-life encounter happened in 2011, Mr. Graham said, and it took a startling twist.

“He basically said, ‘Get a life,’ ” Mr. Graham said of the F.B.I. official, who suggested that the former senator was chasing a dead-end investigation.

Mr. Graham, 78, a two-term governor of Florida and three-term senator who left Capitol Hill in 2005, says he will not relent in his efforts to force the government to make public a secret section of a congressional review he helped write — one that, by many accounts, implicates Saudi citizens in helping the hijackers.

“No. 1, I think the American people deserve to know the truth of what has happened in their name,” said Mr. Graham, who was a co-chairman of the 2002 joint congressional inquiry into the terrorist attacks. “No. 2 is justice for these family members who have suffered such loss and thus far have been frustrated largely by the U.S. government in their efforts to get some compensation.”

Mr. Graham’s focus on a possible Saudi connection has received renewed attention because of claims made by victims’ families in a federal court in New York that Saudi Arabia was responsible for aiding the Sept. 11 hijackers and because of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed against the F.B.I. in Florida.

In sworn statements in the two cases, Mr. Graham has said there was evidence of support from the Saudi government for the terrorists. He also says the F.B.I. withheld from his inquiry, as well as a subsequent one, the fact that the bureau had investigated a Saudi family in Sarasota, Fla., and had found multiple contacts between it and the hijackers training nearby until the family fled just before the attacks.

Despite the F.B.I.’s insistence to the contrary, Mr. Graham said there was no evidence that the bureau had ever disclosed that line of investigation to his panel or the national commission that reviewed the attacks and delivered a report in 2004.

“One thing that irritates me is that the F.B.I. has gone beyond just covering up, trying to avoid disclosure, into what I call aggressive deception,” Mr. Graham said during an interview in a family office in this Miami suburb, which rose on what was a sprawling dairy farm operated by Mr. Graham’s father, also political leader in Florida.

The F.B.I. dismisses such criticism. In a new review of the bureau in the aftermath of Sept. 11, a three-person commission issued a blanket declaration that the family in Sarasota had nothing to do with the hijackers or their attacks. The review placed blame for an initial F.B.I. report of “many connections” between the family and terrorists on a special agent who, under bureau questioning, “was unable to provide any basis for the contents of the document or explain why he wrote it as he did.”

Still, a federal judge in South Florida is reviewing an estimated 80,000 documents related to the F.B.I.’s inquiry in Florida to determine what to release. Mr. Graham suggested that those documents could include photographs and records of cars linked to the hijackers entering the gated community where the Sarasota family lived. “That will be a real smoking gun,” Mr. Graham said.

The case received unexpected attention this year when a former operative for Al Qaeda described prominent members of Saudi Arabia’s royal family as major donors to the terrorist network in the late 1990s. The letter from the Qaeda member, Zacarias Moussaoui, prompted a statement from the Saudi Embassy saying that the national Sept. 11 commission had rejected allegations that Saudi officials had funded Al Qaeda.

Mr. Graham’s stature has added weight both to the push for disclosure of the classified 28 pages of the congressional inquiry as well as the legal fight to make public F.B.I. documents about the investigation of the Saudi family in Sarasota.

“He has been behind us all the way in terms of bringing attention to this,” said Dan Christensen, editor and founder of the Florida Bulldog, the online investigative journal that filed the Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the F.B.I and the Justice Department. “He brings a lot of credibility. Here is a guy who is one of the ultimate experts on this.”


Mr. Graham’s refusal to drop what many in the intelligence community consider to be long-settled issues has stirred some private criticism that the former senator has been out of the game too long and is chasing imagined conspiracies in an effort to stay relevant as he lectures and writes books. Intelligence officials say the claims in the secret 28 pages were explored and found to be unsubstantiated in a later review by the national commission.

Former colleagues are not so ready to write off a lawmaker they remember for sounding the alarm against the invasion of Iraq, warning that shifting attention to removing Saddam Hussein would debilitate efforts to rid Afghanistan of Al Qaeda, which Mr. Graham said posed a far greater threat to the United States.

“Bob Graham has proven to be prescient about many things,” said Jane Harman, the former California congresswoman who once served as the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.

Never one of the flashiest members of the Senate, Mr. Graham was seen more as a cautious, conscientious lawmaker eager to dig into the dry details of policy. His unglamorous reputation no doubt contributed to his inability to catch on during an abbreviated run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2003. But his colleagues also saw him as a man who would not be easily dissuaded.

“Bob is kind of quiet, but once he is on to something, he is like a dog with a bone,” said Tom Daschle, the former Senate Democratic leader.

Noting that his wife, Adele, accuses him of “failing at retirement,” Mr. Graham remains involved in Florida conservation issues and other state causes. He has also written books, including the Sept. 11 suspense novel “Keys to the Kingdom,” and handed down his interest in politics and public service to his four daughters, one of whom, Gwen, was elected to the House from North Florida last year.

Mr. Graham said he simply wanted to make certain any co-conspirators in the Sept. 11 attacks were made to pay.

“To me, the most simple, unanswered question of 9/11 is, did the 19 hijackers act alone or were they assisted by someone in the United States?” he said. “The official position of the United States government is they acted alone.”

“My motivation is to try to answer that question,” he said. “Did they act alone or did they have a support structure that made 9/11 possible?”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/14/world/middleeast/florida-ex-senator-pursues-claims-of-saudi-ties-to-sept-11-attacks.html?_r=0