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Open thread 3/8
- By Phillip Brownlee
- Posted March 8, 2008 at 6:04 a.m.
- Filed under Open thread
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http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/they-knew-but-did-nothing/2008/03/07/1204780065676.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap9
They knew, but did nothing
March 8, 2008
In this exclusive extract from his new book, Philip Shenon uncovers how the White House tried to hide the truth of its ineptitude leading up to the September 11 terrorist attacks. .
In the American summer of 2001, the nation’s news organisations, especially the television networks, were riveted by the story of one man. It wasn’t George Bush. And it certainly wasn’t Osama bin Laden.
It was the sordid tale of an otherwise obscure Democratic congressman from California, Gary Condit, who was implicated - falsely, it later appeared - in the disappearance of a 24-year-old government intern later found murdered. That summer, the names of the blow-dried congressman and the doe-eyed intern, Chandra Levy, were much better known to the American public than bin Laden’s.
Even reporters in Washington who covered intelligence issues acknowledged they were largely ignorant that summer that the CIA and other parts of the Government were warning of an almost certain terrorist attack. Probably, but not necessarily, overseas.
The warnings were going straight to President Bush each morning in his briefings by the CIA director, George Tenet, and in the presidential daily briefings. It would later be revealed by the 9/11 commission into the September 11 attacks that more than 40 presidential briefings presented to Bush from January 2001 through to September 10, 2001, included references to bin Laden.
And nearly identical intelligence landed each morning on the desks of about 300 other senior national security officials and members of Congress in the form of the senior executive intelligence brief, a newsletter on intelligence issues also prepared by the CIA.
The senior executive briefings contained much of the same information that was in the presidential briefings but were edited to remove material considered too sensitive for all but the President and his top aides to see. Often the differences between the two documents were minor, with only a sentence or two changed between them. Apart from the commission’s chief director, Philip Zelikow, the commission’s staff was never granted access to Bush’s briefings, except for the notorious August 2001 briefing that warned of the possibility of domestic al-Qaeda strikes involving hijackings. But they could read through the next best thing: the senior executive briefings.
During his 2003 investigations it was startling to Mike Hurley, the commission member in charge of investigating intelligence, and the other investigators on his team, just what had gone on in the spring and summer of 2001 - just how often and how aggressively the White House had been warned that something terrible was about to happen. Since nobody outside the Oval Office could know exactly what Tenet had told Bush during his morning intelligence briefings, the presidential and senior briefings were Tenet’s best defence to any claim that the CIA had not kept Bush and the rest of the Government well-informed about the threats. They offered a strong defence.
The team’s investigators began to match up the information in the senior briefings and they pulled together a timeline of the headlines just from the senior briefings in the northern spring and summer:
“Bin Ladin Planning Multiple Operations” (April 20)and “Bin Ladin Threats Are Real” (June 30)It was especially troubling for Hurley’s team to realise how many of the warnings were directed to the desk of one person: Condoleezza Rice, the National Security Adviser. Emails from the National Security Council’s counter-terrorism director, Richard Clarke, showed that he had bombarded Rice with messages about terrorist threats. He was trying to get her to focus on the intelligence she should have been reading each morning in the presidential and senior briefings
“Bin Ladin Public Profile May Presage Attack” (May 3)
“Terrorist Groups Said Co-operating on US Hostage Plot” (May 23)
“Bin Ladin’s Networks’ Plans Advancing” (May 26)
“Bin Ladin Attacks May Be Imminent”
(June 23)
“Bin Ladin and Associates Making Near-Term Threats” (June 25)
“Bin Ladin Planning High-Profile
Attacks” (June 30),
“Planning for Bin Ladin Attacks Continues, Despite Delays” (July 2)
Other parts of the Government did respond aggressively and appropriately to the threats, including the Pentagon and the State Department. On June 21, the US Central Command, which controls American military forces in the Persian Gulf, went to “delta” alert - its highest level - for American troops in six countries in the region. The American embassy in Yemen was closed for part of the summer; other embassies in the Middle East closed for shorter periods.
But what had Rice done at the NSC? If the NSC files were complete, the commission’s historian Warren Bass and the others could see, she had asked Clarke to conduct inter- agency meetings at the White House with domestic agencies, including the Federal Aviation Administration and the FBI, to keep them alert to the possibility of a domestic terrorist strike.
She had not attended the meetings herself. She had asked that the then attorney-general, John Ashcroft, receive a special briefing at the Justice Department about al-Qaeda threats. But she did not talk with Ashcroft herself in any sort of detail about the intelligence. Nor did she have any conversations of significance on the issue with the FBI director, Louis Freeh, nor with his temporary successor that summer, the acting director Tom Pickard.
There is no record to show that Rice made any special effort to discuss terrorist threats with Bush. The record suggested, instead, that it was not a matter of special interest to either of them that summer.
Bush seemed to acknowledge as much in an interview with Bob Woodward of The Washington Post that Bush almost certainly regretted later. In the interview in December 2001, only three months after the attacks, Bush said that “there was a significant difference in my attitude after September 11″ about al-Qaeda and the threat it posed to the United States.
Before the attacks, he said: “I was not on point, but I knew he was a menace, and I knew he was a problem. I knew he was responsible, or we felt he was responsible, for the previous bombings that killed Americans. I was prepared to look at a plan that would be a thoughtful plan that would bring him to justice, and would have given the order to do that. I have no hesitancy about going after him. But I didn’t feel that sense of urgency, and my blood was not nearly as boiling.”
If anyone on the White House staff had responsibility for making Bush’s blood “boil” that summer about Osama bin Laden, it was Rice.
The members of Mike Hurley’s team were also alarmed by the revelations, week by week, month by month, of how close the commission’s chief director, Philip Zelikow, was to Rice and others at the White House. They learned early on about Zelikow’s work on the Bush transition team in 2000 and early 2001 and about how much antipathy there was between him and Richard Clarke. They They heard the stories about Zelikow’s role in developing the “pre-emptive war” strategy at the White House in 2002.
Zelikow’s friendships with Rice and others were a particular problem for Warren Bass, since Rice and Clarke were at the heart of his part of the investigation. It was clear to some members of team that they could not have an open discussion in front of Zelikow about Rice and her performance as National Security Adviser. They could not say openly, certainly not to Zelikow’s face, what many on the staff came to believe: that Rice’s performance in the spring and summer of 2001 amounted to incompetence, or something not far from it.
David Kay, the veteran American weapons inspector sent to Iraq by the Bush Administration in 2003 to search for weapons of mass destruction, passed word to the commission that he believed Rice was the “worst national security adviser” in the history of the job.
For Hurley’s team, there was a reverse problem with Clarke. It was easy to talk about Clarke in Zelikow’s presence, as long as the conversation centred on Clarke’s failings at the NSC and his purported dishonesty.
Long before Bass had seen Clarke’s files, Zelikow made it clear to the team’s investigators that Clarke should not be believed, that his testimony would be suspect.
He argued that Clarke was a braggart who would try to rewrite history to justify his errors and slander his enemies, Rice in particular. The commission had decided that in its private interviews with current and former government officials, witnesses would be placed under oath when there was a substantial reason to doubt their truthfulness. Zelikow argued that Clarke easily fell into that category; Clarke, he decreed, would need to be sworn in.
When he finally got his security clearance and was allowed into the reading room, Bass discovered he could make quick work of Rice’s emails and internal memos on the al-Qaeda threat in the spring and summer of 2001. That was because there was almost nothing to read, at least nothing that Rice had written herself.
Either she committed nothing to paper or email on the subject, which was possible since so much of her work was conducted face-to-face with Bush, or terrorist threats were simply not an issue that had interested her before September 11. Her speeches and public appearances in the months before the attacks suggested the latter.
Tipped off by an article in The Washington Post, the commission discovered the text of a speech that she had been scheduled to make on September 11, 2001 - the speech was canceled in the chaos following the attacks - in which Rice planned to address “the threats of today and the day after, not the world of yesterday”. The speech, which was intended to outline her broad vision on national security and to promote the Bush Administration’s plans for a missile defence system, included only a passing reference to terrorism and the threat of radical Islam. On the day that Osama bin Laden launched the most devastating attack on the United States since Pearl Harbour, bin Laden’s terrorist network was seen by Rice as only a secondary threat, barely worth mentioning.
But if Rice had left almost no paper trail on terrorism in 2001, Clarke’s files were everything that Bass could have hoped for. Clarke wrote down much of what he saw and heard at the White House, almost to the point of obsession when it came to al-Qaeda. Bass and his colleagues could see that Clarke had left a rich narrative of what had gone so wrong at the NSC in the months before September 11, albeit filtered through the writings of the very opinionated Clarke.
Repeatedly in 2001, Clarke had gone to Rice and others in the White House and pressed them to move, urgently, to respond to a flood of warnings about an upcoming and catastrophic terrorist attack by Osama bin Laden. The threat, Clarke was arguing, was as dire as anything that he or the CIA had ever seen.
He pushed for an early meeting in 2001 with Bush to brief him about bin Laden’s network and the “nearly existential” threat it represented to the United States. But Rice rebuffed Clarke. She allowed him to give a briefing to Bush on the issue of cyber terrorism, but not on bin Laden; she told Clarke the al-Qaeda briefing could wait until after the White House had put the finishing touches that summer on a broader campaign against bin Laden. She moved Clarke and his issues off centre stage - in part at the urging of Zelikow and the transition team.
Bass told colleagues that he gasped when he found a memo written by Clarke to Rice on September 4, 2001, exactly a week before the attacks, in which Clarke seemed to predict what was just about to happen. It was a memo that seemed to spill out all of Clarke’s frustration about how slowly the Bush White House had responded to the cascade of terrorist threats that summer. The note was terrifying in its prescience.
“Are we serious about dealing with the al-Qaeda threat?” he asked Rice. “Decision makers should imagine themselves on a future day when the CSG [Counterterrorism Security Group] has not succeeded in stopping al-Qaeda attacks and hundreds of Americans lay dead in several countries, including the US.
Bass’s colleagues said he knew instantly that the September 4 email was so sensitive - and potentially damaging, especially to Rice - that the White House would never voluntarily release a copy to the commission or allow him to take notes from the room if they came close to reproducing its language. Under a written agreement between the commission and the White House, notes could not “significantly reproduce” the wording of a classified document.
Bass decided he would have to try to memorise it in pieces, several sentences at a time, and then rush back to the commission to bat them out on a computer keyboard.
The day he discovered the document, Bass all but burst into the commission’s offices and rushed over to Hurley.
“Holy shit, chief,” Bass said excitedly. “You won’t believe what I found.”
He told Hurley that Clarke’s September 4 memo was a “document that grabs you by the throat, a document that you write when you’re at the end of your tether - or well past it”, as Clarke clearly was in the weeks before September 11. Hurley instantly understood the significance of what he was being told by Bass. The question for both men was whether Zelikow would allow them to share any of it with the public.
Months later, Bass could not take it any longer. He was going to quit, or least threaten to quit, and he was going to make it clear that Zelikow’s attempts at interference - his efforts to defend Rice and demean Clarke - were part of the reason why. He marched into the office of Dan Marcus, the general counsel, to announce his threat to leave the investigation.
“I cannot do this,” he declared to Marcus, who was already well aware of Bass’s unhappiness. “Zelikow is making me crazy.”
He was outraged by Zelikow and the White House; Bass felt the White House was trying to sabotage his work by its efforts to limit his ability to see certain documents from the NSC files and take useful notes from them. Marcus urged him to calm down: “Let’s talk this through.” But Bass made it clear to colleagues that he believed Zelikow was interfering in his work for reasons that were overtly political - intended to shield the White House, and Rice in particular, from the commission’s criticism. For every bit of evidence gathered by Bass and Hurley’s team to bolster Clarke’s allegation that the White House had ignored terrorist threats in 2001, Zelikow would find some reason to disparage it.
Marcus and Hurley managed to talk Bass out of resigning, although the threat lingered until the final weeks of the investigation.
On May 15, 2002, CBS network reported that a daily briefing presented to Bush a few weeks before the September 11 attacks warned him specifically about the threats of a domestic hijacking by al-Qaeda.
Instead of releasing the briefing or at least offering a detailed explanation of what was in the document, the White House chose to have Rice hold a news conference at the White House in which she raised as many questions about the briefing as she answered.
It would later become clear to many of the commission’s members and its staff that she had tried to mislead the White House press corps about the contents of the briefing.
She acknowledged that Bush had received a briefing about possible al-Qaeda hijackings, but she claimed that the brief offered “historical information” and “was not a warning - there was no specific time, place, or method”.
She failed to mention, as would later be clear, that the briefing focused entirely on the possibility that al-Qaeda intended to strike within the United States; it cited relatively recent FBI reports of possible terrorist surveillance of government buildings in New York.
Tom Kean, the commission’s chairman, could not deny the thrill of this. A former governor of New Jersey who had left politics to become president of Drew University in his home state, Kean took a seat in the reading room in the New Executive Office building where the commission was reviewing the White House’s most secret files.
Kean was handed a sheaf of presidential briefings from the Clinton and Bush administrations. Here in his hands were the documents that the White House had been so determined for so long to keep from him. Lee Hamilton liked to refer to the briefings as the “holy of holies” - the ultimate secret documents in the government - and Kean assumed that must be the case.
“I thought this would be the definitive secrets about al-Qaeda, about terrorist networks and all the other things that the President should act on,” he said. “I was going to find out the most important things that a president had learned.” He assumed they would contain “incredibly secretive, precise, and accurate information about anything under the sun.”
Each brief was only several pages long, so Kean could read through months of them in a stretch of a few hours.
And he found himself terrified by what he was reading, really terrified. Here were the digests of the most important secrets that were gathered by the CIA and the nation’s other spy agencies at a cost of tens of billions of dollars a year.
And there was almost nothing in them.
“They were garbage,” Kean said. “There really was nothing there - nothing, nothing.”
If students back at Drew turned in term papers this badly researched, “I would have given them an F,” he said.
Kean pointed that out to one of his White House minders who accompanied him to the reading room. “I’ve read all this,” he told the minder in astonishment. A lot of the information in the briefings and other supposedly top secret intelligence reports had already been revealed by the nation’s big news organisations. “I already knew this.”
“Oh, but you’re missing the point,” the minder replied. “Now you know it’s true.” It occurred to Kean that this might be the commission’s most frightening discovery of all: The emperors of espionage had no clothes. Perhaps the reason the White House had fought so hard to block the commission’s access to the briefings was that they revealed how ignorant the Government was of the threats it faced before September 11. Kean could understand their fear. Imagine the consequences if al-Qaeda and its terrorist allies knew how little the US really knew about them.
Commission member Jamie Gorelick, who, along with Zelikow, was given access to the larger universe of briefings, was more impressed by the documents than Kean had been. Or at least she was less unimpressed. She knew the Bush Administration was right to complain that much of the intelligence in the briefs in the months before September 11 was maddeningly non-specific about a possible date or place of an attack. Some of the intelligence in the briefs was “paltry”; sometimes the information contradicted itself from one day to the next, Gorelick said.
But she was astonished by the sheer volume of the warnings. Flood, cascade, tsunami, take your pick of metaphors. She could see that in the spring and summer of 2001, there was a consistent drum beat of warnings, day after day, that al-Qaeda was about to attack the United States or its allies. It was clear to Gorelick that the CIA had gone to Bush virtually every morning for months in 2001 to give him the message that the United States needed to be ready for a catastrophic terrorist strike, and from what she was reading, no one ruled out the possibility of a domestic attack.
“Something is being planned, something spectacular,” she said, summarising what the President had been told by George Tenet and what Bush should have read in the briefings. “We don’t know what it is, we don’t know where it is, but something is happening.”
She said CIA analysts were trying to tell Bush, as bluntly as they could, that the threat in those months was “the worst thing they’ve ever seen - an unprecedented threat,” worse than the threats before the millennium.
It seemed to Gorelick that Rice had “assumed away the hardest part of her job” as national security adviser - gathering the best intelligence available to the White House and helping the President decide how to respond to it. Whatever her job title, Rice seemed uninterested in actually advising him. Instead, she wanted to be his closest confidant - specifically on foreign policy - and to simply translate his words into action. Rice had wanted to be “the consigliere to the President”, Gorelick thought.
Domestic issues seemed to bore her. Her deputy, Stephen Hadley, had told the commission something remarkable in his private interview the month before: He and Rice had not seen themselves as responsible for co-ordinating the FBI and other domestic agencies about terrorism. But if they weren’t responsible, who was? There was no separate domestic security adviser in the White House. They had just demoted Clarke.
At the time of her May 2002 news conference, no reporter had a copy of the presidential briefing. CBS had broken the story of its existence but had few details of what was actually in the document. So the White House press corps would have to trust Rice’s description of what was in it.
She described it as a “warning briefing but an analytic report” about al-Qaeda threats and said that it contained “the most generalised kind of information - there was no time, there was no place, there was no method of attack” mentioned apart from a “very vague” concern about hijacking. “I want to reiterate,” she said. “It was not a warning.”
Asked if September 11 didn’t represent an intelligence failure by the Administration, she replied almost testily: “I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Centre, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon - that they would try to use an airplane as a missile.”
Rice’s news conference came eight months after the attacks. Yet she was suggesting that in all that time, no one had bothered to tell her that there were indeed several reports prepared within the CIA, the aviation administration, and elsewhere in the Government about the threat of planes as missiles.
Had no one told her in all those months that the Department of Defence had conducted drills for the possibility of a plane-as-missile attack on the Pentagon? Had she forgotten that when she and Bush attended the G8 summit in Italy in July 2001, the airspace was closed because of the threat of an aerial suicide attack by al-Qaeda?
Commission member Tim Roemer made it his goal to get the August 6 briefing made public and to prove once and for all that Rice and her White House colleagues had a concept of the truth about September 11 that was, at best, “flexible”. To Roemer, Rice had long ago passed the “threshold” between spin and dishonesty.
“She’d lost credibility with me,” he said. The question among the Democratic commissioners was whether anybody would be brave enough to go public to question Rice’s competence and her honesty.
Much as the staff felt beaten down by Zelikow, so did the other Democratic commissioners. By the end, they had given up the fight to document the more serious failures of Bush, Rice, and others in the Administration in the months before September. Zelikow would never have permitted it. Nor, they realised, would Kean and Hamilton. The Democrats hoped the public would read through the report and understand that September 11 did not have to happen - that if the Bush Administration had been more aggressive in dealing with the threats flooding into the White House from January 2001 through to September 10, 2001, the plot could have been foiled. The Clinton administration could not duck blame for having failed to stop bin Laden before 2001.
But what had happened in the White House in the first eight months of George Bush’s presidency had all but guaranteed that 19 young Arab men with little more than pocket knives, a few cans of mace, and a misunderstanding of the tenets of Islam could bring the US to its knees.
I do think more attention needs to be paid to the ban on homeschooling in California. Can we get a thread for it?
I mean, even if people want to teach their kids that evolution (evilotion, lol) is wrong and want to teach them misinformation, or if people want to ensure a quality education for their kids if they travel a lot, the government absolutely should not interefere. In the former case, it’s not like those kids are going to be scientists, so it’s good to keep the creationist crap outside of taxpayer-funded public schools. If they want to teach their kids the world happened in 6 days, let them be, for God’s sake!
If it’s the latter, I admit I have a personal stake. I want to travel and research for the rest of my life, and my current boyfriend who wants to teach SCUBA for the rest of his life, and so we should be able to teach our kids while traveling without persecution, even if we have residency in a state.
As long as the kids can pass competency exams, the method of education should not matter. It spooks me that California thinks otherwise.
Good grief poster, that was a long post.
Warnings of threats are not uncommon.
I remember those briefs stored in our squadron’s safe. We’d get from a few to a dozen every day. Most of them were advisory in nature and most of them were very general in nature.
It’s like when you read that Terrorist Group A has threatened to attack an American Facility. Okay, where, when and how? That doesn’t narrow it down to anything meaningful. So does one put the whole of Europe on alert? Just the military bases and embassies? How about American visited facilities?
It ain’t that easy Poster and the decision to do something about one of the several hundred messages that filter through in a month is mind boggling in that task alone.
So your answer is “doing nothing is acceptable” because the NIE’s don’t tell you to go to spot A and watch for person B carrying C to perform D heinous acts?
The thing about ideologues like Bush and his administration is that they tend to get foisted on their own petard regularly (as they have since 2001). And here you have people who start from scratch on the assumption that government action is only a valid tool when war is called for. In other words, they don’t “believe in” government hence they don’t believe in its efficacy and thus they fail to use the powers government has at its disposal. They just couldn’t figure out a way to use the only tool they felt they had (waging war) to counter the message in all these pre-9/11 NIE’s.
So they ignored them.
The only valid government function, according to the Bush administration, is war-making. If you want to keep your job as POTUS, and yet you don’t believe in government — and the source of your political power wishes desperately to convince the electorate that government is never the answer unless war is the question — you tend to look for places to wage war. This is your foreign policy AND your domestic policy.
And this is the real danger posed by the modern GOP: they demand to lead Americans, but they don’t believe in the only real vehicle for American leadership, government.
Pedant,
Messages concerning terrorist threats are usually very general.
There is very little one can do when they read a message that “terrorist Group A has sworn to attack the U.S. by hijacking an airline.” Does one bump up security 24/7 at all airports? If so, for how long? Forever?
DID YOU WANT A JOB AT BOEING? DO YOU WORK AT BOEING?
Looks like you too might vote BLUE this year!
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080308/ap_on_el_pr/mccain_air_force_tankers
McCain actually brags about giving the deal to Airbus!
Regular
Posted March 8, 2008 at 7:38 am | Permalink
Does one bump up security 24/7 at all airports? If so, for how long? Forever?
—
You do some dirty work, is what you do. You dig in, beat the bushes, have the FBI try to flesh out some details, accept tips from state and local authorities, piece it all together, and hope it works. And it may not.
Did the Bush administration do that? One would like to assume they did, but who knows? These people are not exactly a forthcoming lot. Certainly it appears that Condoleeza Rice severely dropped the ball (for one), and it also appears that Bush never pushed her or the FBI. That said, obviously there is no perfect solution. But.
What you do NOT do, what you NEVER should do, is just do nothing. This is also known, well known by certain Republics, as “allowing the absence of perfect to destroy the good.” In other words, the absence of perfect information never justifies inaction.
There is more ‘dirty work’ done than you think.
However, it boils down to what goes into notification messages and how it will be distributed. Too many “chicken little” messages and the users become de-sensitized.
Your assessment of what may have happened is different from what I’ve watched on interviews of Condoleeza Rice and suggest that your analysis may be skewed by political ideology.
Perhaps my view is skewed as well, but at least I’ve had the experience of viewing said messages and can tell you from experiences, that notifications, alerts and similar messages usually result in absolutely nothing happening.
Oh yeah, I’ve sat outside of a base waiting to get in while a 100 percent ID check was in process. Overseas, on those narrow two lane roads, it takes hours before you can finally get through. Not sure about you, but myself, I grew weary of getting up three hours early, just so I could be on work on time, when the ‘gate check’ took two hours or longer to process people through.
According to multiple sources, Richard Clarke (a) worked for Clinton, (b) was held in regard sufficently high to have been retained by Bush, (c) reported to Rice, (d) had been through similar NIE’s with Clinton and had a “beat the bushes” process in place, one that had actually prevented a terrorist attack, and (e) had bombarded Rice with messages in the first nine months of Bush’s presidency, messages warning of possible terrorist activity on US soil.
Her solution?
Clarke was fired. His messages were ignored. His process was unemployed.
So Kev; Are you saying that McCain should have given a wink and a nod and just let the previous corrupt deal go through?
Are corrupt deals good then, as long as they bring money to your local?
Boeing broke the rules and they lost the contract.
Oh, and McCain didn’t “brag about giving the deal to Airbus”. He didn’t have anything to do with the recent contract decision.
From what I understood about Clarke, he was a ‘loose cannon.’
Always exceeding his authority and more than willing to dominate the conversation with tales of woe.
Regular
Posted March 8, 2008 at 8:17 am | Permalink
From what I understood about Clarke, he was a ‘loose cannon.’
Always exceeding his authority and more than willing to dominate the conversation with tales of woe.
–
“Prescient” and “effective” are 2 more ways to describe Clarke. “Smart” is another.
That may be true Pedant, but Clarke would have been better off in an analyst position. Not a position where he felt it was his duty to wave the ‘warning flag’ at every opportunity.
Good post, Poster.
Listen to Regular make excuses for Worst. President. Ever.
The threat was sufficiently high that military brass who were going to fly commercial on 9-11 instead requisitioned military planes.
John Ashcroft had not been flying on commercial planes since July.
Meanwhile, BushCo. weren’t worried about Bin Laden because “that was a Clinton thing” according to sources who talked to Newsweek.
Then there’s also the not-so-small matter of the stocks that were sold short against American Airlines.
Somebody made 2.5 million dollars shorting airline stock on 9-11 and won’t even come forward to collect it, for obvious reasons.
This easily solved mystery could have been cleared up by now, if BushCo. had wanted to clear it up.
I suspect it leads right back to members of the Saudi aristocracy, who knew all along.
But they’re our allies. See Bush kissing and holding hands with Prince Sissy-Sheik.
Tara I don’t believe it is a total ban on homeschooling, but that one must be credentialed. That is the proposal, I’m sure it won’t pass that way, but rather, a tighter version of oversight for homeschooling.
hoist on his own petard
you could look it up.
how about a link, BTW?
“One highlight among many is Stein’s one-on-one interview with Richard Dawkins, the dashing Brit who has made a small fortune as the world’s most visible neo-Darwinist.
To his credit, and to the utter discomfort of the public education establishment, Dawkins does not shy from discussing the atheistic implications of Darwinism.
Indeed, Dawkin’s anti-deity call to arms, “The God Delusion,” has sold more than a million copies worldwide. Where Dawkins wanders into a black hole of his own making is in his discussion of the origins of life on earth.
To Stein’s astonishment, Dawkins concedes that life might indeed have a designer but that designer almost assuredly was a more highly evolved being from another planet, not “God.”
http://worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=58119
—————–
Mark your calendars. “Expelled” gets to theaters on 4-17. Ben Stein’s documentary exposes the efforts of Darwinists to stifle all debate on evolutionary theory, including ruining the careers of those scientists who dare question it. Hardly the free exchange of ideas that science touts.
It’s about time.
borrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrring outlander
Putting Ben Stein up as the anti-science spokesperson is just going to make your cause look even more ridiculous.
Tara, the California Compulsory Education statutes that were the subject of the California Court of Appeals decision discussed yesterday do, for all intents and purposes, ban home schooling as most of us understand the term. The one exception is where a credentialed tutor is employed, credentialed meaning a tutor who meets the law in California to be a teacher.
P-M, it is not a proposal. That is the current law concerning compulsory education in California, and the Court of Appeals so found in holding there is no constitutional right to home school.
To attempt to clear up confusion. California, as does every other state in the U.S. to my knowledge, has a compulsory education law. Under California law, a child between the age of 6 and 18 must, unless he/she has graduated from high school prior to age 18, attend school. The options under the law for attending school are: public schools; private schools; being instructed by a credentialed tutor. I suspect the final option is in the law to cover children involved in the movie industry. California has no provision as does Kansas governing home schools. Thus, the actions taken by the parents in the case in home schooling their children was in violation of the California compulsory education law, as none of the exemptions were met.
The cite to the case was posted on yesterday’s Open by Right Angle, at my request. I’d encourage anyone interested to read the decision.
i find it most interesting that Regular’s response to Poster’s lonnnng post about the NSA and events leading up to 9/11, are written as if HE had inside information as to what might have been included in the memoranda that Rice seems to have totally ignored…
Why does Regular feel as though he must appear to be an EXPERT on absolutely every item posted on this Blog?? I seriously doubt that Regular had as high of security clearances as he would like us to believe!!
“…are written as if HE had inside information as to what might have been included in the memoranda that Rice seems to have totally ignored…”
How do you know she ignored the memoranda if you do not know what was in it?
How high of a security clearance do you have?
How high of a security clearance do you need?
“Why does Regular feel as though he must appear to be an EXPERT on absolutely every item posted on this Blog??”
What the matter, competition?
I dunno Chas, I’ve guess you never had to do a daily check on CIA advisory messages have you?
No, nor have I ever claimed such… I doubt seriously if you have either, Regular!! LOL
“How do you know she ignored the memoranda if you do not know what was in it?” — Hud –
==============================
Ummm Hud?? Read upthread to “Poster’s” rather lengthy post earlier… I was responding to what was in that “article”
Bush proclaims, he’ll order torture if he damn well pleases, by vetoing an anti torture bill.
Please, someone INDICT him!
Bush the Torturer, how sweet. How proud you Republicans must be of your boy.
Hey, DavidB I just heard Bush’s comments on that on NPR… sort of scary!! What a guy, eh?? LOL
Let’s just throw out checks and balances in government, and turn the whole thing over to BushCo… Yesterday he said the economy has problems, but it is still strong… He totally ducked the loss of 63,000 jobs!! Flew right by his imitation brain… LOL
Of course, DavidB, Congress COULD over-ride the Veto — for a change!! That would really piss him off!!
#
Chas.
Posted March 8, 2008 at 1:33 pm | Permalink
No, nor have I ever claimed such… I doubt seriously if you have either, Regular!! LOL
——————————–
You would know this how Chas?
People assigned to combat squadrons (units) get a daily briefing, usually in the morning and one before a mission.
Grow up Chas, you have no idea how the real world works.
And you were the CO of your unit?? And that is how you were privy to CIA briefings?? Or were you the communications officer??
You WISH I didnt know how the real world works James… then you could snow me the way you try to do others!!
Besides, you have posted here that you werent IN combat!! LOL
Chas,
Commanding Officers don’t do intel work or prepare briefings, they are the recipient of them.
Lots of Units are designated Combat Units in the Military. It’s what they do, you know. In the Air Force, there are Combat Wings, Squadrons and etc.
There are also Tactical Units and Support Units.
As I said Chas, you have no clue.
Nice try… now do you want to try answering my questions??
Not in Combat? No, I wasn’t in direct Combat. Although, I have been in Combat Zones and on Combat Missions.
The Air Force is different on how it approaches combat, there are very few who do direct Combat (fighter/bomber pilots, Para rescue, Combat Controllers, sometimes Security Police, etc.)
The aircraft I was on, was black box electronic type, no guns, no ordinance. We did surveillance stuff from a distance.
Keep spinning… You still arent answering my questions… But do keep trying… :-)
I missed the question; could you help me.
What questions Chas?
If you have a specific question that I have not specifically answered, point it out. By the way, there’s no such thing as a communications officer. We have entire Units that do Communications, that are mobile and have officers. First through Third Herds (Combat Communications Units) are the ones I’ve worked with on occasion. They set up anything from Air Traffic Control, radio, telephone, satellite, etc.
“By the way, there’s no such thing as a communications officer.”
Speak for yourself, in the USN we have Communications Officers.
Regular… you intimated that you had access to DAILY CIA briefings in your Combat Unit… So, were you the CO of your unit, or the communications officer, who would be privy to such briefings??? THOSE questions…
Want to try again??
True Hud, in the Air Force, they like to call them fancy names to confuse people. People who work on missiles used to be called Instrumentation Technicians and Officers. It gets weirder as one thumbs through the various career field names. :)
And I KNOW there are communications officers in the military… I have had several of them in my congregations over the years… :-)
I would like to point out that the Communication Officer did not see all the messages. So if I wanted to talk to someone about a message he would not be the one I would talk to.
Chas. you are showing that you know nothing of how the military or navy operate. Time to back off.
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Chas.
Posted March 8, 2008 at 2:47 pm | Permalink
Regular… you intimated that you had access to DAILY CIA briefings in your Combat Unit… So, were you the CO of your unit, or the communications officer, who would be privy to such briefings??? THOSE questions…
Want to try again??
===============================
Daily CIA notifications and alerts were received by courier or secure Communications and distributed to each and every squadron. Even the Medics got them I believe. Staff Duty officers and NCOs were often assigned to the Executive Officer as part of the briefing team. In other words, they needed someone to do the ‘grunt’ work to do the briefings.
We also had intelligence from Office of Special Investigation (if appropriate), Command level intelligence and NATO intelligence. The clearance required was back in those day called “cosmic” which is sort of like Top Secret, but it is NATO forces specific and gives access to documents and briefings used daily.
Once I left the Command, I still had a Top Secret clearance, but was no longer privileged to any information to that Command.
Chas, people do this stuff every day, it’s nothing spectacular or surprising. In fact, most of the time it is mass boring and tedious work.
OK, so call it an Intelligence Officer for the Unit… geez….
OK… so now, what does any of that have to do with Condi Rice NOT passing on important CIA briefings to the POTUS before 9/11??
Since you made a specific point of being privy to daily CIA briefings, and claim it is no big deal… Why did BushCo want to keep such briefings from the 911 investigation team???
Hmmmm???
So now you also claim to have been your Unit Commander??? Or did I mis-read that??
Yeah, we had an intelligence officer and an NCO, some were permanent,some were on temporary duty, like I was when assigned the duty. It’s no big deal Chas, and I can’t talk around the duty too much as some of it is still classified I would suppose.
There are also Combat Operations Centers that do this work. As I understand it, they do more of what the separate squadrons did in the past, dunno, been out for awhile.
How do you know she did or did not pass the info?
How do you know what was in the “important CIA briefings”?
Doesn’t the CIA brief the POTUS face-to-face?
I never was a Commanding Officer Chas, never went to to the schools nor did at the time I have the time in rank/service to do so. It’s a pecking order thing.
Besides Chas, your question was way beyond the point.
The initial topic was about briefings, notifications and alerts.
You are always wanting to dig under people’s skin to find out something so you can do a “gotcha.”
Stop being pathetic Chas and deal with the topic at hand.
HUD — we already know those answers…. READ the article upthread by “Poster” And besides, it is old news… Rice knew, and did not give it to the POTUS… And SHE was NSA advisor to the President… SHE did face to face…. But, apparently did nothing about the CIA warnings and threats… As was finally reported by the 9/11 investigation!!
Keep up, ok???
So, Regular, if it is such top secret stuff, you had best not imply that you were the Unit Commander, and had privy information to CIA daily briefings… eh??? And now you claim you cant SAY if you were a Unit Commander, because it is still top secret???
You ever have grandiose feelings of self importance???
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Chas.
Posted March 8, 2008 at 2:56 pm | Permalink
OK… so now, what does any of that have to do with Condi Rice NOT passing on important CIA briefings to the POTUS before 9/11??
Since you made a specific point of being privy to daily CIA briefings, and claim it is no big deal… Why did BushCo want to keep such briefings from the 911 investigation team???
Hmmmm???
—————————–
Gross and unimportant speculation Chas. You don’t what was requested or denied, nor does anyone else outside a privileged few.
Stop arm flailing about a subject you have no clue about.
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Chas.
Posted March 8, 2008 at 3:04 pm | Permalink
So, Regular, if it is such top secret stuff, you had best not imply that you were the Unit Commander, and had privy information to CIA daily briefings… eh??? And now you claim you cant SAY if you were a Unit Commander, because it is still top secret???
You ever have grandiose feelings of self importance???
———————–
WTF Chas…
I never implied I was the Commanding Officer.
It’s mundane mission stuff Chas, military people get briefings routinely, especially in flying squadrons.
Man Chas, you are more of a loser than I once thought.
I dont need to do a GOTCHA Regular… CIA briefings arent available to just every Tom, Dick, Harry, or James in a unit… Anybody knows that… If you had access to intelligence briefings as you claimed earlier… and had top security clearance… Then you must have had some kind of Rank to do that… And thats normally in the hands of the Unit Commander… or Intelligence Officer… NCO’s are just Non Coms… geez… I even know that!! My Dad was a Master Sgt. and was an NCO…
Ooops sorry… he was discharged as a Tech. Sgt. :-|
They were CIA alerts and notifications Chas. I’m very sure they weren’t anything close to resembling what the President of the U.S. sees.
You obviously have no clue what you are talking about Chas.
As I said before, you just wanted to argue for the sake of it.
Go ahead Chas, keep making up stuff. Maybe some day, you might get some credibility, but I doubt it.
OK Regular, its not worth pushing that one… However, you DID imply that the briefings Condi Rice FAILED to pass on to POTUS before 9/11 were no big deal… And you claimed that, by saying you had access to Daily CIA briefings in your “combat” unit…
One could infer that you were claiming to be either a Unit Commander, OR an intelligence officer… and still saying “no big deal”
Already explained Chas - I’m out of here.
as Hank would say…
nitwit
“Then you must have had some kind of Rank to do that… And thats normally in the hands of the Unit Commander… or Intelligence Officer… NCO’s are just Non Coms… geez… I even know that!! My Dad was a Master Sgt. and was an NCO…”
Wow! Are you an idiot or what.
You have no idea how the military operates. You imply you know how the CIA briefs are handled but you really have no idea about anything.
Hot air.
Sorry, not Hot Air should have been “Nitwit”.
OK Hud, you think you are so bloomin bright… WHO handles security intelligence briefings in a Unit?? And if NCO’s are high ranking… Then why arent they permitted in the Officers Club, or Officers Mess??
WHAT if anything did I say here that is wrong??? You just want to flame and blame… Not gonna work, dude!!
BTW, I had four uncles in WW II… 2 Non Coms, 1 First Lt. and one Lt. Col. Brother in Law served in Korea and Nam… 5 tours combined… Army Helicopter Non Com Tech. Sgt. retired with a 30 year career… Dont you sit there and tell me I know nothing of the way military works!!
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Chas.
Posted March 8, 2008 at 4:12 pm | Permalink
OK Hud, you think you are so bloomin bright… WHO handles security intelligence briefings in a Unit?? And if NCO’s are high ranking… Then why arent they permitted in the Officers Club, or Officers Mess??
WHAT if anything did I say here that is wrong??? You just want to flame and blame… Not gonna work, dude!!
———————
lmao!
(shakes head)
My HUNCH is that REgular served in Gulf War in a NATO unit, with a NON US Commander, and doesnt want anybody to know it… But, thats just a HUNCH…
You got something to say REgular, or are you just going to keep up the flaming, and ad hominem crap??
“WHO handles security intelligence briefings in a Unit?”
I do not know about the Air Force or Army but the in the Navy commands I served more than likely you would find what you are calling a NCO.
Why aren’t Officers allowed in the enlisted clubs? Clue: The same reason enlisteds are not allowed in the Officer’s Club.
What is the one space on a Navy ship the CO will knock before entering and will knock only if invited?
I take it back you are not an idiot; you are an ediot. An educated idiot.
“If you had access to intelligence briefings as you claimed earlier… and had top security clearance… Then you must have had some kind of Rank to do that…”
Actually, NCO’s and Staff NCO’s many times have access to classified materiel. If you do not know this, you might be very surprised with the awesome responsibility placed on many young men and women in the military. Rank has nothing to do with it. It’s called “need to know”. To perform their regular duties, many enlisted in the intelligence fields have such access. The Classified Materiels Custodians, who work behind locked doors have Final Top Secret Clearances based upon what is called a Special Background Investigation (SBI). The SBI, used to cost between 10-20 thousand dollars and is the one where investigators actually sometimes talk to your grade school teachers.
At any rate, without going to far, the job of data downloading, transposing to written documents, CMS materiel maintenance, and issuing and disposal as day-to-day routine are routinely performed by enlisted members - of many grades.
And it is not just message traffic. It could be electronic “parts” which contain cipher information (imagine plugging in a new chip) used by military aircraft, communication equipment (radio), and even radar. All of this requires two person integrity (TPI) thanks in large part to to treasonist Johnny Walker. That is a manpower drain, and officers are too highly paid to perform these duties.
Think of the movies. The guy handing the classified message to the president, general, or whatever - is an enlisted guy.
Had you any military experience, you would recognize the awesome and great responsiblities many very young people are performing as they protect our nation.
Oh, you caught me Chas, I was assigned to a special unit called:
“Spezielle Taktiken des Kriegspiels”
;)
Enough. You both have wasted more bandwidth than a horny 13-year-old looking for loose women.
Keep in mind that Richard Clarke served under 7 Presidents, and became part of the White House first under Bush I, then stayed on with Clinton and then with GW Bush, until his services there were “no longer needed” or even listened to.
Oh, and I have a friend who was in Army Intelligence, so I guess that makes me one of the elite, huh?
Good grief.
Looking for polls regarding the Dem nominee?
Polling Report
Plenty there to give pause for thought.
RD,
Richard Clarke got his feathers ruffled when he found out that his duplicate role in the White House was no longer necessary. Briefings from the CIA, NSA (combined with DIA briefings) were always there at sub-cabinet and Cabinet level meetings.
Richard Clarke was an extra lug on the tire that wasn’t needed nor his advice wanted.
Right RD and Bush ignored his warnings before 9/11….
Interesting poll RD,
There is a 7 point swing in 7 days (1 March to the last poll)
Regular: in response to your comment that the Democrats can’t handle their own budget, which was totally of the mark btw, I give you this:
F.B.I. Investigates Missing G.O.P. Money
Hundreds of thousands of dollars are missing and presumed stolen from the chief fund-raising arm of House Republicans, according to party officials who described the findings of emergency internal audits.
The financial records of the group, the National Republican Congressional Committee, may also have been falsified for several years, Republican officials said. The campaign committees of several Republican lawmakers may also have been victims of a scam that is now under criminal investigation by the F.B.I.
The audits were ordered after the abrupt departure several weeks ago of Christopher J. Ward, who had been treasurer of the committee. Lawmakers said that Mr. Ward, who served a similar role for dozens of individual members of Congress and their political committees, is the focus of the F.B.I.’s criminal investigation.
The committee has acknowledged publicly that it was aware of “irregularities in our financial audit process” and that it had called in the F.B.I. in February because “these irregularities may include fraud.”
But until now the committee has not acknowledged that any money was missing from its bank accounts or that the financial irregularities might extend beyond the national committee to the campaign funds of individual Republican lawmakers who also worked with Mr. Ward, a longtime party operative.
The Republican officials said they could not discuss the details of their findings on the record because of the continuing criminal investigation.
A lawyer for Mr. Ward, Ronald C. Machen of the Wilmer Hale law firm in Washington, had no comment. A spokeswoman for the F.B.I.’s Washington field office acknowledged that the bureau had opened an investigation at the request of the Republican committee.
The F.B.I. investigation comes at an especially awkward time for House Republicans, who are struggling to raise money for Congressional races in November.
Their job has been made even more difficult by the large number of Republican lawmakers — more than two dozen from the House — who have announced their retirements, and by a series of unrelated criminal and ethics investigations of other Congressional Republicans.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/06/washington/06gop.html?_r=2&8br&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
McCain has screwed the pooch! There will be many more oppose him over the air bus deal. Unions, patriots, investors. Not many airbus investors will be voting. Woo is McCain.
woo=woe.
Well Daves,
It should be investigated and those found in wrong doing arrested.
Politicians often lose any common sense once they get to Washington D.C. - Republican Party is no different.
With that said, money often corrupts people, it would not surprise me that something smells and appears foul.
Public trust are more than just words you know. :)
In a special election today a Democrat was elected to fill the remaining term of Republican Dennis Hastert. The seat had been held by a Republican for 3 decades —-
FLASH: Republicans Going Down In Flames Already!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/03/08/dem-wins-election-to-fil_n_90581.html
Democrat Bill Foster has snatched former House Speaker Dennis Hastert’s congressional seat in a closely watched special election that gave the longtime Republican district to the Democrats.
Watch to see whether a rash of retirements breaks out over the coming weeks as vulnerable members take the Illinois special election as a sign of things to come in the fall.
What pussies to quit rather than face getting kicked out. They created this, we should get to express that kind of glee in removing them.
By the way, can someone tell me was if the base is .99 what percent increase is it if it’s now 3.15?
I’m not at all good at math.
OMG this better make tomorrow’s discussion:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/03/08/steve-king-republican-co_n_90540.html
I can’t even begin to say how insulted I am by this guy, what a dickhead.
He ought be ran out of town on a rail.
Will McCain be supporting Sen. Roberts bid for reelection? That would go over like a lead balloon!
Oh, jeez, another CON-shill bites the dust.
Buh bye, Bow-Tie Guy . . .
http://www.mediabistro.com/tvnewser/msnbc/tucker_canceled_other_programming_changes_ahead_79352.asp
Insiders tell TVNewser Tucker Carlson’s 6pmET show Tucker is getting the axe, but Carlson stays on as a political contributor to all MSNBC shows at least through the 2008 election. The official announcement, expected tomorrow, will include details about who will replace Tucker at 6pmET as well as other political programming additions. Sources say the network is going to beef up its schedule with more NBC News talent.
In recent days, Jossip, as well as other blogs, ratcheted up the talk that Tucker would be replaced “for a new project.” In its 33-month run, Carlson’s show has had two names, four time slots and multiple formats. At 6pmET, it builds on its Harbdall lead-in on some days, but loses audience on others.
******
Meanwhile, the lone liberal voice out there, Keith Olberman, just keeps going and going and going . . .