Article

2004-04-11 Home Front: WoT

President Bush was told more than a month before the Sept. 11 attacks that al-Qaida had reached America's shores, had a support system in place for its operatives and that the FBI had detected suspicious activity that might involve a hijacking plot. Since 1998, the FBI had observed "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks," according to a memo prepared for Bush and declassified Saturday. White House aides and outside experts said they could not recall a sitting president ever publicly releasing the highly sensitive document, known as a PDB, for presidential daily briefing.

Not that GWB will get any credit for being forthcoming.

The Aug. 6, 2001 PDB referred to evidence of buildings in New York possibly being cased by terrorists. The document also said the CIA and FBI were investigating a call to the U.S. embassy in the United Arab Emirates in May 2001 "saying that a group of (Osama) bin Laden supporters was in the U.S. planning attacks with explosives." The commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks asked the White House to declassify the document at its meeting Thursday. It is significant because Bush read it, so it offers a window on what Bush and his top aides knew about the threat of a terrorist strike. The PDB made plain that bin Laden had been scheming to strike the United States for at least six years. It warned of indications from a broad array of sources, spanning several years. Democratic and Republican members of the 9-11 commission saw the document differently.

Natch.

Democratic commissioner Bob Kerrey, a former senator from Nebraska, said the memo's details should have given Bush enough warning to push for more intelligence information about possible domestic hijackings. "The whole argument the government used that we were focusing overseas, that we thought the attack was coming from outside the United States - this memo said an attack could come in the United States. And we didn't scramble our agencies to that," he said.

And if we had?

I hope Kerrey has the grace to feel foolish with the actual text of the memo released. I doubt if he will, though. Partisans aren't big on feeling foolish.

Richard Ben-Veniste, a Democratic commissioner and former Watergate prosecutor, said the memo calls into question national security adviser Condoleezza Rice's assertion Thursday that the memo was purely a "historical" document. "This is a provocative piece of information and warrants further exploration as to what was done following the receipt of this information to enhance our domestic security," he said.

There's a legal concept that's called the "reasonable man" standard, or it was called that before things got PC. It's probably a "reasonable person" standard now. To my mind, a "reasonable person" wouldn't have had basis for decisive actions based on the content of the memo. But then, at one point a court decided that a "reasonable man" when driving across a set of railroad tracks would stop his Huppmobile, get out, and look both ways down the track to make sure the Old 97 wasn't barrelling down upon him before crossing, so what the hell do I know?

Republican commissioner James R. Thompson, a former Illinois governor, said the memo "didn't call for anything to be done" by Bush. The memo's details confirm that the Bush administration had no specific information regarding an imminent attack involving airplanes as missiles, Thompson said. "The PDB backs up what Dr. Rice testified to. There is no smoking gun, not even a cold gun," he said.

That's what I get out of it, too, but then, I'm probably not being reasonable...

"Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate bin Laden since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the U.S.," the memo to Bush stated. 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 President Clinton launched missile strikes on bin Laden's base in Afghanistan in 1998 in retaliation for bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 231 people, "bin Laden told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington," the memo said.

And the intel community was probably expecting attacks on the same order, by similar means...

Other than our saintly, heroic FBI agent in Minnesota who knew the whole plot of course, just ask her.

The memo cited intelligence from other countries in three instances, but the White House blacked out the names of the nations. Efforts to launch an attack from Canada around the time of millennium celebrations in 2000 "may have been part of bin Laden's first serious attempt to implement a terrorist strike in the U.S.," the document stated. Convicted plotter Ahmed Ressam, who was caught trying to cross the Canadian border with explosives about 60 miles north of Seattle in late 1999, told the FBI that he alone conceived an attack on Los Angeles International Airport, but that bin Laden lieutenant Abu Zubaydah "encouraged him and helped facilitate the operation," the document said. Ressam is still awaiting sentencing after agreeing to testify in other terrorism cases. Zubaydah was a senior al-Qaida planner who was captured in Pakistan in March 2002. Al-Qaida members, some of them American citizens, had lived in or traveled to the United States for years, the memo said. "The group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks," it warned.

... and the FBI's been working on breaking them since 9-11, and before...

The document said that "some of the more sensational threat reporting" - such as an intelligence tip in 1998 that bin Laden wanted to hijack aircraft to win the release of fellow extremists - could not be corroborated.

To me, that implies something along the lines of the Air India hijacking to Kandahar that got Omar Saeed Sheikh sprung...

One item in the memo referred to "recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York."

WTC wasn't a federal building, was it?

A White House official speaking on condition of anonymity said that was a reference to two Yemeni men the FBI interviewed and concluded were simply tourists taking photographs. On May 15, 2001, a caller to the U.S. embassy in the United Arab Emirates warned of planned bin Laden attacks with explosives in the United States, but did not say where or when. The CIA reported the incident to other government officials the next day, and a dozen or more steps were taken by the CIA and other agencies "to run down" the information from the phone call, senior administration officials said Saturday evening. One official said references to al-Qaida in prior presidential briefings "would indicate 'they are here, they are there' in various countries and the CIA director would tell the president what was being done to address "these different operations."

Lots of flotsam in the sea of data; nothing there that would allow anyone -- anyone -- the ability to say, "ya know, we'd better be on guard for some commercial airline hijackings in early September."

Posted by Steve White 2004-04-11 12:19:17 AM|| || Front Page|| [7 views since 2007-05-07] Top

#1 "The whole argument the government used that we were focusing overseas, that we thought the attack was coming from outside the United States - this memo said an attack could come in the United States"

The arguments of the Democrats against GW have become like those of a shrewish wife. No substance to the nagging...just nag nag nag.

It's not to say that the Dems aren't effective. The Dem's, like shrew wives, can get their friends to sit around and have endless hours of fun berating just how stupid he is......Like, last time he tried to hail a cab, he was ignored because, like I told him , he should have done it from the corner, not the middle of the sidewalk!!! I told him so!! And last time he was in Starbucks...he ordered a "large" instead of a "grande"!!!!

The Dem's have become completely void of their own substance and now are reduced to the divisive politics of nothing more than nag..nag..nag.

Posted by B 2004-04-11 6:16:02 AM|| 2004-04-11 6:16:02 AM|| Front Page Top

#2 This article typifies the kind of slyly dishonest reporting that convinced me the mainstream press is little more than a wholly-owned propaganda outlet for the Democratic Party: some asshole at AP really had to work hard to transmogrify that vague, useless memo into this "Bush Knew About 9/11 In Advance!!" story.

And just exactly what is it that Bush "should" have done in the 36 days that elapsed between the time he saw this potpourri of generalities, rumors and mostly "uncorroborated" miscellaneous intelligence tidbits, and the morning of September 11?

Was Bush supposed to immediately arrest and detain, without charge, all aliens of Middle Eastern origin in the United States at that moment on suspicion they might be plotting terrorist attacks? That's about what it would have taken to nab the 9/11 hijackers before they did the deed-- and under the laws in effect at the time, IT WOULD HAVE BEEN COMPLETELY ILLEGAL FOR HIM TO DO SO. The din of outrage from the American Civil Liberties Union would have been so loud that it would have left every one of us suffering from permanent hearing loss.

Or was Bush supposed to immediately launch an all-out assault on Afghanistan to destroy al Qaeda without even seeking a U.N. resolution? Was he supposed to do it without congressional authorization, which is required by law? That's what he would have had to do; and had he done that, he would have been impeached at once and removed from office before the year was out.

And why, if "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks" were observed by the FBI all the way back since 1998, is this supposed to be Bush's failing, that not enough was done to thwart those plans? He wasn't president in 1998, Bill Clinton was.

But Clinton's a Democrat, so he doesn't even get mentioned in this disingenuous concoction of partisan bullshit.

9/11 happened because for at least the last quarter-century, this ENTIRE COUNTRY refused to acknowledge what the Islamicists themselves had been telling us, again and again: THEY ARE AT WAR WITH US. Again and again they attacked us throughout the 1980's and 1990's; yet we kept dismissing them as a ragtag band of disgruntled kooks.

Whatever oversight kept us from shortstopping the 9/11 attacks, it is the fault of every U.S. president from Carter on; every member of the House and Senate since 1979; and of every last U.S. citizen for not DEMANDING that our government take the problem seriously.

Blame it on George Bush? Screw you, John Kerry.

(sorry for the caps lock; I'm pissed off)

Posted by Dave D. 2004-04-11 8:45:37 AM|| 2004-04-11 8:45:37 AM|| Front Page Top

#3 I believe extreme liberals in certain media venues are taking an active part in trying to lay all the blame for the 9/11 attacks on the Bush Administration. On Thursday on NPR's Fresh Air Terry Gross said "As we all know the 9/11 Commision was formed to find out what the Bush Administration knew prior to the 9/11 attacks." I guess I shouldn't have been surprised by the blatant untruth of this statement considering the complete free pass she gave Dick Clarke. It seems NPR does have a political agenda.

Posted by Deacon Blues 2004-04-11 9:48:56 AM|| 2004-04-11 9:48:56 AM|| Front Page Top

#4 I moved the original memo to Home Front - Politix, which is probably also where this belongs. None of this puffing and blowing actually has anything to do with actually pursuing the war on terror. 50 years from now, this won't even be a footnote in the history books. Assuming they're written in English.

Posted by Fred 2004-04-11 10:52:35 AM|| 2004-04-11 10:52:35 AM|| Front Page Top

#5 Yikes Fred! It's Easter! We'll win, it might take awhile tho.

Posted by Shipman 2004-04-11 11:25:37 AM|| 2004-04-11 11:25:37 AM|| Front Page Top

#6 We almost certainly will win, provided the Democrats' cries of "Iraq is Bush's Vietnam!!" don't become self-fullfilling prophecies.

Frankly, I'm not a thousandth as alarmed by ANYTHING happening in Iraq right now as I am about the utter treachery of the Democrats: they seem perfectly willing to engineer a national disaster in the form of the complete failure of the war against Islamofascism, if only it will help them win this next presidential election.

I guaran-damn-tee you: not a single one of the Democrats mouthing off these days--NOT EVEN ONE--actually believes so much as a single word of the doom-and-gloom crap they've been spewing out (well, maybe poor little Dennis Kucinich believes it, along with Ralph Nader). Every last one of them knows precisely WHY we're in Iraq, knows that we're succeeding, and knows that Iraq is the key to cutting through the Gordian Knot of Islamic lunacy. Every last one of them.

The Democrats made a cynical, calculated choice, back during the primaries, to take a position opposed to everything we are doing in Iraq. They did it because they saw the potential in that huge crowd of foamers and droolers that Howard Dean whipped up into a lather, and with the sole exception of Joe Lieberman, none of them had the integrity to resist tapping into the electoral energy of that madness.

And now they're riding the tiger and can't get off.

Some have said that if Kerry wins, he'll actually continue virtually all of Bush's policies in the War On Terror; that having him as President won't be that bad, after all.

Bullshit.

If Kerry wins, he will be under relentless pressure from the Left to pull out of Iraq and suspend nearly everything we've been doing to prevent further terrorist attacks, and focus instead on kissing Kofi Annan's and Jacques Chirac's asses. And he will NOT be able to resist that pressure, because the tiger isn't going to turn into a pussycat.

"50 years from now, this won't even be a footnote in the history books."

It will be a helluva lot more than a footnote in the history books if the Left wins this round: it'll be an entire chapter. In their view, this August 6th memo is a bigger scandal than Watergate.

Posted by Dave D. 2004-04-11 12:37:52 PM|| 2004-04-11 12:37:52 PM|| Front Page Top

#7 Damn, your harshing my mellow Dave D.

Agreed on many points. If as you say a Kerry term plays out with a quick withdrawl from Iraq, the happy times will last one election cycle, then three attacks and.... for the Muslims... the deluge.

Posted by Shipman 2004-04-11 1:14:34 PM|| 2004-04-11 1:14:34 PM|| Front Page Top

#8 Yeah, that's the way I see it, too: giving up on Iraq will guarantee more terrorist attacks, since the jihadis will inevitably view it as Mogadishu writ large. And more terrorist attacks will leave any American president--Democrat or Republican--with no way out: he can't countenance toleration of the attacks as "just the cost of doing business with the rest of the world," nor could he consider a reprise of Bush's "Arab Democracy Experiment," and the only option left to him would be all-out, total war against the Arab--and possibly the entire Islamic--world.

But at least that war would only take about twenty minutes.

Posted by Dave D. 2004-04-11 1:48:09 PM|| 2004-04-11 1:48:09 PM|| Front Page Top

#9 While I think a Kerry win would cost countless American lives and be a huge set back in the WOT - I think that it would cause such a major backlash in the subsequent election and that it will become a dark day for the Islamofacists and for the world in general.

Right now we are restrained. Allow Kerry to diddle and Americans to die, and no amount of propaganda will contain the wrath.

Posted by B 2004-04-11 4:13:32 PM|| 2004-04-11 4:13:32 PM|| Front Page Top

#10 I'll even go further ...I predict that if Kerry wins...and AQ strikes our shores...Kerry's fate will be like that of Davis.

I can see the possibility of a Kerry win. But he will be less popular than Nixon or Davis and my guess...make that prediction... is that he will suffer the same fate. Clinton just barely escaped it. The moment the left rids itself of the GW Satan, Kerry is a twit who will be hated by all.

Posted by B 2004-04-11 4:17:56 PM|| 2004-04-11 4:17:56 PM|| Front Page Top

#11 Have to agree with fmr governer J. Thompson. There's no gun there smoking or otherwise. People should realize that had any of the hijackers been arrested prior to 9/11 the ACLU would have had them released the next day. Ashcroft's head would have been called for. Meanwhile, at the Detroit ranch new passports would have been issued and the game resumed. Same result. I don't think 9/11 could have been prevented simply because of the self applied handcuffs. Chine

Posted by Chiner 2004-04-11 4:58:48 PM|| 2004-04-11 4:58:48 PM|| Front Page Top

#12 The moment the left rids itself of the GW Satan, Kerry is a twit who will be hated by all.

Yep, what I was trying to think.

Posted by Shipman 2004-04-11 5:37:23 PM|| 2004-04-11 5:37:23 PM|| Front Page Top

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